The new EAT-Lancet report was published last month, with a refreshed analysis of the global food system and how we might achieve a healthy diet for all which stays within planetary boundaries. In this blog we take a look at what this major scientific report has to say about the role of advertising, and how we can create a just food system by reducing its influence.
The original 2019 report from EAT-Lancet (the food-focused Commission of the world-renowned Lancet medical journal) provoked huge backlash from the meat industry for its recommendations to eat less meat. EAT-Lancet 2025 likewise doesn’t hold back, naming the current food system as “the single most influential driver of planetary boundary transgression”. The report centres on an updated Planetary Health Diet (PHD): an achievable, healthy diet for all humans, which can accommodate regional and cultural differences. Shifting to the PHD, says the report, could avert a jaw-dropping 15 million deaths per year – that’s 27% of total deaths worldwide.
The problem the Commission lays bare – the impact of the current food system on planetary and human health – is enormous, and no single solution will work in isolation. The scale of the transformation needed – including a 33% reduction in production of food from ruminant animals – is gigantic. But the potential for rapid progress to a healthier, fairer food system is equally huge. Reducing the influence of advertising for unhealthy and unsustainable food has a major role to play in enabling the shift called for: healthier diets, food justice, and a reduction in food waste.
Advertising, inequality and food environments
Our food environments and our choices are shaped by advertising, and the effects of advertising are experienced differently by different groups.
EAT-Lancet 2025 describes how globally the lowest quality diets and highest rates of overweight and obesity are found in upper-middle and high-income countries, because when economies grow, people are exposed to more unhealthy food advertising as well as greater availability of ultra-processed food, red meat and sugary drinks.
But the twist is that because of inequality of access to healthy diets within those wealthier countries, it is often people on the lowest incomes who have less healthy diets overall. It is also lower income communities who are often most exposed to advertising for junk food and alcohol. Signaling that advertising is helping to drive health inequalities.
We know from our own research that advertising in the UK is more concentrated in lower income areas. Unhealthy food advertising is common across outdoor advertising sites, and we know that children are particularly influenced by unhealthy food advertising, which shapes unhealthy food habits throughout life, as noted in EAT-Lancet 2025.
Policy to date falls short
Many councils in the UK have recognised the negative effect of advertising, and have taken steps to restrict advertising of unhealthy food on sites they control. But unfortunately, despite their desire to protect citizens, especially children, from the lure of junk food advertising, councils are limited in their powers. Many outdoor advertising sites are privately owned, sometimes by multinational outdoor media companies themselves, so council policies do not affect the content of many of the billboards in our towns and cities, which still display countless ads for burgers. Furthermore, councils have little influence on the advertising their citizens are exposed to online and on social media.
The government, meanwhile, is falling short. Long-awaited national legislation is due to finally come into force in 2026 to restrict the advertising of unhealthy food to children, namely pre-9pm on television, and any time online. However the rules have been delayed and watered down as a result of industry lobbying, and now allow brand-only advertising which could still promote unhealthy food brands. Furthermore, outdoor advertising is not covered by the new rules, so you and your children will still be seeing those burger ads in your town.
This is important, because advertising undermines our ability to make healthier or ethical food choices. EAT-Lancet 2025 recognises this effect, noting that ensuring individual and collective agency are extremely important in enabling people to choose healthier diets and to challenge the concentration of corporate power, but that this agency is constrained by manipulative marketing, as well as inequalities and industry lobbying.
A whole systems approach
As with all the interlinked global crises we face, there is not one single solution to transforming our food system, but multiple actions working together. We are calling for reform of the planning rules to give local councils more power to reject new outdoor advertising sites, which will help to reduce the harmful influence of advertising for unhealthy food, and other consumer products. Recognising the central importance of healthier food environments is a critical step.
Combined with actions to revitalise local food production, reducing the influence of advertising would enable significant progress towards increasing the availability and appeal of healthy and more sustainable food choices, particularly among people whose food costs make up a larger portion of their household budget.
Published by