Reference no: EM131626201

Discuss this statement briefly. The FTC has been involved in protecting consumers from "so called" health products, and there are now strong rules in place to ensure that marketers do not make unfair statements or unsubstantiated health claims . However, outside of these general rules, the Government makes little legal assertions about consumers using products outside of cases such as drinking and tobacco age limits. Legally I think there is clarity on what is acceptable and not acceptable for marketers to do. The question of what is ethical to sell in terms of harming ones health is a slippery slope, and one I find problems with. For example - ice cream. Ice cream is loaded with sugar and provides no health benefits - it is a indulgent luxury - and if we are honest, a lot of ice cream marketing is targeted towards children, who are certainly a vulnerable audience. If we replace all ice cream trucks with kale salad trucks, our society would be much healthier! Of course, we won't ban ice cream, or donuts, or any other sweets for that matter, because people like them and the products make a lot of people a lot of money! While we may agree that products are harmful, we also intuitively understand that we live in a society where people ought to have freedom of choice.