NHS CHIEF: PARENTS ARE RAISING CHILDREN TERRIBLY

They’re fuelling deadly obesity timebomb

PARENTS are getting it ‘ terribly wrong’ with their children’s weight, the head of the NHS warned yesterday.

Calling for a campaign to tackle obesity, Simon Stevens said the alternative was a surge in killer diseases such as cancer.

He also hinted he would support a sugar tax – a view at odds with Government policy. Mr Stevens, who has a young family, said one child in ten is obese on starting primary school – and one in five is too fat when they leave.

‘As a society, as parents, we are doing something terribly wrong in the way in which we are supporting and bringing up the next generation,’ he said. ‘That will mean a rising tide of avoidable type 2 diabetes

and cardiovascular disease and cancer, because we now know that one in five cancers are caused by obesity, not to mention blindness and amputations.

‘Are we going to, as the National Health Service, stand by and get ready to treat that burden of illness, or are we going to rattle the cage and advocate for something different?’

In his address to an NHS conference in Liverpool, Mr Stevens compared junk food to smoking or drinking in pregnancy.

‘If you are marketing sugar-laden fizzy drinks and junk food at kids you have a responsibility to stop that,’ he insisted.

‘The task of the food industry and the retailers is to reformulate food – particularly sugar – as they have done on salt, and to recognise that they don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the public argument.’

Suggesting that he supports a sugar levy, Mr Stevens called for a ‘change in the

‘Are we going to rattle the cage?’

weather and terms of trade’ around the food industry.

Industry experts hit back, saying Mr Stevens was ‘confusing’ consumers.

‘Obesity is a complex problem which cannot be reduced to the demonisation of one ingredient, nor can it be right that an everyday ingredient such as sugar is characterised as a poison,’ said Ian Wright, of the Food and Drink Federation.

‘We have reduced calories through recipe reformulations, including sugar and saturated fat reductions, to iconic products and changed portion sizes.’

Last week Mr Stevens, who is chief executive of NHS England, told the BBC that obesity had become as serious as smoking. ‘As parents, we’ve got responsibilities,’ he said. ‘When your children come home after school – it’s water, or milk, not fizzy drinks or juice. Cut-up apples not sugary bars.’

Parenting groups pointed out the difficulty of making all meals healthy.

Lynne Burnham, of Mothers at Home Matter, said: ‘A lot of parents just do not have time to cook a meal from scratch.

‘People are also so busy these days that they do not have time to check what their children are eating. This is not necessarily about parents being negligent but if they are working they cannot be there all the time.’

Life sciences minister George Freeman has said increased taxation should be considered for firms selling sugary products. But, asked if David Cameron was considering a sugar tax, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman replied: ‘No. Working with public health professionals, the industry on public health matters, including obesity, that is an important agenda. I don’t believe that the right approach here is to put sugar taxes on hard-working people to increase the weight and cost of their shopping baskets.’

Mr Freeman had said: ‘Where there is a commercial product which confers costs on all of us as a society, as in sugar, and where we can clearly show that the use of that leads to huge pressures on social costs, then we could be looking at recouping some of that through taxation.’