The Government needs a plan to fix our broken food system and turn the tide on the obesity public health emergency, says Lords committee

This is the key conclusion reached by the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee in a report published today. The report, ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system', finds that obesity and diet-related disease are a public health emergency that costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. It demands that the Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework.

The report notes that:

• Two-thirds of adults are overweight and just under a third are living with obesity.
• After tobacco, diet-related risks now make the biggest contribution to years of life lost. The annual societal cost of obesity is at least 1–2% of UK GDP.
• Unhealthy diets are the primary driver of obesity, with people in all income groups failing to meet dietary recommendations.
• While there is increasing interest in the potential of new medicines to reduce obesity rates, their widespread use would cost the NHS billions every year. Prevention is better than cure.
• There has been an utter failure to tackle this crisis. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity has continued to rise.
• The food industry has strong incentives to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products. Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.
• There is a high level of public concern about the quality of our food and a demand for government action.

People have busy lives and many struggle to pay the bills. In addition, many have neither the time nor the facilities to cook meals from scratch and healthier food can be more expensive than less healthy food. The report focuses on actions that will force the food industry to make healthier food accessible and affordable for all.

There is no silver bullet, and so, as part of the new comprehensive strategy, key actions should include:

• making large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and excluding businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
• giving the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system.
• introducing a salt and sugar reformulation tax on food manufacturers, building on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. The Government should consider how to use the revenue to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for people living with food insecurity.
• banning the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and ban on paid-for online advertising in October 2025.
• commissioning further research into the links between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and adverse health outcomes and reviewing dietary guidelines to reflect any new evidence. Rapidly growing epidemiological evidence showing a correlation between consumption of UPFs and poor health outcomes is alarming. Beyond energy and nutrient content, causal links between other properties of UPFs and poor health outcomes have not at the present time been clearly demonstrated.
• immediately developing an ambitious strategy for maternal and infant nutrition and driving up compliance with the school food standards, to help break the vicious cycle by which children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity.
• enabling auto-enrolment for Healthy Start and free school meals and reviewing the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening eligibility for both schemes, to help families in poverty afford healthier food.

Baroness Walmsley, Chair of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee said: 

“Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill. Something must be going wrong if almost two in five children are leaving primary school with overweight or obesity and so many people are finding it hard to feed healthy food to their families. That is why we took a root and branch look at the food system and analysed what had gone wrong over the past few decades.  

“Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives. This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state'. Both the Government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right. 

“We hope, given the recent comments from the Prime Minister, Lord Darzi and the Secretary of State for Health, that there is now an appetite to shift towards prevention of ill health. We urge the Government to look favourably on our plan to fix our broken food system and accept that not only is it cost-effective, but that it would lead to a lot less human misery.”

Notes to editors

1. The Food, Diet and Obesity Committee was appointed by the House of Lords on 24 January 2024 “to consider the role of foods, such as ‘ultra-processed foods', and foods high in fat, sugar and salt, in a healthy diet and tackling obesity”, to report by the end of November 2024.

2. Given the time constraints, and the strong evidence that diet is the key influence on the risk of obesity, the Committee's remit was specifically concerned with the links between food, a healthy diet and tackling obesity. Notwithstanding their importance, and on the basis that prevention is better than cure, the Committee was not invited to focus on obesity treatment (such as medication or physical therapy).