Few people would deny that obesity has become a massive health crisis facing this country.
Few would deny that eating too much sugar is one of the main contributors to it. So what should we conclude? This week a government-commissioned report recommended increasing the tax on sugar products like fizzy drinks. Yet the Prime Minister has made it known he has no intention of doing so. Is he right?
A couple of generations ago nobody saw this coming. Back then the big threat was malnutrition: many poor people simply not having enough decent food to eat. Yet over the last thirty years we have become a nation of the fat. A quarter of adults are technically obese. So are 10% of four-to-five year-olds and 19% of ten-to-eleven year-olds. And many more are overweight. The problem is greatest among theb poorest and those who rely on what has become known as ‘junk food’.
We’ve seen the problem growing now for at least fifteen years. Alan Johnson, a health minister in the last Labour government, described it as a potential crisis on the scale of climate change.
Sugar’s contribution to the crisis is beyond doubt. On average, sugar accounts for between 12% and 15% of people’s energy intake; the recommended proportion for healthy living is just 5%. As well as causing obesity, our excess consumption of sugar is a cause of tooth decay, Type-2 diabetes, severe heart conditions and even some forms of cancer. It is estimated that obesity costs the NHS over £5bn a year.
The coalition government under David Cameron asked Public Health England to look into the problem and come up with some recommendations. Its report was ready in July but the government has been sitting on its publication, much to the anger (and deep suspicion) of those wanting get on with doing something about the issue. The department of health argued it wanted to publish the report alongside the unveiling of the government’s strategy on child obesity due later this year. But the government’s critics claim it is being browbeaten by the food and drink industry whose profits could be threatened by radical action aimed at cutting our consumption of sugar.
The government finally succumbed to pressure to publish - the most powerful attack coming from one of its own MPs, Dr Sarah Wollaston. She chairs the House of Commons Select Committee on Health and her committee had heard evidence from Dr Alison Tedstone, the chief nutritionist at PHE, who in effect spilled the beans on what was in the report.
The report identifies as the villains of the piece the consumption of cheap, sugary drink;, the extra sugar added to ready-made meals and takeaways; the discounts offered by supermarkets, of the buy-one-get-one-free sort, on high sugar-content products; and the sheer volume of food-related advertising. It makes a series of recommendations, including reducing the scale of advertising; providing a clearer definition of what high sugar content means and printing the facts more clearly on the products; and introducing a programme of gradual sugar reduction in everyday food and drink.
But its most controversial proposal is for a 10-20% tax on high sugar products such as full-calorie fizzy drinks, which would increase their cost by between 7p and 14p a drink. Dr Tedstone told the committee: ‘the higher the tax increase, the greater the effect.’ The report cited the examples of other countries, such as Mexico and France, which it claims have successfully reduced sugar consumption by increasing tax. The PHE’s diet and obesity committee said: ‘This is too serious a problem to be solved by approaches that rely only on individuals changing their behaviour in response to health education and marketing or the better provision of information on our food’.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the food and drink industry denies the effectiveness of tax as a weapon in reducing consumption of high-sugar products. They cite Denmark as a country that introduced and then removed such a tax after discovering it had no effect.
Even before the report had been published Downing Street let it be known that the Prime Minister ‘doesn’t see the need for a tax on sugar’, at the same as being unable to confirm that Mr Cameron had actually read the report his own government had commissioned.
The argument being put by those who support the Prime Minister’s position is that such a tax would impose an unnecessary extra burden on already hard-pressed families. Observers have noted that with his government apparently determined to go ahead with its plans to cut tax credits (which the Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons will severely hit the incomes of around three million poorer-paid working families), the Prime Minister does not want to add any further financial pressure on them.
But his critics have a different explanation. They think he has been nobbled by the food and drinks industry whose profits depend on high-volume sales. Jamie Oliver, the TV chef who has led campaigns to improve food standards in school meals and is now one of the strongest advocates of a tax on sugar, wrote on Thursday: ‘Why would the government ignore such evidence [of the effect of a tax on reducing sugar consumption]? For the answer we have only to look at the pressures exerted by the powerful food and drinks lobby, which has been reluctant to accept even the simplest solutions to the sugar epidemic, such as clearer labelling’.
Critics such as Jamie Oliver claim the government has got form on not standing up to such pressure, citing its dragging of feet over minimum pricing for alcohol and taking forever to insist that cigarettes should be sold under plain wrappers. Yet this government, like others before it, has not been shy to use tax as a weapon on behalf of public health. The huge duty imposed on tobacco is an obvious case in point and, as result, cigarette smoking is in sharp decline. The same could be done with sugar, advocates of a sugar tax claim.
There is, of course, a more familiar and fundamental objection to trying to use taxation as a way of changing people’s behaviour. It is that it is no business of the government to act as a ‘nanny state’, telling people what they should and shouldn’t do and trying to force them to do it by imposing punitive taxation on their activity. To which campaigners for a healthier Britain would say: if we take that line we might as well give up on the very notion of public health.
So what is the right approach? How worried should we be about the growth of obesity? Is tackling our consumption of sugar the way to doing something about it? And should that involve imposing new taxes on the sugary drinks, the ready-made meals and the cheap takeaways to which we seem to have become addicted?
