People in England keep eating too much, so let’s quietly make food less calorific. That’s the from Public Health England (PHE) for tackling the nation’s growing obesity problem. A total of to remove 20 per cent of the calories from foods like pizzas, crisps and ready meals by 2024.
It is clear something must be done. The most recent PHE figures show that a third of pupils aged 10 to 11 are overweight or obese, as are 58 per cent of women and 68 per cent of men. Obese boys and girls respectively consume up to 500 and 290 surplus calories daily, effectively an extra meal. Men and women – who should ideally consume no more than 2500 and 2000 calories daily – are on average consuming 200 to 300 calories extra per day.
So will slimming down food also slim down people? PHE’s plan is voluntary, and firms will not be penalised for failing to hit the reduction target. There are also no plans to monitor the cut in calories over the next six years.
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“I’d like to have seen some shorter scale milestones, because otherwise how will we judge the rate of progress?” says of the University of Oxford. “We can’t just wait until 2024 and see if the job is done – we need to know where we are in a year or two,” she says.
Eat less, move more?
But whether consumers – especially in the poorer social groups most affected by obesity – will heed the message is uncertain. Former First Lady Michelle Obama led a similar initiative in the US. It was successful at first, but , says , an obesity expert at the consultancy ConscienHealth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “Urging people to eat less and move more has failed spectacularly for three decades in the US, because this is a complex, chronic disease caused by multiple factors in a perfect storm.”
One of the biggest problems is that the root cause of obesity remains unknown, despite the intuitive conclusion that it must be because people eat too much and exercise too little.
“What if this unproven theory that overeating and inactivity is the main driver of weight gain in children is wrong?” asks of Boston University School of Medicine. “We could end up ignoring environmental and epigenetic changes that could be driving the epidemic, and if we don’t seriously evaluate all possible causes and find the real culprits, it will continue to grow,” she says.
Kyle agrees. “The truth is that this problem has taken decades to build up,” he says. “If scientists knew precisely what to do to reverse the trends, faster progress might be possible, but anyone who says they know a quick solution is telling a lie – after almost four decades of attention to the problem, no country has yet succeeded in reversing these trends,” he says.
