Obesity: Low-fat Diet

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, first, I must congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, on securing this debate. Far more than that, I must pay tribute to her absolutely tireless efforts to raise the matters of diet, eating well and food waste. She has raised almost everything from what goes into our mouths to what does not and becomes food waste, and how to eat well and cheaply. She lives by the example—she has told us how much weight she lost—but in this House she has constantly emphasised the need for cooking skills. Nobody has done more in the last few years to raise the issue here than she has. I thoroughly agree with her. I cannot blame the public for their weariness with government food advice. There have been contradictions in that advice. There has been unclear and quite hard-to-follow advice. That is a recipe for confusion and people have just stopped listening.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, mentioned the Eatwell plate. I underline that to ask the Minister: did as much effort go into ensuring that the advice in the new Eatwell Guide is as sound as she would like? An awful lot of effort went into the redesign of the Eatwell plate. The knife and fork were taken away, apparently because her department thought that they did not resonate with the public. There are a lot of questions about the advice. When we talk about fats, for example, the new Eatwell Guide differentiates unsaturated oils, such as vegetable and olive oil and lower-fat spreads, from other foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar. That is because some fat is essential in a healthy balanced diet, but other foods high in fat, salt and sugar are really not healthy. They should be eaten much less often and in very small amounts. The size of the purple section on the Eatwell plate reflects the fact that oils and spreads are high in fat and contain lots of calories. That seems sound advice but, for all the reasons underlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, it is still confusing.

There is an underlying message, which is quite clear, about eating within your need for calories. It is usually about eating less. I would have to declare an interest here in that I probably should eat a bit less. I have to declare a second interest as a co-chair of the All-Party Food and Health Group and a third interest as a vineyard owner. I took greatly to heart the comments the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, made about glasses of wine. She is quite right that they contain calories, but on the other hand the Mediterranean diet, often held up before us as a very good example, contains some red wine. My husband had red wine recommended to him by his cardiologist as an alternative way of thinning his blood following a stent operation. It is back to what my mother said, which is that a little of what you fancy does you good—underlining “little”.

I turn for a moment to a point touched on by the National Obesity Forum in its very controversial report. The way the report came out was unfortunate, because the headlines that resulted were controversial, but that does not mean that everything in the report should be dismissed. The report accuses major public health bodies of colluding with the food industry. I do not know whether that is true but the NOF and the Public Health Collaboration have called for a “major overhaul” of current dietary guidelines. That advice is very sound.

I do not know where the line is drawn between collusion and allowing the food processing and retail industries to reformulate, including by using things that could not even be defined as food. This practice is clearly exposed in Joanna Blythman’s book, published last year, Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets, which shows just how important it is to debate this issue and the causes of obesity. She uncovers just how much of the seemingly more natural—but still processed—foods are clever products of the chemical industry. She has said:

“The pace of food engineering innovation means that newer, more complex manufactured food creations with ever more opaque modes of production are streaming onto the market every day”.

She explains how just about everything from your seemingly healthy option of granary farmhouse loaf or sliced egg salad sandwich has a slew of processes and ingredients for which our digestive systems just were not designed.

Just as the public learned to avoid E numbers and artificial ingredients, so the food industry has now learned to use innocuous-sounding ingredients that really belong in a chemistry lab, not a kitchen. Why does this matter? Have they been passed as safe? Given some of the research coming out now, it matters because we are paying the price with our health. For millennia, our digestive systems evolved to efficiently process vegetables, nuts, fruit, pulses, eggs and the occasional meat and dairy product. Suddenly, in the second half of the 20th century they came under assault.

The effect was explained earlier this year by Jenni Russell, writing in the Times, where she set out the work of the genetic epidemiologist Professor Spector of King’s College London. His work has been to do with the growing amount of evidence that the destruction of our gut bacteria by processed foods is the real enemy and could be behind the obesity crisis. In essence, précising his work, she said that something very curious happened in Britain in the mid-1980s. Obesity rates had scarcely shifted in the 20 years since records have been kept. They were more or less steady, but then rocketed overnight—not just here but around the world. Obesity almost trebled, and every age group was affected. Whether they were 16 or 60, people suddenly started getting fat.

Your Lordships could say that that was because people were sitting in front of the television much more and eating more and worse foods. I know that things such as corn syrup, which goes into so much food, are also implicated. The fact that our food is not the food that our digestive systems have learned to recognise over hundreds of years must have some bearing on this. Other work from around the world is just becoming evident. For example, Professor Chang in Berkeley, California, is exploring the connection between copper and fat metabolism. There are all sorts of things that we are just at the beginning of understanding. Although it is about eating less and taking more exercise, it is also about the fact that our current food system is fatally flawed, especially when it comes to our health, and obesity is the symptom of this. As Professor Tim Lang, who has been working on these issues for decades, says, there is a,

“need for a complete change of mind set to tackle these”,

issues,

“away from a productionist approach with its successes and subsequent problems”.

He outlines a new direction for food policy, building it around sustainable development, low-impact farming systems, diets and low energy use.

The debate about fat and obesity is incredibly important, but we must hold it in the right context. At the moment, it is a bit like seeing someone suffering from a bad cut and having a debate as to whether to put on a plaster or bandage or to sew it up. As a very short-term measure, we need to think about the plaster, but in the long term we need to be able to buy and prepare food that contributes to our health rather than undermines it. That means seasonal, local and less processed food, with more pulses—the noble Baroness will agree with that—more vegetables and more cooking skills taught in schools. What are the Government doing to ensure that all schools receive nutritional guidelines and that academies and free schools are no longer excluded—and that A-level cooking will be part of the curriculum, because I understand that it is being dropped?