2 weeks Ago
A person holds a half-eaten takeaway hamburger and fries. Senior lawmakers want the British government to ban junk food ads and introduce new taxes on salt and sugar to help fix the nation’s “broken food system.” Members of the House of Lords — equivalent to the U.
S. Senate — made a swathe of recomendations as part of a report into the country’s “obesity public health emergency.” Two thirds of British adults are overweight and almost a third are obese.
Obesity is linked serious health conditions like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and stroke. According to the report, it results in more lost years of life in the U.K.
than anything other than smoking — which is already the focus of sweeping legislative reform . It’s also thought cost the country somewhere between 1% and 2% of the country’s annual GDP in direct costs, lost productivity and other societal costs. With the U.
K.’s public health service aready struggling to meet intense demand from an increasingly sick population, lawmakers are keen to introduce public health measures that reduce pressure on the health system. The House of Lords’ Food, Diet and Obesity Committee report — ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’ — urges government to a produce a comprehensive strategy to reduce obesity.
The report wants leaders to: “Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill,” said Baroness Joan Walmsley, who chairs the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee. “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.” Trump Rally Speaker Calls Puerto Rico ‘Floating Island Of Garbage’—Campaign Says Joke Doesn’t Reflect Trump’s Views MacBook Pro Release Date Latest: Apple’s Ambitious Plans Demi Moore’s Horror Thriller ‘The Substance’ New On Streaming This Week “Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives,” she added in a statement.
“This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’.” The report, she said, offered “cost-effective” policies that would “lead to a lot less human misery.” ‘No Need’ For Excessive Fat, Sugar and Salt Public health experts and obesity charities have largely welcomed the report, which “reveals the lengths to which food and drink companies have gone to avoid regulation,” according to Obesity Health Alliance director Katharine Jenner.
Jenner, whose organisation represents a major British health NGOs and other obesity policy stakeholders, added: “If the proposed recommendations are enacted, unhealthy food companies will no longer be able to hide behind misleading labels, advertise unhealthy foods, or have a seat at the table designing policy.” Association of Directors of Public Health vice president Alice Wiseman emphasized the importance of making “affordable foor more accessible.” “The fact that healthy food is three times more expensive than unhealthy alternatives takes away people’s freedom of choice and is paving the way for increasing numbers of people being forced to live with avoidable ill health and disease,” she said, adding her organization would prefer government to go further and make the reformulation of food mandatory.
“There is simply no need to have excessive amounts of fat, sugar and salt in our food,” she added. Some experts raised concerns over the detail of recommendations designed to reduce the influence of big junk food companies in policymaking. “The risk of undue and opaque influence” is particularly concerning in the food industry, because “everyone has to eat” and procure food, Hilda Mulrooney, who researches nutrition and health at London Metropolitan University, told the Science Media Centre .
“The issue of conflicts of interest or their potential is a reasonable and genuine concern although what constitutes a conflict of interest is not always clear.” She warned unclear rules could result in the “demonisation of reputable scientists” while failing to acknowledge other potential conflicts of interest, like bias..
