A report, ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’, found that obesity and diet-related disease are a public health emergency that costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.
It demands that the Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework.
Baroness Walmsley, chair of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, commented: “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.
“Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives. This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’. Both the Government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right.
“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.”
The report highlighted:
- Two-thirds of adults are overweight and just under a third are living with obesity.
- After tobacco, diet-related risks now make the biggest contribution to years of life lost.
- The annual societal cost of obesity is at least 1–2% of UK GDP.
- Unhealthy diets are the primary driver of obesity, with people in all income groups failing to meet dietary recommendations.
- There has been an utter failure to tackle this crisis. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity has continued to rise.
- The food industry has strong incentives to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products.
- Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.
- There is a high level of public concern about the quality of our food and a demand for Government action.
The Lords committee argues that many people have neither the time or the facilities to cook meals from scratch and healthier food can be more expensive than less healthy food. The report focuses on actions that will force the food industry to make healthier food accessible and affordable for all.
Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation, added: “This brilliant report rightly states that supporting people in Britain to eat well is the single most important priority for the prevention of ill health. Everything else dwarfs into insignificance when you look at the evidence.
“The committee has done just what the Government needs and set out a set of affordable and feasible recommendations. All can be initiated in the next five years and I hope that the Prime Minister takes this list and makes it his personal priority.”
The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee says key actions include:
- Making large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales.
- Giving the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system.
- Introducing a salt and sugar reformulation tax on food manufacturers.
- Banning the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament.
- Commissioning further research into the links between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and adverse health outcomes.
- Developing a strategy for maternal and infant nutrition.
- Driving up compliance with the school food standards.
- Enabling auto-enrolment for Healthy Start and free school meals.
- Reviewing the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening eligibility for both schemes.