Cutting the flab
“Why are you looking so grumpy?” That’s what my kids asked me when I got home last Wednesday night, said Jamie Oliver in The Times. I had to explain to them I was angry because “the Prime Minister had let British children down”. Last week Theresa May flunked her first big test as PM. She had a golden opportunity to show she was serious about tackling the scourge of obesity, by fulfilling the promise that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt made last year to take “draconian” action to force food companies to change their ways. But when the Government unveiled its long-awaited obesity strategy, it proved utterly feeble. “Everything about it stinks of ‘we don’t care’.”
It certainly looks as if May has put the interests of business before those of the nation’s children, said George Eaton in the New Statesman. The key measures advanced by health campaigners – curbs on advertising (notably the use of cartoon characters to promote cereals and snacks) and on supermarkets offering promotional deals on junk foods – have been ditched. And although the industry is being asked to reduce the sugar content in food that children enjoy by 20% by 2020, said Sarah Boseley in The Guardian, it’s only a voluntary process, which was started under Cameron’s government – and which has been largely ineffectual. The key measure is the sugar tax, already announced by George Osborne in March: yet this only applies to soft drinks (it will put 8p on a can of Coke) and won’t come in for two years. Nor is any action being taken on fat – as much a cause of obesity as sugar. Instead, schools and parents will be asked to push children to do an hour of exercise a day. And that’s exactly where responsibility should lie, said Emma Gill in the Manchester Evening News. “How long are we going to blame the Government and advertisers for a problem that ultimately lies with us parents?” It’s we who decide what our children put in their mouths. It may not always be fun being “the fruit-and-veg pusher, but it’s part and parcel of being a parent”.
No, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian: what we refuse to admit is that “fat is a class issue”. A third of British children are deemed to be overweight, but “most of the seriously obese are poor”. And that’s hardly surprising: when you have no prospects, are excluded from the finer things society has to offer, and are regarded as bottom of the pecking order, small pleasures occupy a key place in your life. “It is inequality and disrespect that make people fat.” That’s why Government has a central role to play. And under the previous Labour government it played it rather well, said The Observer. It devolved responsibility for nutrition to an independent Food Standards Agency which was “insulated from heavy industry lobbying”. Hence it was able to broker industry-wide deals – to reduce salt content in food, for example – that were copied around the world. But to its shame, the coalition government in 2010 restored nutrition policy to the Department of Health, so exposing it once again to the powerful food and drinks lobby. And May’s “craven” U-turn is the result.