We must not abandon plans to tackle the obesity crisis

I’M ALARMED by reports that Liz Truss and Therese Coffey, the new health secretary, are not only considering ditching most of Boris’s anti-obesity plans, but also getting rid of the sugar tax, introduced in 2018. This would be a huge mistake.

The sugar tax, designed to encourage food manufacturers to cut the amount of sugar in products, or pay a small levy, is not perfect — the manufacturers largely replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners, which is good for your teeth but may not be so good for your gut bacteria.

Still, it led to a 10 per cent drop in the consumption of sugary soft drinks, while generating £300million for good causes such as support for school sports.

And cutting sugar consumption matters because excess sugar leads to obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

It seems other anti-obesity measures now unlikely to happen include curbing Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) deals and advertising junk food to children online and before 9pm on TV.

But we have to do something: in the 40 years since I was a medical student, rates of obesity in the UK have quadrupled; one in four children aged ten to 11 is now obese.

One of the main reasons for this is the ever-increasing amounts of takeaways and ultra-processed food being consumed.

Quite apart from the damage that eating lots of junk food does to our health, the subsequent tsunami of obesity-related diseases is costing the UK at least £58billion a year, according to a recent report by the economic consultancy Frontier Economics. (And while the cost of living crisis is being used to allow BOGOF deals, the reality is that these offers are usually for highly processed snacks packed with additives, sugar, fat and salt.) We have a long history of sensible health measures being proposed and then abandoned (former Prime Minister David Cameron wanted to extend the sugar tax to cover other highsugar foods — plans that Theresa May’s government ditched). I fear we’ll soon be seeing yet another example of a government putting the interests of the multinational food industry ahead of the nation’s health.