While the nation was enveloped in Olympics fever last week, celebrating the success of British athletes at the peak of physical perfection, the government published its long-awaited childhood obesity strategy. It was a disgrace, so thin on action it barely deserves to be labelled a strategy. It will condemn too many British children to a lifetime of health problems and a premature death.
One in three children leaves primary school overweight or obese, putting them at significantly greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes later in life. Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, has described obesity as “the new smoking”; the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has labelled childhood obesity a “national emergency”; and the government’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, has called on the government to include obesity alongside terrorism in its national risk planning. This is far from hyperbole: poor diet is the nation’s biggest premature killer, ahead of smoking and drinking, and costs the NHS around £6bn a year.
Last year, the government promised a “draconian” approach to tackling childhood obesity. Yet there were really only two significant measures in the watered-down plan. First, a sugar levy on soft drinks, already announced under David Cameron, which would have been very difficult for Theresa May to renege upon. While a positive step, this is unlikely to achieve anything like the progress needed without being part of a broader package of measures to cut children’s sugar and fat intakes. It is also likely to be tied up for years in the courts as it is subject to challenge by soft drinks manufacturers, if it is ever implemented at all. Second, the strategy set out measures to promote physical exercise, which, while uncontroversial, cannot alone counteract the impact of unhealthy diets.
The food industry is notorious for using friendly cartoon characters and online games to market directly at children
Just as telling is what’s missing. A year ago, Public Health England reviewed the evidence about what works in reducing obesity. It called for far-reaching measures: to reduce junk-food advertising directed at children, to limit the number of supermarket promotions on unhealthy foods, and to force manufacturers to gradually reduce the sugar content of high-sugar foods. None features in the government’s strategy: it simply sets out a voluntary approach to asking manufacturers to reduce sugar levels over time. This is the same approach adopted by former health secretary Andrew Lansley in his 2011 “responsibility deal”, which left it up to the food and drinks industry to voluntarily change its approach. Yet studies have shown it failed to work.
This is hardly surprising. There is a race to the bottom at work in our food industry. Packing foods with addictively delicious – and cheap – fat, salt and sugar is one of the fastest ways to a healthy profit. Once the worst offenders go down this road, conditioning our palates to crave more of the unhealthy in a way that puts paid to the idea of free consumer choice, others follow. There’s little point to one manufacturer taking action; consumers will simply switch away from their products. This is why enlightened members of the industry are pushing for a compulsory approach to reducing sugar and fat contents: they want to take action, but need a level playing field.
The food industry is notorious for using friendly cartoon characters and online games to market directly at children, pushing them to pressure parents into buying fat- and sugar-laden foods. It is known for misleadingly passing off products, such as breakfast drinks that contain more sugar than a can of cola, as healthy. There are parallels with the 1950s tobacco industry, which offered guarantees its products were safe that companies knew they could not make stand up.
Except this is even worse – this time, the target is young children. And food manufacturers are winning; children consume, on average, three times the maximum recommended amount of sugar. Tooth decay is the most common reason for children aged between five and nine to be admitted to hospital.
Obesity may be a national crisis, but it is a crisis we know how to address. The tragedy is that, prior to 2010, the UK was a world leader in nutrition policy. The previous Labour government devolved responsibility to the independent Food Standards Agency, insulating nutrition policy from heavy industry lobbying. The FSA led the way on the reformulation of food products, brokering industry-wide deals to get the industry to reduce salt contents. As a result, Britain was the first country in the world to successfully reduce salt intakes. It is an approach that has been copied around the world; countries such as South Africa, Chile and Argentina have applied it not just to salt, but sugar and fat, with great success.
Related: Theresa May’s climbdown on obesity is her first big mistake | Jackie Ashley
In 2010, the coalition government rubbished this approach. In response to industry lobbying, nutrition policy was restored to the Department of Health, with disastrous effect. Policy again became vulnerable to the powerful food and drinks lobby that, like the once-mighty tobacco industry formerly did, spends vast sums on influencing ministers and MPs. Companies that make billions from selling unhealthy food argue that if the government increases regulation of the industry, there will be a heavy price to pay in terms of job losses and economic output.
These arguments are easily demolished. The global bank Credit Suisse, hardly a bastion of anti-business sentiment, published a report calling for a sugar tax in 2013 and argued that it would have positive impacts on the economy in the long run. The only companies that greater regulation hurts are those that seek to make their money from pushing sugar. But what kind of society puts their economic interests over and above the health of our children?
When Theresa May stood on the steps of Downing Street last month, she pledged to the British public: “When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but of you.” Yet her government’s anti-obesity strategy echoes the costly vulnerability of governments around the world to big tobacco lobbying in the 1960s and 70s.
Damningly, it could not do more to promote the interests of the powerful at the expense of the health of our children. And it bodes terribly for other sectors of the economy in which regulation is needed to ensure decent businesses flourish and the cowboys don’t win out. Just five weeks into May’s premiership, capitalism has never looked less responsible.
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The Observer view on the government’s childhood obesity strategy | Observer editorial
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