Source and Copyright : Henry Dimbleby, Times Newspapers.
Once
again I have to use an article copied directly from the Times Newspaper
(25/03/23) to communicate my thoughts on this subject. None of my written words
could even match the journalistic skills of Henry Dimbleby. So why blog it ?.
Well it is then stored in my knowledge base, that is one of my many blogs, so I
can easily find it in the future. Having recently experienced open heart
surgery to replace a faulty aorta valve this is a very relevant article to me.
Having witnessed first hand the number of patients on the heart and lung
hospital ward you can see this is a growing problem. Many of these patients
were in very poor general physical health. Whilst the hospital menu was still
including many very sweet puddings. As a menu it certainly had not been
adjusted to be one based upon a healthy diet and it was more aligned to normal
patient expectations.
Our food system is creating a huge health crisis
yet politicians are too worried about nanny-statism and too in thrall to
business to act, says Henry Dimbleby.
What do
you think is the biggest cause of avoidable illness and death in this country?
Smoking? Drinking? Drugs? Wrong on every count. The thing that is most likely
to kill you before your time is the very thing you need to stay alive: food.
Not all food, of course. Not the kind that, even now, springs to mind when we
imagine sitting down to eat: something freshly made, from recognisable
ingredients, in a kitchen, by a human. But most of the food eaten in this
country is nothing like that.
Ultra-processed food — meaning a packaged product, generally high in calories
and low in nutrients, containing unfamiliar ingredients that have been through
multiple stages of industrial processing — makes up 57 per cent of the British
diet. We eat more of this stuff than any other European nation.
More than 80 per cent of the processed food sold in the UK is so unhealthy
that, under World Health Organisation guidelines, it is considered unsafe for
marketing to children. It doesn’t do adults any good, either. Our diet of
cheap, sugary, fatty food is making us pile on the pounds. Sixty per cent of
adults in this country are overweight or obese, and by 2060 that proportion is
expected to reach 80 per cent.
The side-effects of obesity include depression, anxiety, infertility, high
blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and broken sleep. That is before
we even get to the big ones: cancer, dementia, heart failure and type 2
diabetes, which has its own attendant risks of blindness, peripheral neuropathy
and limb amputation. By 2035 the NHS is expected to spend more on treating type
2 diabetes — just one of the multitude of illnesses caused by bad diet — than
it does on all cancers today. Already, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development estimates that the UK economy loses £74 billion a
year in reduced workforce productivity, shortened lives and NHS costs because of
conditions related to a high BMI.
It is extraordinary that there is not a public uproar about this. Imagine if a
novel virus started killing and disabling people on such a scale, and with no
end in sight. You don’t have to imagine it: we know how far politicians and the
public will go to combat such a threat. Unlike Covid, however, the plague of
dietrelated disease has crept up on us stealthily, under the seductive guise of
“choice”. Our food system has slid into dysfunction, taking our bodies with it.
This change has been sufficiently gradual to lull us into a kind of helpless
submission. No matter how bad the headlines, the British public (and political
class) can’t seem to muster an appropriate level of fear. Instead, we recoil
instinctively into what we believe to be “common-sense” solutions. Too often,
those solutions are not just wrong but counterproductive.
Between 1996 and 2020 successive governments introduced 689 different policies
intended to halt our national weight gain. Yet we keep getting fatter and
sicker. This is because such policies nearly always come at the problem from
the wrong angle. They start from the assumption — shared by most in this
country — that dietary ill health is chiefly an issue of personal
responsibility; that the answer must be to educate the masses in healthy
eating, encourage us to exercise and leave the rest to individual willpower.
This feels like common sense. We know our bodies grow or shrink depending on
what we put into them and feel a rush of impatience at the idea of blaming “the
system” for our expanding waistlines. Surely it is up to each of us to take
responsibility for what we eat?
This line
of thought fails to address the sheer scale of the problem. In 1950 under 1 per
cent of the UK population was clinically obese. Today, the figure is 28 per
cent. Are we to believe that, in the intervening years, the population has
suffered a massive collapse of willpower? Of course not. Humans have not
changed. The food system has.
