The Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework
The report by The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee finds that obesity and diet-related disease are a public health emergency that costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.
Among its recommendations Peers say that the Government should make large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and exclude businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
There should be a ban on the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and ban on paid-for online advertising in October 2025.
Peers say that 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 rates have 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.
Many people struggle to pay the bills and have neither the time nor the facilities to cook meals from scratch. Healthier food is also often more expensive than less healthy food. The report focuses on what we can do to ensure the food industry makes healthier food accessible and affordable for all.
Baroness Walmsley, Chair of the 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.
“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.”
