Obesity czar: We need a revolution to break children’s sugar addiction

BRITAIN has a sugar addiction that can only be beaten by a revolutionary change in the nation’s eating habits, the public health minister warned last night.

Nicola Blackwood, who is in charge of the Government’s childhood obesity strategy, said children’s consumption of sugary food and drinks was among Europe’s highest.

‘We have developed an addiction to sugar,’ she told the Commons health select committee. But her warning came as it emerged that a single bowl of breakfast cereal can contain almost two-thirds of a child’s daily added sugar limit.

Experts say children aged four to six should not eat more than 19g of added sugar a day – just under five teaspoons.

Research into 63 children’s cereals, published in the journal Public Health Nutrition, found a 30g serving typically contained 6.27g, or 1.7 teaspoons.

But Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cornflakes came in at 35g per 100g – 11g in a 30g serving, or just under three teaspoons – around 60 per cent of the limit.

During a fiery hearing yesterday, MPs on the Commons health select committee demanded to know why the long-awaited obesity strategy was watered down before it was announced last summer.

They demanded to know why a planned ban on junk-food advertising before 9pm had been shelved, and why stronger rules forcing companies to reduce sugar had not been introduced.

Labour MP Luciana Berger said: ‘Why didn’t you fight harder? Our children are getting bigger.’

Mrs Blackwood said firms had been asked to reduce sugar by 20 per cent by 2020 and a sugar tax was planned for soft drinks.

She added: ‘ No country elsewhere has come up with a reformulation plan like we have, no other country has introduced a producer-led tax like we have.

‘I want us to break our addiction to sugar and high-calorie foods.

‘I don’t want us to have the same relationship with food in ten years as we have now.

‘It is genuinely a generation change we are after, I hope this is the beginning of a revolutionary change. But it is a large- scale change we are after.’

However, Professor Paul Dobson, of the University of East Anglia, told the MPs: ‘Those measures will fail.

‘They will fail because they are not targeted. They are relying on one-to- one agreements as opposed to industry requirement to do it.

‘There is no stick here. What is the threat if you don’t comply?’

After the hearing, Professor Russell Viner, of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: ‘Tackling childhood obesity has never been more urgent. We want a ban on all advertising of junk food and drink prior to the 9pm watershed.’

‘Why didn’t you fight harder?