Food: Regulation and Guidance

My Lords, let me join the queue to congratulate my noble friend Lord Whitty on initiating this debate, the importance of which is much greater than might be indicated by the paucity of noble Lords who are contributing to it. About 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Runaway World. Its theme was that, in a global industrialised order, we have unleashed forces that we are losing our capacity to control. What is happening to world food production and consumption and their relationship to patterns of health is one example of that. Today the purchase and therefore the consumption of food have become increasingly isolated from food production. It is important to recognise that this is a recent development. It dates back only about 50 years—even later than the noble Lord suggested—in the industrial countries, while it is an ongoing process in developing countries. The key retail entity in producing this separation, which I argue is structural and underlies many of the dilemmas that noble Lords have talked about, is the supermarket, as with the advent of supermarkets food becomes completely removed from the vagaries of the climate, the seasons and localities. The supermarket also offers the consumer an abundance of products on a scale completely unknown before in history. As this separation between the production and consumption of food becomes radicalised, advertising and marketing become the primary vehicles of information about food—again, a crucial difference from the past. The modern food industry has been a vehicle of plenty for many; at the same time, it has helped to create an entirely new relationship between food and health. I am not in the business of self-promotion, but I also wrote quite a lot about anorexia and bulimia a few years ago. Why do people starve themselves to death in an era when we have far more food than we can possibly consume? I will not bore noble Lords with the answer, but it is directly bound up with the rise of supermarkets. Once you have that rise, food is no longer determined by what happens locally. There is a certain sense in which we all have to be on a diet in relation to how we want to be. The pressures that exist on young women to follow a certain bodily image become conjoined to that. Anorexia was virtually unknown in history before—it was known only in the activities of a few female saints—but now it and its less radical versions affect large swathes of the female population across the world. The other side of this, which has already been mentioned, is the rise of obesity. I will concentrate on this, hoping that my remarks will slot in nicely with what was said previously. For thousands of years, obesity was rarely seen. It existed only among a tiny proportion of the very rich. In complete contrast, in 1997 the World Health Organisation formally recognised obesity as a global epidemic running out of control. One billion adults in the world are clinically obese or radically overweight. The most striking increase—already noted, I think—is among children and adolescents. The US and Mexico have the highest overall rates of obesity at roughly 30 per cent and 25 per cent of their populations. The UK is in an unenviable third place at 24 per cent. Some noble Lords might have seen reports in the newspapers of what happened in Australia, where they had to widen the entrances to crematoria because the coffins had got so huge that they could not get them in. This story is apparently not apocryphal. Contrary to what is often argued, recent studies show quite conclusively that our lives are not more sedentary than was true three or four decades ago. The epidemic of obesity is almost all the result of dietary changes. Of course, we would be foolish just to blame the food and drug industries for this, but their contribution undeniably has been huge. It is a contribution that the food companies are starting to recognise and trying to do something about. Fast-food manufacturers are quick to point out the changes which have been made over the past few years, some voluntary and others prompted by regulation. We have many examples from different countries. In the United States, for example, Pepsi, Kraft, Kellogg and others have promoted what they call a Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation—a sort of voluntary, sign-up organisation. There is not a lot of rigorous regulation in the United States, certainly not at a federal level. Nestlé and similar companies are pursuing parallel lines in the UK and Europe. Yet that is on nowhere near the scale needed. My opening remarks were due to show that this problem is structural. It is deep, global and unparalleled in previous history. It is perfectly obvious that marginal measures will not serve to control it. The food industry, especially its fast-food sectors, pays back no more than a tiny proportion of the total social costs it creates. In this country, it has been calculated to be £17 billion a year that is needed to treat obesity and obesity-related illnesses. Some medical specialists say that the prevalence of obesity alone in countries such as this one and the United States will overwhelm health services within 10 to 15 years, because of the associated problems of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and many other serious medical consequences that ensue. That is a sort of epidemic running out of control. The knock-on costs are completely out of proportion to the existing regulation of the fast-food industry. The Chief Medical Officer in the UK recently spoke of a public health time bomb, which is completely correct. Even having listened to the interesting contributions of other noble Lords, I propose that if we look at this as a deep structural issue with massive social and medical consequences, it is not enough just to tinker at the edges—whatever resistance one might get from the food industry. I shall make three comments on this to which I would like the Minister to respond. First, we should contemplate far more stringent controls on junk-food advertising to children than exist at the moment. We have to tackle the issues of advertising not just in the orthodox media but, I am afraid, on the internet. Noble Lords will know that there has been a certain advance of control in this country and elsewhere on advertising to children, but many companies have then simply turned to the internet as a vehicle for promoting the same thing. One thing that is well known is that children—and some adults too—find it difficult to discriminate between advertising and other messages in television and other programmes, so they are very vulnerable to those messages. We are not really near to controlling with the rigour that we need. There are some voluntary no-child marketing strategies, which enlightened companies have followed, and I commend them. In this country they include, for example, Mars and Cadbury—although that is pretty recent—but again it is nowhere near enough just to rely on that. In Norway and Sweden, all marketing to children under 12 is banned. Why should we not do the same in this country? Secondly, the issue of trans fats has quite rightly been raised. I will not go over what the noble Lord said so eloquently and knowledgeably. However, research has shown that trans fats are an independent factor in weight gain. They contribute in other ways, which were noted, because of their use in frying and many other things that produce weight gain, but there is evidence that they independently contribute to it quite apart from how they are used in relation to other aspects of food. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned that Denmark, Switzerland, New York and California have banned trans fats. Denmark is the most interesting example; it was the pioneer, and because it goes back some way we have more research on Denmark than on the other cases. The research shows amazing health benefits from that ban, with a 20 per cent reduction in some kinds of illnesses directly related to trans fats. Why can we not follow the Danish example in this country and simply ban trans fats? My third point has not been mentioned by noble Lords, but in my view it is really crucial. Even though it is politically very problematic, we need a tax-based approach to play a part in regulating the food industries, specifically the fast-food industry. That is because, to repeat the point, the fast-food industry is creating social and medical consequences of a massive kind and not contributing to paying for those consequences. We—the rest of us—have to pay for those consequences. That is not morally right and not a situation that one should simply accept, so it is right that extra taxes should be added to food and drink which are high in fat, sugar and salt. The evidence that these foods do as much damage as tobacco and alcohol is strong. Tobacco and alcohol are very highly taxed, and quite rightly so. Researchers at Oxford have developed three models for the potential use of taxation to improve public health, which in the UK they calculate will save upwards of 5,000 lives a year, if they are implemented. Even though there is always fierce resistance from the fast-food industry, the tax-based approach has just as much legitimacy as it does in the case of the tobacco and alcohol industries. The fast-food industry will increasingly face the sort of litigation that has driven such regulation in those industries, so it is not completely against the interests of the fast-food companies to participate in accepting an increased tax-based regime, or at least look at the possibility doing so. That would not only help to limit the intake of noxious foods that produce such tremendous medical problems; it would also make it possible for the food industry to pay back some of the social costs that it creates. At the moment, it pays back virtually none of these costs. Finally, I ask what the Minister thinks about the FSA, and what will happen to food regulation more generically.