Kelly Parsons, University of Hertfordshire and David Barling, University of Hertfordshire
Reforming England’s food system could save the country £126 billion, according to a recent government-commissioned report. The National Food Strategy, led by British businessman Henry Dimbleby, proposes a raft of measures to shake up how food is produced and the kinds of diets most people eat.
The need for action is laid out in stark terms. Poor diets contribute to around 64,000 deaths every year in England, and the government spends £18 billion a year treating obesity-related conditions. How we grow food accounts for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and is the leading cause of biodiversity destruction.
To meet these challenges, the report calls for “escaping the junk food cycle” to improve general health and reduce the strain on the NHS, reducing the gap in good diets between high- and low-income areas, using space more efficiently to grow food so that more land can return to nature, and creating a long-term shift in food culture.
The strategy is, in parts, highly ambitious, particularly in its framing of the challenge as a systemic issue, and in some of the more innovative measures it proposes.
These include the world’s first sugar and salt reformulation tax, aimed at forcing manufacturers to make the foods they sell healthier – by reformulating recipes to remove sugar and salt – and raising around £3 billion for the Treasury in the process. Companies would also have to report how healthy and sustainable their food sales are. Cannily, the strategy team persuaded some companies to come out in favour of the proposals, which suggests they’re serious about seeing their ideas implemented and attuned to the government’s nervousness around upsetting the food industry.
The Eatwell Guide, which shows what proportion of our diet should come from each food group, would be based not only on the healthiness of certain foods, but their environmental sustainability too. This reference diet would underpin government decisions, and help ensure food policies are consistent with what is good for people and the planet.
The strategy takes a commendably bold stance on the government’s approach to trade policy, making clear that not honouring a manifesto commitment to protect food standards could bankrupt Britain’s farming sector.
Missed opportunities
At the same time, the strategy is politically pragmatic, clearly crafted with an eye on what what is likely to be winnable within the current government. As such, some politically-contentious issues are sidestepped.
The strategy sets a goal of reducing meat consumption by 30% over ten years, but shies away from interventions to tackle this head on, with a meat tax discounted as “politically impossible”.
The report notably fails to address the poorly paid, precarious and often dangerous jobs of food workers, in agriculture and hospitality. The report details how the problems with food are systemic, but misses the chance to make the link between poor working conditions in the sector and food insecurity and health. The terrible irony of “critical workers” like farmers, fishers and catering staff that feed many of us is that they’re unable to afford to eat well themselves.
The scale of the challenge has led to calls for a new minister for hunger, a cabinet sub-committee on food, or an independent food body. The strategy opts instead for a Good Food Bill with statutory targets around diet-related health and reporting. It also favours expanding the remit of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to encompass health and sustainability and calls for improved monitoring and measurement of the food system and the policies linked to it.
If enacted, these proposals could benefit food policymaking, but they’d leave the difficult question of how different government departments can coordinate on the issue untouched. Expanding an existing body may be politically expedient, but does the non-ministerial FSA have the clout and capacity to drive reform in the many other departments with a hand in food policy?
An ambitious and innovate strategy in parts, and wise for its political astuteness. Whether it has achieved the right balance will become clearer in the next phase, when the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs delivers its response. The recommendations will need to survive the political jungle and overcome obstacles both bureaucratic and ideological.
Should they make it through in one piece, these policies could tackle some of the biggest challenges related to food. But more importantly, the strategy could disrupt the politics and ideas about what people should want from their food system, and give licence to additional policy interventions in trade, meat and jobs.
Kelly Parsons, Food Systems Policy & Governance Research Fellow, University of Hertfordshire and David Barling, Professor of Food Policy and Security, Director of the Centre for Agriculture, Food and Environmental Management, University of Hertfordshire
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Government is hopelessly wrong on their food guidelines and any attempt from the government to control what people eat should be vigorously fought. I am no fan of people eating sugar but there’s no way I’d support a sugar tax because it’s none of my business what other people eat.
I think everyone should make their own choices and also bear the full responsibility of the consequences of those choices. Want to eat crap – fine. But I’m not paying your doctor bills.
Our crisis today is a lack of personal responsibility. We’ve got a nanny state that doesn’t hold people accountable and it will be the end of us.
