As UNICEF (the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) reported yesterday that:
Obesity surpassed underweight as the more prevalent form of malnutrition this year, affecting 1 in 10 – or 188 million – school-aged children and adolescents, and placing them at risk of life-threatening disease, UNICEF warned in a new report today.
Feeding Profit: How Food Environments are Failing Children draws on data from over 190 countries and finds the prevalence of underweight among children aged 5-19 has declined since 2000, from nearly 13 per cent to 9.2 per cent, while obesity rates have increased from 3 per cent to 9.4 per cent. Obesity now exceeds underweight in all regions of the world, except sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
That ultra-processed foods are to blame for this crisis is clear from case studies:
According to the findings, several Pacific Island countries have the highest prevalence of obesity globally, including 38 per cent of 5 to 19-year-olds in Niue, 37 per cent in Cook Islands, and 33 per cent in Nauru. These levels – which have all doubled since 2000 – are largely driven by a shift from traditional diets to cheap, energy-dense, imported foods.
Meanwhile, many high-income countries continue to have high levels of obesity, for example 27 per cent of 5 to 19-year-olds in Chile are living with obesity, 21 per cent in the United States, and 21 per cent in the United Arab Emirates.
They added:
According to the latest available data, 1 in 5 children and adolescents aged 5-19 globally – or 391 million – are overweight, with a large proportion of them now classified as living with obesity.
Children are considered overweight when they are significantly heavier than what is healthy for their age, sex and height. Obesity is a severe form of overweight and leads to a higher risk of developing insulin resistance and high blood pressure, as well as life-threatening diseases later in life, including type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers.
The report warns that ultra-processed and fast foods – high in sugar, refined starch, salt, unhealthy fats and additives – are shaping children's diets through unhealthy food environments, rather than personal choice. These products dominate shops and schools, while digital marketing gives the food and beverage industry powerful access to young audiences.
I have talked about this issue of obesity and its direct relationship with ultra-processed foods many times before on this blog. Nothing changes my mind about the fact that this is one of the most significant issues that we face. If diets high in ultra-processed foods were addressed, and that consumption was reduced, not only would much of childhood obesity be tackled, but so too would much of the incidence of the following diseases, all of which are fuelled mainly by the excessive sugars in these processed food products:
- Adult obesity
- Type 2 diabetes
- Most forms of heart disease
- Many types of cancer
- Depression and anxiety
The incidence of all these complaints is increased significantly by the consumption of excess sugar (which makes programmes like the Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up To Cancer very hard to understand).
This is not, then, just a health issue - although changing diets is now absolutely fundamental to improving health care outcomes. It is also fundamental to:
- Making the NHS affordable
- Maintaining what politicians think to be acceptable levels of government spending
- Solving the UK's productivity crisis
- Tackling some aspects of inequality
We could change diets. Regulation in the case of sugary drinks and the quantity of salt in food proves that. That we are not reveals four things:
- Wes Streeting is in hock to the big food industry and our supermarkets
- He does not want to solve our health care crisis
- The government is not seeking answers to the real problems that are actually affecting this country, which could be solved.
- The government will not take the actual action required to balance its books, even though it is possible for it to do so
In that case, my suggestion is very straightforward. A government that is faced with the evidence of a crisis, and its causes, and does nothing about it is not fit for office. This one should change, or go.
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Lino under no steer, genius mcsweeney, rachel from accounts and busy boy are not at all interested in doing anything that might help/benefit the majority of the UK population.
Four more years of deep austerity to face under Lino. Then perhaps even more austerity under the next government.
I cant see that it would be that difficult to pass measures which would have a significant impact and potentially immediate on public health.
Look at what the 20mph speed limit has done in Wales
So…….
Adopt a 20 mph speed limit in built up areas – coupled with I suggest lower ‘national’ speed limits
Controls and higher taxation on
Alcohol
Tobacco
Vapes
This would include licensing throughout the distribution chain ie makers/importers, distributors and retailers, along with limits on the amount you can hold without a licence.
Controls on Caffein effectively ‘outlawing’ energy drinks
A sugar and sweetener duty coupled with a limit on total consumption in the UK
Might be a start
Energy drinks work on sugar, not caffeine.
I could not agree more about the Stand Up to Cancer business which is just a way of getting working people to pay to treat their diseases caused by corporate poisoning of our world.
Nothing must get in the way of profit, just like nothing could get in the way of being a good communist.
I think the main problem is that in most cases it’s not sugar that is the main culprit but the complex subsitutes that cause the problem as they have no useful attributes to our bodies other than to create complex disruption to our digective systems. The latest tomato ketchup from Heinz has a claimed 50% less salt and sugar content. Yet it contains a sweetener that in tests on rats produced a number of bodily problems for the rats including disruption of the lower digestive microbug system. Unilever in 1988 filed a patent application for a cocoa butter replacement that could be used to replace a precentage of the cocoa butter mass.. My point is that this is a continuing process not for the general public but for profit motivation. Almost all food available to purchase as snacks and ready meals are full of refined products with a chemical composition of no nutritional use to the human body. Most of the consummers of these products are the ones least able to afford to spend on more nutritious foods nor have they got the time; often working long hours on minimum wages in high rent accommodation. Get more vocal Richard about your wealth tax and maybe Gary might take note and make contact.
Don’t excuse the sugar.
That’s the real cause of the crisis.
Are you referring to all sugar or only processed sugar???
Both
Most elements of sugar are pretty dangerous to the human body in excess. For example, we were never designed to eat fructose all the time.
Not excusing sugar Richard pointing out that by making substitutes for sugar available to the food industry cheaper than sugar then to me it’s obvious that cheaper means a way to maintain or increase a products profit. Margarine was a good example of a product that was made available because butter was expensive and was not good for people, really?
The food industry has much to answer for in terms of their use of all manner of additives and bulk enhancers.
I remember in the early 1970’s talking to a client who was having success with using ascorbic acid to clean the blood from meat obtained for around the head area of salmon heads. This was then used to manufacture fish cakes and cat food.. Ascobic acid was seen as natural so no problem with it’s use. At first farina was used to add bulk but then modified startches were found to be better at improving the texture and look of the product.
I am not discounting the problems associated with sugar but suggesting it’s not that simple in the complexity of our food manufacturing industry.
Margarine, and many other cooking fats from that era, were created to make use of the fats used in explosives in World War I which had no apparent use immediately thereafter, and were turned into food stuffs instead. The price we are paying for that is very high.
So, accepted.
Maybe marginally off topic, but here’s some live music for you! “Keeping me alive”. By Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. After all, eating poor food is killing us, so why shouldn’t music help keep us alive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDCVMhujqWM&list=PL4_zotuuu4206U2bo1vncUELSwv_z7-lG&index=19