It will take huge guts to take on the root causes of obesity
ABOUT a decade ago a friend of mine was involved in a project to promote healthy eating among families in my local area. Meetings were held, committees convened and worried attendees heard about a looming obesity crisis.
Kids and adults alike were choosing fast food over more nutritious options.
Waistbands were expanding and the health impact, they were warned, would be grave. Something had to be done.
So, the plan was to target poorer families. These were households on low incomes who thought eating healthily meant expensive eating. Households who were nervous of putting the oven on because of the fear of the electric bill or who didn’t have the skills to cook from scratch.
These were also households which didn’t have cars and so couldn’t access out-of-town supermarkets with their cheap fruit and veg and had to rely instead on local, usually more expensive shops with a poorer range of products.
Or, if these mums and dads did trail to Asda or Tesco, they had to struggle back on the bus with bags and kids and buggies. In which case it was easier to choose a fast food option – which they could guarantee the children would eat – than take a chance and spend hard-earned cash lugging piles of veggies home only for them to be thrown away.
Obesity, you see, isn’t just about losing weight on a diet or joining a gym or being thrown a few quid to get on a bike. It’s about too many people having too little money and a lack of education. It’s about less well-off people being denied options. It’s about the gap between rich and poor. It’s about food poverty. And so a plan was formed to educate and inform people and this was to be delivered through SureStart family centres. Get parents on board and youngsters follow. Genius.
Fast forward 10 years and many of those centres have been closed or scaled back due to government cuts.
Public health budgets across the UK have been slashed too and meaning ‘luxuries’ like healthy eating campaigns have had to go.
Meanwhile, there remains no minimum unit price on alcohol in England and Wales so most of the UK can carry on buying booze for what amounts to little more than pocket money. And piling on the pounds to boot. And the food industry can be less than candid still about sugar and fat content.
So, well done to our PM for announcing this week his national campaign to slim down our waistline and get us fighting fit to face the ongoing Covid threat. But it’s a bit late. There are years of catching up to do.
When it comes to a nation’s health there is no quick fix. We have to begin somewhere, but this should have started a decade ago.