I’ve put in years of study on what we eat… in my estimation most people are hopelessly mixed up from government and “expert” misinformation. We can mostly agree that sugar is bad but people don’t seem to realize that the fructose found in fruit is the exact same thing as fructose in HFCS. Grains are bad but enjoy the experts’ stamp of approval. Vegetable oils should probably be banned as they are the number one cause of chronic health issues like heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer. Salt’s bad reputation is entirely underserved. Dietary cholesterol and saturated fat are benign at worst. Red meat is probably the best thing you can eat. This is why I don’t want government deciding what to tax – they’ve got it completely wrong on a lot of things.
So true. But this is the natural extension of government taking care of us—free healthcare leads to controlling how you eat in the name of reducing cost. Climate control leads to forcing you out of cars. Education control means putting you in a silo in terms of what job you can have. And then they still get their diktats all wrong, like the whole cholesterol scare. Oops! There never has been a free lunch, you pay for it with loss of freedom.
The attack on meat mystifies me—the methane stuff is just a cover, so why is meat really under attack?
JCB,
High quality protein is necessary for higher brain function; it probably has substantial effects on the endocrine system as well!
Theory and anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that cultures that consume a high protein diet are more fierce and independent; like the Comanche, Cheyenne and other Plains Indians of North America; with a diet high in buffalo and other game. I wonder if the same would be true of the Mongols and Zulus?
The Mongols worked out for awhile that if their children grew up in china eating the trashy high carb diet they would turn out weak and useless warriors like the chinese so that practiced sending their kids back to the steppe to grow up and then return as real warriors.
The chinese even wrote of the massive difference between the two armies whenever they clashed. The lack of baggage train the mongols needed. They needed little to no fire nor did they often stop for meals.
Exactly the type of government overreach that caused the obesity and diabetes epidemic we currently face. When the belief that saturated fats were the cause of cardiovascular disease was promoted and adopted based on unscientific published research it launched decades of misinformation that covered for the highly profitable processed food industry as they replace saturated fats with trans fats and carbohydrates. Now we have a huge mess to clean up.
And any dietary advice that puts imaginary eco-harm ahead of human health is bound to go off the rails and people will suffer. As far as reducing our impact on the natural environment – we are already there using technology and industrial agriculture to grow more food than we need on less and less land and waters.
The religious belief that salt must be reduced in diets (true for only some people with specific health conditions) is certain to do harm as we already have evidence from well designed studies that salt restriction increase mortality in some chronic illnesses while doing little for most other people. We need to face the fact that, just like climate change, the world is awash in beliefs that are not based on evidence and which, if acted upon will do nothing but harm to people and the environment. Our governments and the bureaucracies they support are completely unqualified to sort truth from fiction.
Only a free competitive market, sound science and the unrestricted flow of information and debate can save us from ourselves.
The majority of people are not aware that salt is an essential nutrient and humans require approximately 1.5 teaspoons of salt daily. Plus it makes food taste a whole lot better.Before refrigeration for food storage was ubiquitous, we used salt to preserve meat and fish. Today, because this is generally no longer necessary, average salt consumption has dropped significantly. My grandparents and great grandparents ate lots of salted meat and lived long happy lives so how bad could it be?
When my mother was in a care home I used to go for lunches there sometimes. The average age of the residents was in the high 80s if not 90s. They uniformly piled the salt onto their meals.
Go figure, as the Americans say.
Salt adds flavor and enjoyment to our food. Everyone of every age should be able to derive pleasure from their meals.
There are many scientific studies that show much of the supposed dietary problems are more likely due to genetics than diet.
My community of 10’s of thousands was part of a major study of diet and mortality conducted over decades. It was actually a data gathering exercise for use in examining both then posited as well as yet to be thought of correlations.
The participants were informed of various study results. One result was NO statistically significant correlation between heart disease and dietary cholesterol.
That is because most dietary cholesterol is not uptaken by the gut in digestion. Most of the blood lipids that cause problems are produced by the liver. That’s how cholesterol lowering statins work. They reduce liver lipid formation,
It’s true that dietary cholesterol is mostly not absorbed by body but it’s untrue that LDL is the cause of heart disease. There is no correlation between LDL levels and heart attacks and many population studies show that people with higher cholesterol live longer than those with lower cholesterol.
Taking a statin is one of the most ignorant things a person can do. Statins may have a slight effect on heart attacks (by keeping arteries more flexible via nitric oxide and not a reduction in cholesterol) but that’s more than offset by their side effects.
My own blood lipid levels correlate exactly (but not linearly) with my weight. I’ve told my doctor it doesn’t matter what I eat, just what weight I stay under.The lipids are obviously produced by my body.
