Truculent Britain will never beat obesity

It worked in Finland, so why would a similar public health project here not stand the slightest chance?

Everyone loves to see the Nanny State with egg on her face, especially when she is supposed to be on a diet. Hence, the tone of barely restrained glee in some of yesterday’s headlines about anti-obesity policies in schools. The words “failed” and “don’t work” were bandied about with that exultant defeatism at which we British excel.

The cause of all this schadenfreude was a study into an anti-obesity programme introduced at more than 50 primary schools in the West Midlands in 2005. Pupils were given an extra 30 minutes of exercise every day, families were invited to attend healthy eating workshops, and encouraged to take physical activity locally. Yet after a year, no obvious good had been done. The children who took part in the programme were no thinner than those who didn’t.

Part of the explanation for this may lie in the programme itself, which was more concerned with exercise than with diet. Many studies show that, for the purposes of weight loss, you need to do it the other way round: a modern junk food diet provides more calories than you can ever hope to outrun.

But the headlines are right. Policies like this don’t work – at least, not on their own. I don’t mean to say schools can’t make a difference. I spent the best part of 2013 helping to write the government’s School Food Plan. Britain’s addiction to processed junk starts in childhood; it makes sense for the treatment to start there, too.

But there is no silver bullet for the obesity epidemic. It is as hard to kill as a B-movie monster: a shape-shifting parasite that spreads its sticky tentacles into every crevice of modern life. It draws its strength from both corporate and human greed; from social changes, such as the exodus of women from the kitchen; from stress, loneliness and anxiety, which encourage dysfunctional eating; and from the ubiquitous, aggressive marketing of processed food.

To tame the beast, you need to jump on all the tentacles at once. Perhaps the most celebrated example of this is the work of the Finnish doctor Pekka Puska. In 1972, Puska was asked to lead a public health project in the province of North Karelia, a place distinguished at the time by the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in the world. Poor diet and smoking meant one in 10 working-age men and women in the region were on disability benefit due to diseased arteries.

Puska decided to come at the problem from every angle. He distributed healthy recipe cards to housewives; lobbied the local sausage factory to reduce salt and fat levels; convinced employers to introduce no-smoking policies; persuaded shops to display fresh food more prominently; cleared paths and gave free traction shoe clamps to the elderly so they could go for walks in winter. He didn’t just preach to people about living healthily: he changed their environment to make it easier for them to do so.

Within five years, deaths from heart disease started to fall dramatically. Puska was asked to roll his project out across the country, adding grander interventions such as free school meals for every child. By 2009 the annual mortality rate from heart disease in men in Finland had fallen by 80 per cent.

This doesn’t have to be a Scandi socialist dream. In 2014, management consultants Mckinsey made the capitalist argument for a similar intervention. Pointing out that obesity is now the third-biggest drain on global GDP (after smoking and armed violence), it recommended that Britain should introduce 44 anti-obesity policies, ranging from better food education to changes in transport policy. This, it predicted, would bring at least 20 per cent of obese Britons down to their target weight.

That may seem like an awful lot of intervention for a relatively modest shift. But 20 per cent of fat Britons is a population roughly the size of Austria. And according to Mckinsey’s estimates, whittling them down to a healthy size would have an economic benefit to Britain of around £17 billion a year.

The science and the economics both make sense. But, alas, I can’t see it happening here. The truculent British character resists being pushed – or even gently nudged – into good behaviour. We would rather get fat and die young than admit that Nanny knows best.