The Guardian view on obesity: put public health before food industry pressure | Editorial

Britain has spent the last three decades asking individuals to make healthier choices inside a market that makes those choices more expensive and less visible. It is no surprise then that the proportion of adults in England living with obesity nearly doubled in that time, to 30%. MPs on the health select committee have decided enough is enough. Preventing obesity in future generations, they say, must take precedence over the interests of the food and drink industry.

In a report to parliament, the cross-party committee argues that preventing obesity demands radical action to regulate food markets. To those who say “just wait for cheap Ozempic”, MPs offer a clear answer: off-patent GLP-1 drugs may transform treatment, but treatment is what becomes necessary when prevention has failed.

The most ambitious proposal is to exclude food businesses selling a high share of unhealthy products, and their trade bodies from shaping “food, diet and obesity-prevention” policy. MPs say measures to protect children and public health are repeatedly delayed or diluted by industry warnings about “prices, jobs or the economy”. Yet obesity costs the UK at least £74bn per year, including £11bn to the NHS alone.

MPs are echoing peers on the Lords food, diet and obesity committee – putting the food industry in the same category as tobacco firms, which are excluded from shaping tobacco-control policy. Under Sir Keir Starmer, ministers rejected the proposal, saying such a measure would “prevent effective engagement”. With Andy Burnham expected to become prime minister, MPs are making the case again that industry has too often allowed commercial interests to shape the agenda.

Layla Moran. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

The committee wants supermarkets to be held responsible for what they sell, and to recast their business model. Large retailers would report healthy product sales and face binding targets within a year, extended to other big food businesses by the end of this parliament. Failure could trigger turnover-based fines, potentially used to make healthier food cheaper. MPs are telling ministers to stick to their own 10-year plan, which says there will be mandatory reporting on healthy food sales for all large firms.

These are powerful interventions, designed to put public health – not industry pressure – at the heart of food policy. MPs also propose eye-catching measures, including a ban on all outdoor advertising of foods high in fat, salt and sugar by July 2027. While sweets, chocolate and crisps attracted £196m in advertising over a year, fruit and vegetables got just £19m. Councils should also get clearer powers to block new fast-food outlets. The report notes that KFC has challenged dozens of English councils over takeaway restrictions, overturning local decisions more than half the time.

The committee chair, Layla Moran, is right to demand tough regulation and affordable healthier choices. The inequalities are stark. Rates of obesity are more than twice as high in the poorest areas than the richest – and the gap is widening. As Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, notes, this is hardly rocket science: France has kept obesity levels steady since 1990. In the UK, obesity has continued to rise, especially among younger adults, while governments have repeatedly preferred voluntary agreements, delayed regulation and yielded to industry pressure. What MPs have concluded is that this is not a failure of individual willpower, but the predictable result of an environment engineered around cheap, heavily promoted unhealthy food. That must change.

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