I know enough about how substances move through membranes to realize that most fats must be reduced to simpler molecules by the digestive system in order to be absorbed in the blood.
fat is not absorbed by the blood, it travels by the lymphatic system to be finally transported by chylomicrons in the blood (these are massive compared to even VLDL particles) first via the heart and then onto the liver through the blood.
statins work by lowering inflammation. They also lower CoQ10 which is in the process of manufacturing cholesterol for which the liver encapsulate in lipid rafts (what is actually measured in a rough way) along with triglycerides.
Essentially there is little statistical difference between statins and aspirin from what I understand, both reduce inflammation with the later increasing certain strokes markedly and the former increasing all manner or other ailments such as diabetes, parkinsons, ALS, alzheimers, motor neurone disease. MS etc. But both don’t make a meaningful difference on all cause mortality than doing diddly squat over an average of years save maybe living a day or two longer. Do this other conditions provide a day or two of benefit?
I came to that same conclusion after learning that the evidence against dietary cholesterol is flimsy at best. this is just another faux fear to get people taking Statin drugs, which do have some very serious side effects. Another expensive drug which has no benefit to the people taking it. But that doesn’t stop the US Government from requiring contract employees to fall in the “safe” range for cholesterol at their annual checkups.
they can just play around with the ‘feldman protocol’. It is a way of gaming the lipid readings in a short period of time to get it to read lower than it normally would.
In the US, regulating citizens’ health was not one of the enumerated powers in our Constitution.
(But of course, neither was regulating elementary school education.)
History suggests the pendulum does not swing back in the instance of “nanny states”, but I can hope.
Nope, the pendulum doesn’t swing back, George. It eventually stops swinging altogether and drops through the floor.
I can think of no civilization ever whose government has taxed and regulated their country into a prosperous utopia.
The parasitic bureaucracy that administers the details of those nanny states always, always, screws up and eventually kills the host.
George, they’ve taken “promote the General Welfare” to mean pretty much anything they want it to mean if it’s done “for your own good”
A healthy and well nourished society WILL have obese people. It’s a “bell curve” thing. When the majority of people are at or above “optimal” nutritional levels there will be many significantly above optimum.
You can solve the “problem” in the usual communist manner.By foercing everyone into substandard levels of nutrition you reduce obesity.
None of the studies about “obesity deaths” seem to consider that the alternative is likely deaths due to malnutrition.
Jim,
I believe the near starvation diet of Allied POWs held by the Japanese helped inspire the Pritikin Diet! After nearly starving in captivity, the prisoners were found to have very low rates of heart disease and diabetes!
The truth is that a good diet includes lots of healthy fats and proteins; not so much processed sugars and starches. Perhaps the government could come out with some exercise guidelines as well. I recommend the following:
1) Sex; one of the best cardiovascular exercises, married couples enjoy it more and more often than single people, so promote marriage.
2) Dancing; another good cardio exercise that can often lead to sex when done well!
3) Walking; brisk walking is low impact and can be good cardio; especially when done hand in hand with a your partner heading for the dance floor or the bedroom!
4) Weight training; tones and firms leading to better outcomes for all of the above! Nuff said!
And how many POWs died of starvation? I don’t thing that counts as a “healthy” diet. And exercise contributes to health more than diet does.
Didn’t POWs in Hongkong eat a lot of rats they caught?
to this day people in hong kong still enjoy eating lots of red meat being one of the biggest consumers of red meat in the world and one of the highest average age of mortality.
I strongly suggest the Brits immediately protest the Government bureaucrats involvement in What and how they eat.
Should the Government persist and implement dietary restrictions on the population, then it would seem only fair to insist that all incumbent politicians/bureaucrats meet a certain body mass index or step down from office. Additionally no individuals can run for office or accept appointment to government offices that do not meet BMI requirements.
That should sour the mood of fat cat bureaucrats trying to control your life.
‘no individuals can run for office’
…no individuals can waddle for office…
There you are, fixed it for you!
Don’t forget the protectionist chlorine chicken lobbyist routine while resisting mad cow warnings.
Meal worms in every pot.
“what proportion of our diet should come from each food group, would be based not only on the healthiness of certain foods, (…. )but their environmental sustainability too.”
Question for avoiding ‘the booby prize’ using pure logic only (the poker player’s tell): Which aspect will be prioritized, “healthiness of certain foods” or “their “environmental sustainability”. The author even answers this question further on below this quote. I’ll give a poker tell analysis if someone takes the challenge!
Which aspect will be prioritized
Whichever group’s lobbyists pay the most?
