This year’s Broken Plate report highlights a range of damaging effects caused by poor nutrition and the absence of a coherent UK food policy, which it says are leading to problems which include ‘stunted growth in children’ and record levels of ‘amputations linked to the complications of obesity’.
It says that on current trends more than 80% of children born in 2022 who survive to the age of 65 will be overweight or obese. At least one in 20 of them will already have died.
Obesity in children has risen by 50% in the past year alone. Children with obesity are more likely to grow up to have diet-related disease. Obesity adversely affects ability to learn in school, self-esteem and physical and mental health.
Anna Taylor, executive director at The Food Foundation and one of Public Sector Catering’s Top 20 ‘most influential’ people said: “This report provides the strongest evidence to date of the worsening crisis affecting our food system and the health of the UK population.
“It is vital that the incoming prime minister takes urgent action to address the issues raised by the National Food Strategy with the development of a new plan for primary legislation.”
The report says poor nutrition is causing stunted growth, with British five-year-olds shorter than their counterparts in some European neighbours and showing significant height variation between poor and wealthy areas within this country.
Life-limiting amputations caused by the complications of diabetes linked to obesity have reached record levels, reducing quality of life and placing a burden on the healthcare system and wider economy.
Dr Max Davie, the health improvement officer at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Institute of Child Health, added: ‘As prices continue to rise nationally, there is an ever-growing nutritional gap between high- and low-income families. Healthy foods are nearly three times more expensive than less healthy foods per calorie.
“We call on the Government to ensure that all members of our society, including the most vulnerable, have the means to access healthy affordable foods. We must act now to build a healthier and more sustainable future for our children.”
The research offers a bleak picture of the way the food system is currently working:
- Healthy nutritious food is nearly three times more expensive than obesogenic unhealthy products, with more healthy foods costing an average of £8.51 for 1,000 calories compared to just £3.25 for 1,000 calories of less healthy foods. Between 2021 and 2022 healthier foods became even more expensive, increasing in price by an average of 5.1% compared with 2.5% for the least healthy foods
- Excess weight costs the UK approximately £74bn every year in direct NHS costs, lost workforce productivity and reduced life expectancy. It is one of the main factors in the 20-year gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest members of society
- One in five households would have to spend almost half their disposable income on food to achieve the government-recommended healthy diet, leaving little money for energy and other household bills. By contrast, the wealthiest fifth of the population would need to spend just 11% of their disposable income
- Sustainable alternative milks made from ingredients such as oats and soya, cost up to £1.79 per litre compared to £1 for cows’ milk. They are 60% more expensive than dairy milk even though they on average create less than a third of the greenhouse gas emissions of dairy milk and use little more than half the water to produce
- Sandwiches with plant-based fillings cost £3.25 on average compared with £3 for meat and £2.85 for fish
- About a third (32%) of all food and soft drink advertising is still invested in promoting unhealthy foods compared with 1% spent on fruit and vegetable promotion. A further 39% is spent on brand advertising, much of which is associated with less healthy products
Dr Dolly Theis MRC Epidemiology Unit & Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), at Cambridge University, said: “This major Food Foundation report shows that our food system is completely broken. Unhealthy food is cheap, aggressively marketed and makes people sick.
“Although we have had almost 700 government obesity policies in England to date, very few have led to any action. The government must stop this cycle and ensure it implements all policy proposals, including those put forward in the latest obesity strategy published in 2020.”
The report claims that only one in four state schools in England is known to be meeting school food nutritional requirements, despite calls for the Government to mandate an accreditation scheme so that compliance with standards can be more regularly checked in all schools.
It says childhood is a critical time for development and sub-optimal nutrition can have ‘irreversible lifelong implications’.
It adds that fast food retailers gravitate to areas of poverty - 31% of food retailers in the most deprived areas are fast food outlets compared with 22% in the least deprived areas.
It says that as fast-food consumption is closely linked with increased risk of obesity, it is likely that this higher availability of fast food is a contributing factor to socio-economic health inequalities.
And it concludes: “The Broken Plate report shows more clearly than ever, the need for regulation to create structural change in our food system if we are going to provide a healthy future for our population.”