Many people find it hard to imagine that a food “system” really exists, let
alone that it could be shaping their behaviour. The purpose of my new book,
Ravenous, is to lift the lid on that system, to show how the vast, complex,
strangely invisible machinery that feeds us actually works, and what it is
doing to us and our planet. Seventy years ago it was widely assumed the world
was on the brink of running out of food. The global population was rising fast
— projected to increase from 2.5 billion to nine billion over the coming
century. How could all these people be fed?
The
so-called Green Revolution saved the day. Scientists developed new,
higher-yielding crop breeds. By combining these with artificial fertiliser,
pesticides, herbicides and high-tech machinery, farmers could generate much
bigger harvests. As expected, the global population boomed. There are eight
billion people on the planet today yet the threat of mass starvation has
receded. Globally, we produce around 50 per cent more calories per head than we
need. (Much more if you include the crops we feed to livestock to get meat.)
Now that revolution’s side-effects are beginning to kill us. The environmental
costs of the modern industrial food system are staggering. It is the number one
cause of global deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution, soil degradation
and biodiversity collapse.
After the energy industry it is the biggest cause of climate change,
responsible for 25 to 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. All this,
in turn, poses a grave threat to the food system. Unpredictable weather events,
poor soil, the decline in pollinating insects, drought, floods, rising sea
levels: these are by far the biggest dangers to our food security (bigger even
than President Putin’s war in Ukraine). Climate change is already affecting
agricultural yields. The parched summer last year produced dismal harvests in
Europe. In Italy the worst drought for 70 years led to a drop of about 45 per
cent in corn and animal feed crops. In France maize crops were 28 per cent
below forecasts.
More recently we’ve seen how a freak cold snap in Spain and Morocco led to
vegetable shortages here, exacerbated by a peculiarity of our local food
system. UK supermarkets buy most of their produce on fixed-price contracts in
order to offer cheap products at stable prices to consumers. They are reluctant
to pay more for produce, even when it is in short supply. In continental Europe
supermarkets responded to the shortages by paying over the odds to wholesalers,
outbidding UK retailers. This meant passing on higher prices to their
consumers, which in turn reduced demand — but their shelves were full. I was
sent a photo of shrink-wrapped cucumbers, packaged and labelled for a UK
supermarket, for sale in a market on the Costa Brava. The producer had simply
followed the money.
However, the fundamental threat to our food security is environmental. Our
rapacious food system is destroying the ecosystem upon which it depends.
And then there is the damage being done to our bodies. Biologically, we are
hunter-gatherers. If you have to search for everything you eat, it makes sense
to look for things that give you more calories than you expend. When we eat
honey, for example, our taste buds respond with intense pleasure: a natural
feedback mechanism to reward us for finding such a bountiful source of energy.
The same is true of chocolate ice cream. It contains six times as many calories
as broccoli and our appetite for it is correspondingly powerful.
This craving is strongest when fat and sugar are combined in a ratio of 1:2,
the ratio in breast milk. Food manufacturers use this formula in products such
as ice cream, milk chocolate and biscuits, knowing we find it irresistible.
Even allegedly savoury products such as ready meals are often doused with sugar
and oil to give them a “moreish”’ flavour. Processed food tends to be low in
water and insoluble fibre. This is known to slow down the body’s “satiety”
signals, the feeling of fullness, so we eat more of it. Because each mouthful
is more calorific (and less nutritious) than a mouthful of broccoli the
consequences of eating just a little bit more are greater too.
As well as being easy to sell, this kind of food is cheap to make. The Green
Revolution has created an abundance of sugar, flour and vegetable oil. So
companies have a financial incentive to develop and promote foods that chiefly
use these ingredients. They do so not just to capture a bigger slice of the
market but to grow the market itself. Young marketeers are taught about the
“consumption effect”: people who have more food in their home will eat more of
it.
In-store promotions such as the classic “bogof” deal (buy one, get one free)
are explicitly designed to persuade shoppers to buy more than they intended.
Chocolate has an “expandability” of 93 per cent, meaning if you run a bogof on
chocolate, customers will on average consume almost twice as much as they would
have without the promotion.