TonyG, first, the answer to this question in the strategy:
“strategy sets a goal of reducing meat consumption by 30% over ten years, ”
This cut is because of environmental-sustainability, regardless of the health aspects which they don’t reference. In my initial quote, the phrase “on the healthiness of certain foods” sets up the second one. The issue they are dancing around as number one is enviro! Healthfulness was the first criterion only because that is the selling point. Logically healthy and sustainability are not necessarily compatible.
Gary,
Given the past record of government when it comes to health (dietary guidelines, etc.), I’m pretty sure “health” isn’t anywhere near the top of their list.
Look at old photos of people from the 1940s through at least the 1970s. Obesity was practically non-existent. I just scanned through my 1972 high school yearbook. In my graduating class of 1,100, there were many body types but NOT ONE obese person. What has changed? Well, for one thing, most nuclear families were intact, divorce rare, and children were fed by moms, most stay-at-home homemakers. Meals were planned and prepared out of wholesome ingredients. Junk foods, fast food restaurants and take-out were generally rare “treats” rather than dietary staples.
The feminist movement changed all that, with most people, especially the poor, now growing up with one parent and almost EVERYONE having to be employed just to make ends meet. Government then began massive food handouts to try and compensate. Nutritionists began to jerk us around with dire warnings about milk, eggs, butter, etc. (not noting of course that one of the big killers or contributing factors to heart and lung disease was rampant smoking) Then came demand for fast cheap snacks and foods, so enter the highly advertised processed and fast food industries, offering every imaginable product, highly processed and loaded with additives, salt, sugar and preservatives. I would guess that there are about 100 restaurants and eateries today for every one in the 1960s-70s. People spend $25,000 for a gourmet kitchen with granite countertops so that they have a place to set down their bags of carry-out food.
So now the gub mint wants to be the mom that most people are missing. But they can’t help themselves. They are obliged to pay homage to the causes of the day, climate, greenhouse gases, sustainism, diversity, global governance, etc. What can one do? Live wisely, eat healthy, fight the good fight, and hope it doesn’t all slowly disintegrate into anarchy or totalitarianism.
Mom was concerned about the individuals, Take care of the individual and when troubled find out the source of the trouble.
Gub mint is concerned about the Collective. Collective concerns are generalized by necessity and decided upon by committee. Committees focus on symptoms over causes due to central committee bureaucratic demand for immediate public explanations.
Results are unintended consequences with symptomatic solutions because root cause goes untreated. Gub mint leaders take temporary victory lap before looking for scapegoats to blame once unintended consequences manifest. Failed symptomatic solutions are etched in legalized granite ergo rinse and repeat. More symptomatic solutions, more unintended consequences
It bears repeating:
“God made an idiot for practice and then He created the Committee.” – Mark Twain
“Mom knows best.” Anonymous
Committees focus on symptoms over causes because there’s no money to be made if people were actually healthy.
I remember in Winnipeg the first hamburger and chips I tasted over 70yrs ago. We kids had already been sent to bed, when my older sister came in and told my parents about “The Casbah” a fish chip and hamburger joint that had opened. She went out and returned with hamburgers and chips. Kids awaken, smell the lovely odours, and make a fuss. We each got ¼ of a hamburger an a little pile of chips – heaven!
Eat your bugs and save the planet. It’s the law.
These burgers obviously ‘identify’ as veggie burgers,
How dare you suggest they are not real veggie burgers! Dead-naming is a hate crime.
Love it! That is a veggie burger I would eat.
Food police
Hubris abounds.
Central planning by a businessman who hopes to be granted a tax subsidized, exclusive government license to operate the scheme. How original. I wonder why Britain has not tried this before. [yes /sarc and in some places /treason]
The basis of the diet will be soylent green.
This is very Orwellian; who thinks this way?
Low salt, low fat, and lots of lectins in the pulses and lentils etc.
Trying their hardest to make people retarded and get dementia, while recommending the carbs causing the obesity, and fattening the treasury.
their personal treasury yes. the more they mandate ‘healthy foods’ the thinner their health budgets spread.
This will never work.
Did you see it? – The real reason for the food strategy? Here it is: “world’s first sugar and salt reformulation tax, aimed at forcing manufacturers to make the foods they sell healthier – by reformulating recipes to remove sugar and salt – and raising around £3 billion for the Treasury in the process” Tax, Tax, Tax. Control, Control, Control. Anything that is not free market is surely doomed to fail.
