Health expectancy in the UK is falling like a stone
Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, the UK government continues to cling to the belief that their current public health nutrition policies are working. But they really aren’t.
After 14 years of Tory austerity driving poverty and destitution there were hopes, back in July last year, that Labour would start to turn things around. Still waiting for that.
Meanwhile nutrition in the UK is so poor that children aged five are now significantly shorter than they were a decade ago, but they weigh a lot more than they did back in 2015. The implications for the health of that generation (and the UK’s economy, as a consequence of that poor health) in four or five decades is extremely concerning.
Obesity continues to increase; over 28% of the UK adult population now qualify as obese. It’s more difficult to determine an overall percentage of obesity in children because they are measured by age range, but that is going up too. And the rise in obesity is being matched with an increase in a range of chronic conditions that destroy health and cost the NHS billions every year.
For the last 60 years heart disease in the UK has been falling, but no longer. Since 2020, cardiovascular health issues are on the rise. Deaths from heart attacks, coronary heart disease (where plaque build-up in arteries restricts blood flow to the heart) and strokes are increasing, and it’s happening to younger people. Of course, obesity is not the only issue in cardiovascular health, homocysteine also plays a significant role, but that remains unacknowledged by government policy or modern medicine.
Bowel cancer is also on the rise, but not in the age group that it used to be associated with. In people over 60, colorectal cancer incidence is fairly stable, but it is increasing in people under the age of 50. We have known for years that what people eat – or don’t eat, is one of the primary causative factors in the development of colorectal cancers but, as with so many other aspects of health and nutrition, the UK government is not doing anything about it.
And then there is diabetes. More than 4.6 million people in the UK are currently living with diabetes, and those numbers are rising, with more than half a million people being diagnosed last year alone.
Which brings us neatly on to sugar
Back in the 1970s John Yudkin, the founding professor of the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, London, put forward a theory that sugar was a key player in the development of diabetes and heart disease. His theory was dismissed, and his career was utterly destroyed by both academia and the food industry of the time. It is now accepted that sugar is indeed a big factor in type 2 diabetes, although resistance to the idea that it is also implicated in heart disease continues. But as with so many issues around nutrition, once again, government really isn’t doing much to make a difference.
In 2018 the UK sugar tax, or Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) came into force. This applied taxes to some soft drinks that contain more than 5g of sugar per 100ml, with a higher rate applied to drinks containing 8g or more per 100ml. As a result the soft drinks industry reformulated, removing sugar and replacing it with artificial sweeteners (the toxic effects of artificial sweeteners is a whole other story…). Although sugar intake did fall slightly following the implementation of the SDIL, the most recent government data on sugar intake in 2020 shows that sugar intake in the UK has really not fallen much and still exceeds government recommendations. And a report published in 2024 by the Oral Health Foundation shows that sugar consumption in the UK continues to be worryingly high.
Despite the evidence that the SDIL really isn’t making much of a difference, several studies have been published shouting about what a success it has been. One trumpeted that the SDIL was associated with a reduction in obesity in 5,000 Year 6 girls in England. There are about 10.6 million school children in the UK, so possibly reducing the prevalence of obesity in 5,000 is hardly a drop in that ocean. Another has calculated that the SDIL has reduced sugar in soft drinks by a staggering one teaspoon a day in children and two teaspoons a day in adults. Gosh.
The thing with the SDIL is that it only applies to a very limited number of soft drinks and nothing else. At a food industry meeting back in 2017, a Treasury official explained how the SDIL was going to work. That official was asked why all sugar, both imported, or produced in the UK, was not taxed. The official response: “it’s too hard”. Not terribly impressive, when sugar is one of the major underlying factors in the decline in health of the UK population.
Is government nutrition policy trustworthy?
Government nutrition policy is developed by civil servants, who direct the Scientific Committee on Nutrition (SACN), a committee of supposedly independent experts to find evidence to support UK nutrition policy. An article last year in the British Medical Journal (the BMJ) caused something of a flurry in the nutrition world. It highlighted links between the members of SACN and the global food and drink industry. For example, someone in the subgroup on maternal and child nutrition is being paid over £5,000 a year by an American company that makes infant formula. Someone else in the main committee is getting paid by Danone, the Almond Board of California, Alpro, Nestlé, the Dairy Council, The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council and Yakult, and is also a member of the American Society for Nutrition which is funded by companies like Kellogg’s, PepsiCo and Hershey. The potential financial conflict of interests suggest that the experts are not necessarily either ‘independent’, or unbiased.
And the civil servants themselves seem to be terribly attached to old theories and debunked ideas. They continue to demonise saturated fat, despite a growing body of evidence that it does not cause heart disease. They ignore the mountain of evidence around homocysteine and fail to recommend increasing intakes of B vitamins and omega-3 (which would deal with a significant proportion of chronic diseases, thereby saving the NHS an absolute fortune). They continue to maintain that the health of the population can be sustained by eating a varied and balanced diet, even though data from the government’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) clearly shows that few people in the UK actually eat a varied and balanced diet. And public health nutrition policies continue to focus almost exclusively on a few macronutrients (carbohydrate, fats and proteins) and ignore the majority of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients that humans need in very small quantities) that are the substances that maintain our health and wellbeing.
As for politicians, they are terrified of being accused of running a ‘nanny state’ by the right-wing press and politicians. And they get lobbied (and in some cases paid for) by the food industry. So they issue voluntary policies to make it look as if they are not trying to control anything, and so the food industry doesn’t stop paying them.
In fact, until fairly recently, politicians have not viewed food related ill health as important enough to be considered urgent and, because the food system is so complex, they have been extremely reluctant to try to tackle it. To make matters worse, thanks to politicians, there are multiple government departments that deal with food systems. Government departments that are dreadful at communication; internally, with other government departments, with industry, and with the general public.
About that ineffective policy
Between 1996 and 2020 the UK government implemented 689 policies intended to tackle obesity. Not a single one of them has had any beneficial impact; obesity (and the bad health that goes with it) has just gone up and up and up.
Then there is the Eatwell Guide, updated from the Eatwell Plate in 2016. It’s supposed to show what everyone should be eating. Most of the ‘experts’ that worked on the Eatwell Guide came from the food and drink industry rather than the supposedly unbiased civil service. It continues to promote the high carbohydrate, low fat diet that UK policy has been based on for several decades, even though it is probable that that policy has been a key driver in the obesity epidemic.
In October 2024 the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee published a report, Recipe for Health: A plan to fix our broken food system. The government effectively dismissed most of the recommendations made in the report, claiming it already has a range of measures in place to sort out the problems, and that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) was in the process of developing an ambitious food strategy. And yet DEFRA doesn’t have a nutrition division. Without a good foundation in nutrition, how can anyone, government department or otherwise, devise a food strategy that will support the health of the nation?
A couple of points to leave you with
Until very recently, responsibility for ill health and obesity have been dumped on the individual. It is only in the last few years that the food industry has been exposed as being one of the primary causative factors.
Many politicians agree that food related ill health is a big problem. Yet despite all of the evidence to the contrary, central government continues to claim that its current public health nutrition policies are absolutely fine. Maybe the civil service are reluctant to admit that they have been getting it wrong for several decades. Maybe the politicians currently in power are being influenced by food industry lobbying.
It is time that the country stood up to the food industry. And demanded that the politicians do the same.