The average Briton now consumes five times more crisps than in 1972. We eat 1.5
times as much breakfast cereal (which has become far more sugary). You only
have to cast your eye around your local supermarket, where fresh ingredients
form a thin coastline around the great landmass of processed, packaged food, to
see how the consumer landscape has changed.
Confectionery alone — a small section of the processed food market — is worth
£3.9 billion. By contrast, the entire fruit and veg market in the UK is worth
£2.2 billion per year.
“
Side-effects of obesity include depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood
pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and poor sleep
The bigger the market, the greater the economies of scale. Highly processed
foods are, on average, three times cheaper per calorie than healthier foods.
This is one reason why bad diet is a particularly acute problem among the
poorest. How we eat is one of the clearest markers of inequality. A diet of
cheap junk food has the peculiar quality that it can make you simultaneously
overweight and undernourished.
Children in the poorest areas of England are both fatter and significantly
shorter than those in the richest areas at ages ten and 11. (The average
five-yearold in the UK is shorter than their peers in nearly all other
high-income countries.) Dietary ill health is a major reason why, at the height
of the pandemic, people in the most deprived areas were twice as likely to die
from Covid. Even before then, the upward trajectory of life expectancy in the
UK had begun to slow and, in some areas, go into reverse. Women in the most
deprived 10 per cent of neighbourhoods in England now die 3.6 months younger
than they did in 2010. Their life expectancy is 7.7 years shorter than that of
women in the richest areas. The differential for men is 9.5 years. For “healthy
life expectancy” — the number of years a person spends in good health — there
is a gap of 19 years between rich and poor.
The problems created by our food system are too enormous and too entrenched to
fix through individual willpower alone.
Government intervention is required. But politicians are extremely nervous about
interfering in matters as personal as what we eat. They are easily intimidated
by noisy libertarians, within their own parties and in the media, who punish
any whiff of nanny-statism. And they are susceptible to scaremongering from
industry lobbyists who fight hard to maintain the multibillion-pound status
quo.
Food company bosses have mastered the art of polite intransigence, making
sympathetic noises about doing the right thing while refusing to do it. Any
politician who attempts to force through change using legislation will be
visited by a stream of hand-wringing chief executives assuring them, in tone of
regretful pragmatism, that such a law would wipe out their profits and put an
irreparable hole in the economy.
I recently left my role as lead non-executive director of the Department of
Food and Rural Affairs because I can no longer swallow my frustration. There
are so many things the government could do to shift the food system on to a
better track. (For a full list, please do read my book.) Far from endangering
the economy, acting now would prevent us sliding further and further into ill
health, low productivity, dwindling tax receipts and a health service so
overwhelmed by dietrelated disease that it sucks the national coffers dry.
Instead, we are paralysed by political indecision. No, worse — we are going
backwards. Having promised in 2020 to bring in restrictions on junk-food
promotions and advertising to children, the government has now “delayed” this
until the next election. If it can’t even bring itself to enact this fairly
modest — and hugely popular — policy, what hope is there for wider systemic
change? Part of the difficulty is that responsibility for food policy is spread
across multiple, often competing, government departments. Too often, these
departments end up acting as client states for the industries they represent.
It is up to the Treasury, for example, to decide whether food companies should
be taxed on the sugar they put into processed food. (This was one of the
recommendations I made in the National Food Strategy, an independent report for
the government published in 2021.) The Department for Digital, Culture, Media
and Sport decides whether, and when, the advertising of junk food to children
should be restricted. The Department for Education decides who is eligible for
free school meals. And the Department of Health and Social Care is left to
clear up the mess.
Bringing together these fiefdoms in order to force through reform requires
strong, consistent leadership at the top. The political tumult of recent years
has made that impossible. And yet the system is fixable. In fact, change is
inevitable. Sooner or later, the damage done by our current food system will
become politically and economically unsustainable. The question is: how much
suffering are we prepared to inflict on ourselves before we intervene? Do we
really want to wait until a crisis becomes a catastrophe?
£3.9bn
Value of the confectionery market in the UK per year
28% of
the population is clinically obese (1% were in 1950)
80% of
processed foods sold in the UK are considered unsafe for marketing to children,
under WHO guidelines
£2.2bn
Value of the entire fruit and vegetable market per year
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