Unregulated drug marketing stifles science and harms patients. To suggest otherwise is an affront to liberty — not a protection of it. (Editorial)

In one half of a PLOS Medicine Debate, Simon Chapman lays out a case for a smoker's license designed to limit access to tobacco products and encourage cessation.

The objective of this study was to assess exposure to marketing of unhealthy food products and its relation to food related behavior and BMI in children aged 3–13, from different socioeconomic backgrounds in a south Indian town.

In an article that forms part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food, Kelly Brownell offers a perspective on engaging with the food industry, and argues that governments and the public health community should be working for regulation, not collaboration.

In an article that forms part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food, Andrew Cheyne and colleagues compare soda companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns - which are designed to bolster the image and popularity of their products and to prevent regulation - with the tobacco industry's CSR campaigning.

Original Source

Global food systems are not meeting the world's dietary needs. About one billion people are hungry, while two billion people are overweight. India, for example, is experiencing rises in both: since 1995 an additional 65 million people are malnourished, and one in five adults is now overweight. This coexistence of food insecurity and obesity may seem like a paradox, but over- and undernutrition reflect two facets of malnutrition. Underlying both is a common factor: food systems are not driven to deliver optimal human diets but to maximize profits.

Sunita Narain introduces the first comprehensive Indian study to look at nutritional claims made (or not made) by junk food makers, and how they compare with the benchmarks for recommended daily intakes of salt, sugar, carbohydrates and fats issued by India's National Institute of Nutrition and the World Health Organization.