The British towns where VEG has all but vanished

...and why it makes my blood boil that food giants have turned shoppers into cannon fodder in their cynical bid to get us hooked on their junk

ONE of the most shocking moments during the 18 months I worked on Britain’s Fat Fight, my new TV show, came when we filmed inside the Diabetes Centre at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. If there is a front line in our war against obesity, this surely is it. The casualties were all too obvious – people who have lost toes, limbs and even eyes to type 2 diabetes. I spoke to several of them. They all had different stories.

One woman in her 50s, diagnosed with type 2 in her mid-20s, described her deep emotional connection to food and overeating; a man in his 70s admitted he used to be ‘a big drinker’ and ate ‘whatever he liked’.

But despite their differences, they all said a version of the same thing. As well as praising the fantastic care they were receiving from the NHS, they said they wished they’d had more support when they were younger; that they had understood better just how much harm they were doing to themselves.

Now we have to work out what that support looks like – and put it in place, fast. Because this is a war we’re evidently losing. Obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years to the point where 25 per cent of us are now clinically obese and at serious risk of developing weight-related illnesses.

Do nothing and that horrendous statistic will rise to half the population by 2050. The NHS is already beginning to buckle under the strain. Imagine doubling the problem it faces. Then the word catastrophe will be no exaggeration.

When Julie, who collared me on the very first day of filming in Newcastle, took me to Church Walk in Walker, where she grew up, I began to get another insight into the problem. If you played a game of Hunt The Fresh Vegetables in this part of town, you could be looking for weeks.

There is one small ‘supermarket’ that sells frozen foods, tinned foods and just about every brand of biscuit. The only fresh vegetables are spuds.

Another convenience store across the precinct does sell a few apples, oranges, onions and cabbages. But from the state of some of them, they are not in high demand.

I’m not exactly sure how this has happened but it feels like a downward spiral. Fresh vegetables are not particularly useful ingredients in massproduced fast food. They are less stable than the fats, sugars and refined carbs that are the building blocks of industrially made foods. Even meat, with a few preservatives added, is more compliant.

SO THE rise of fast food has been edging out the veg. Places like Walker are targeted by the food industry with aggressive advertising on billboards and at bus stops. And TV delivers a steady stream of ads that consolidate the message. In Chillingham Road, not far from Church Walk, there are 19 takeaways in a half-mile stretch. For many people living nearby, this is now their main source of food.

So veg becomes less available. People eat less of it, and think less about it, and eventually it just falls off their radar. It’s not that people can’t peel a carrot or are too lazy to chop up a cabbage, as some will have it. It’s that, in a food environment overrun with junk, it doesn’t even occur to them to look for carrots and cabbages. And all too often, they are nowhere to be seen.

This matters. Because fruit and vegetables really are the foods that evolution has made most suitable for us. Eat them regularly and their incredible diversity of nutrients forms the bedrock of our health. Take away the veg and we are vulnerable.

But people like Julie can see what’s happening. And they are a ray of hope. Julie has teamed up with great social enterprise called Food Nation, to run cookery classes in Walker and other deprived parts of the city. And through her Council Estate Cook Twitter feed, she shares recipes and tips for eating on a budget.

These are great initiatives and we need more of them. But above all, we need to shift our food culture, so that the positive mentality of people like Julie – the belief that things can change for the better – really takes hold.

Some will always argue that the responsibility for change is entirely a personal one. Only you can decide what you put in your mouth, right? But making these films about Britain’s obesity crisis and spending time with those most affected by it, I’m convinced that a culture of blaming and shaming helps no one and completely misses the point.

We haven’t turned into a nation of lazy, greedy people in a single generation. Human nature hasn’t suddenly transformed in 30 years. That’s not how evolution works. Business, on the other hand, evolves at a terrifying rate. And the business of designing and selling mass-produced food has rapidly outstripped our ability to defend ourselves against it.

There’s an arms race going on between big food brands competing for our appetite, and we are ultimately the cannon fodder. The fact that two-thirds of us are now overweight proves this is not a problem of

WE ARE CANNON FODDER AS THE BIG FOOD BRANDS BATTLE FOR OUR APPETITE