It is clear that there is a public health problem of obesity in the UK. It is clear that diet must be a large factor in it. Lack of physical activity is probably another substantial factor.
However, taxing sugar and salt while leaving everything else the same is not going to do much of anything. Similarly, promoting bikes while leaving the road system unchanged is not going to do anything.
There are two things at work. One is that the local environment has become one in which walking and cycling to wherever one is going is mostly neither safe nor pleasant. And where many of one’s destinations are simply not reachable except by car, being in malls or distant supermarkets.
The other thing is that both food and eating habits have changed.
As to the eating habits. Talk to anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the UK in a middle class household. You will find that children ate at mealtimes, and what they were given. There was little or no snacking, certainly there was no practice of kids going to a stocked fridge and helping themselves whenever they felt like it. If you probe a little, you will find that they regularly were hungry – but it was thought of differently, it was having a healthy appetite. And you will often hear that they were not allowed to eat before meal times because it would ‘spoil your dinner’.
In addition, food was completely different. Fridges were not universal and were small. Houses generally had ‘larders’, small rooms, often with a marble or stone topped cupboard, open to the outside, in which food could be kept relatively cool – but well above modern fridge temperatures. There were apparently earthenware milk coolers in quite common use – these were unglazed covers with a small water reservoir in the top, which cooled through evaporation to keep the milk from spoiling. Milk was usually delivered daily.
In this environment people shopped frequently – they had to, because food could not be kept. What they bought was also very different. There were no factory made dishes, there could not be because of the lack of a cold chain, so they bought raw ingredients. This was the era of separate shops, greengrocers, grocers, butchers, bakers, all of which would be in walking distance. There were no giant bottles of coke or soft drinks and no snacks. There were actual specialist sweet shop, selling candy and chocolate, which you had to go to. In the immediate post war years sweets were rationed to one quarter pound per person per week.
As car ownership and use rose, and supermarkets arrived at scale, and fridge ownership became universal, the small shops vanished, the roads became too trafficked for walking and cycling, children stopped playing outside, and we arrived at the era of the once a week shop. The supermarkets now increasingly stocked factory made dishes and meals, and these became products developed by teams to trigger appetites. Manufactured snacks also appeared in bulk. Mothers were now shopping with children, and indulging their demands for snacks, soft drinks etc.
If a government really wants to increase cycling, it will have to change the road environment to make the roads and streets safe and pleasant for it. If it really wants to change diet, it will have to change the whole system. Keeping the present way of shopping, cooking and eating just as it is while taxing salt and sugar will simply result in similar over-eating of the reformulated foods, similar levels of obesity, and similar levels of inactivity.
The food industry’s product development teams are experts in formulating the kind of food that will lead people to overeat. The town planners have become expert at designing and permitting road environments which encourage inactivity. We do have an obesity problem, crisis even. But this proposal is not going to address it. What would solve it?
Walk or bike to work and to destinations. Meat and two vegetable style cooking and eating. But no-one wants to try to produce that, and if they did, they have no idea how to do it. So they concentrate on empty gestures such as this one. And claim that what they propose will, of all things, lower CO2 emissions!
Which is completely beside the point. If improving diet and activity would lead to increased CO2 emissions, we should jump at it. The issue is not emissions, its health. But its not how much sugar there is in manufactured meals. Its how we are living and the environment we are living in.
reduce meat by 30% more? when consumptions already dropped heaps?
minister for hunger will be busy indeed
what a farce and another set of govvy shinybums making tidy wages while ruining general populations lives” for their own good” of course
If they want people to lose weight they need to recommend low-carb diets – more meat!
The fact this is a complete fraud is proved by the following: “These include the world’s first sugar and salt reformulation tax, aimed at forcing manufacturers to make the foods they sell healthier – by reformulating recipes to remove sugar and salt – and raising around £3 billion for the Treasury in the process.”
If manufacturers change their recipes, zero taxes are collect. If billions are collected, then there’s been no change in diet. Either way food prices up, leaving the poor with less and British companies with less net exports due to higher prices or less demand. Time and again politicians sell policies using mutually exclusive best case options while ignoring the certain consequences.
You had me at bangers and eggs with fried tomato and beans … only thing better is the same with bacon and steak.
Woke banks come for your dinner plate-
Live exporter slams banks for hypocrisy over lending practices (msn.com)
For a few billion dollars in admin costs, DC and NIH will develop a new food pyramid for you. That does not include the PSA marketing costs of course and talk show ad buys.