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A broken approach to tackling obesity has created a “public health emergency” due to the responsibility for tackling it being wrongly placed on individuals, rather than on the food industry, according to a damning new parliamentary report.
The House of Lords report, published on Thursday, found that: “At the heart of this failure has been a misplaced focus on individual responsibility. In large part because of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’, policies have relied on personal choice rather than tackling the underlying drivers of unhealthy diets.
“This approach has not worked, as the rise in obesity demonstrates. At worst, it risks widening health inequalities and worsening the stigma often suffered by people living with obesity.”
The peers highlight damning statistics, showing that “two-thirds of adults are living with overweight or obesity, and 29% are living with obesity.”
“More than 20% of children start primary school with overweight or obesity, rising to 36.6% by the time they leave. After tobacco, diet-related risks now make the biggest contribution to years of life lost. In economic terms, the annual societal cost of obesity is at least 1–2% of UK GDP—billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.”
The peers’ findings chime with recent statements by the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who highlighted obesity as a major problem which has deterred people from entering the workplace, while placing extra demands on the NHS. He is backing a trial to give the unemployed weight loss drugs to improve their health and job prospects but insists it is not part of a “dystopian future” as the only solution to the problem.
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The peers found that between 1992 and 2020 successive Conservative and Labour Governments had made 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, to minimal effect.
The report is highly critical of the food industry for producing and promoting unhealthy processed food and proposes a series of tough measures to stop this.
It says: “Unhealthy processed foods are more profitable for business than healthy foods because in the main they are cheap to produce, sell in large volumes, have long shelf lives and are highly palatable”
“Aggressive marketing also makes cheaply produced unhealthy foods more profitable. Though welcome, the upcoming bans on junk food advertising online and on television before the 9pm watershed do not go far enough.”
Peers are calling for a total ban on the advertising of ultra processed foods by the end of the Parliament, new taxes on heavily salted and highly sugared foods and new powers for an independent Food Standards Agency to draw up a strategy and oversee the food industry.
The peers single out action to tackle obesity in children.
“Children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity, and more likely to become parents with obesity in their turn. The Government must act to break this cycle, setting new goals on maternal and infant nutrition and developing a strategy to achieve them.
The report says: “It is shocking that many commercial infant and toddler foods are high in sugar: strong new rules on composition and marketing are needed. Too many schools are failing to offer food of an acceptable standard for children and young people. Monitoring of compliance with improved school food standards and support for schools to procure healthier food must be brought in.”
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Baroness Walmsley, Liberal Democrat peer and Chair of the Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee said:
“Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill. Something must be going wrong if almost two in five children are leaving primary school with overweight or obesity and so many people are finding it hard to feed healthy food to their families. That is why we took a root and branch look at the food system and analysed what had gone wrong over the past few decades.
“We hope, given the recent comments from the Prime Minister, Lord Darzi and the Secretary of State for Health, that there is now an appetite to shift towards prevention of ill health. We urge the Government to look favourably on our plan to fix our broken food system and accept that not only is it cost-effective, but that it would lead to a lot less human misery.”
A Department for Health and Social Care spokesperson said:
“Our widening waistlines are costing the NHS and the economy billions of pounds.
“This government is committed to urgently tackling this issue head on, shifting our focus from treatment to prevention as part of our ten year health plan, to ease the strain on our NHS and help people to live well for longer.
“That’s why we are restricting junk food advertising on TV and online, limiting school children’s access to fast food, and banning the sale of energy drinks to under 16s.”