Europe’s youth health challenges need smarter answers than bans and labels
Released on 13 July, a new export report has added fresh momentum to Brussels’ growing appetite for tougher limits on young people’s access to social media. Prepared at the initiative of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the study will shape the EU executive’s proposals, which could surface as early as September, for age-based restrictions across the bloc.
The report’s authors propose a series of safeguards against the risks children face online, while stopping short of defining either the scope of any ban or who should set the age threshold. Yet, while rightly focused on cyberbullying, dangerous content and criminal activity, they notably overlook a major health youth health risk: the increasingly clear link between prolonged social media use and rising childhood obesity.
More fundamentally, the divisive debate on social media bans reflects a wider EU tendency to favour blanket measures over action on root causes. On obesity and cardiovascular health, Brussels must address the full range of underlying drivers, rather than relying on quick fixes, such as social media bans or nutrition labels. Looking ahead, policymakers should move towards a smarter, prevention-based approach that delivers lasting public health gains.
Europe’s heart plan risks repeating old mistakes
To confront Europe’s leading killer, responsible for around 1.7 million deaths each year, the Commission has drawn up the bloc’s first dedicated cardiovascular health strategy. Dubbed the “Safe Hearts Plan,” it calls for a coordinated approach to preventing CVD and the closely linked risk factors and conditions that surround it, including obesity, diabetes and cancer. In late June, the European Parliament’s Public Health Committee adopted its response to the plan, offering a mixed bag that gets the overarching approach broadly right while backing the wrong concrete measures to put it into practice.
While the committee rightly urges a more preventive CVD approach, its prescription for improving dietary health is far less convincing. Despite correctly stressing the value of balanced eating patterns such as the Mediterranean diet, it places improved front-of-pack (FOP) nutrition labelling at the centre of its response. The contradiction is striking, given that France’s Nutri-Score label, once considered for mandatory EU-wide use, faced widespread criticism for its misleading, scientifically flawed rating of Mediterranean staples, with olive oil initially graded ‘D’ and still only reaching ‘B’ under the latest methodology despite its well-established health value.
After years of debate, the new Commission abandoned plans for a common FOP label in early 2025 under Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen, dealing a major blow to Nutri-Score. The shift came as researchers raised growing concerns over the independence of pro-Nutri-Score studies, the weak evidence that labels drive healthier diets and findings, including from the Medical University of Warsaw, that the label may even distort consumer choices. Putting FOP labelling back at the heart of the Safe Hearts Plan would therefore mark a clear step backwards, and Brussels should first reckon with South America’s far longer experience of such schemes.
Setting record straight on Chile-style food labels
Over the past two decades, Latin America has experienced some of the world’s steepest increases in overweight and obesity, prompting governments across the region to experiment with policies intended to steer consumers towards healthier diets. Among the most prominent has been FOP labelling, pioneered by Chile in 2016 through black octagonal warnings for products high in sugar, calories, fat or sodium, before similar systems were introduced in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
Yet Chile’s own experience has hardly provided the decisive evidence its advocates might have hoped for, with early figures showing child overweight and obesity continuing to rise between 2016 and 2020. A 2023 Lancet review reached a similarly cautious conclusion, finding that “while causal studies indicate that” these “policies enhance diet quality to some extent, recent national statistics suggest that they are insufficient to address obesity” in the region. While a new Lancet study published in late June claims to have settled the debate in favour of FOP labelling, those conclusions warrant significant scrutiny.
Entitled “The impact of Chile’s multipronged food labelling and advertising law on early childhood excess weight”, the study has quickly been presented as proof that FOP warnings deliver meaningful health gains. Yet according to Pietro Paganini, founder of the sustainable-development think tank Competere, closer reading of the data shows that such claims overstate a narrow, context-specific result and inflate it into a broader political narrative about the effectiveness of FOP labelling.
Competere’s detailed review of the study raises a fundamental methodological problem, since the research assesses a combined package of warning labels, advertising restrictions and school food rules rather than the effect of labels in isolation. What’s more, the measured gains are also limited, amounting to an estimated 16.4 fewer calories per day and a modest short-term effect among children aged four to six, without evidence of lasting reductions in obesity or chronic disease. Tellingly, even the authors acknowledge that the labels’ independent impact cannot be separated from the wider policy mix.
From quick fixes to lasting prevention
If Europe is serious about improving long-term health outcomes for the next generation, its public health policy must move beyond quick fixes and address the wider forces shaping behaviour. The better path begins by recognising what social media bans and nutrition labels have in common, with both seeking to influence complex habits through a single, highly visible intervention while paying too little attention to the environments in which those habits develop.
Recent Competere work has helped expose this blind spot by highlighting research linking excessive screen and social-media use with inactivity, disrupted sleep, distracted eating and increased obesity risk among young people. This matters because obesity policy still concentrates heavily on calories consumed while giving far less attention to energy expended through movement and exercise.
Crucially, rather than simply telling young people what not to eat or where not to scroll, policymakers should equip them to take greater control of their health through education, health literacy, physical activity and informed choice. Technology, too, should form part of the solution, with AI and personalised digital tools offering new ways to build prevention around individual needs and the interaction between diet, movement, sleep and screen habits.
Against that backdrop, Brussels should resist treating complex youth public health challenges with ever more blunt instruments, from sweeping social-media restrictions to one-size-fits-all nutrition labels. A more credible approach would tackle the lifestyle factors driving poor health, including excessive screen time and inactivity, through earlier, integrated prevention. With youth obesity rising, Europe now needs policies that confront causes rather than simply regulating symptoms.
