Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords it was a privilege to serve on the committee. I thank our chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, Professor Martin White, our clerk Stuart Stoner and the whole team. Of the many committee reports in which I have been involved, this one is unique. None has been so welcome and reported on outside this House yet received such a negative response from the Government.

We made several important recommendations for a comprehensive policy, but I want to focus most of my remarks on ultra-processed foods. Our report draws attention to the difficulties encountered by the concept and classification of UPFs, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, just said. We noted that some processed foods, particularly the ultra-processed ones, are more harmful than others, but it is hard to know which.

Buying food that is good for you is often difficult and requires time, especially for those on low incomes. Added to this, there is a huge amount of confusion and misinformation promulgated by the food manufacturers. Generally, the more healthy and good the packet tells you the food is, the more cautious you need to be.

Most food is processed to some degree; it is the amount of processing that is relevant to how much of a health risk it can be. What we as consumers need to know is the damage that that process can do to food. It can be used to include additives that are non-culinary ingredients, such as emulsifiers. One should try to avoid food with those in them, so reading the label is a necessity even if one does not understand what all those unintelligible values mean.

Processing can alter the palatability of foods. Many foods are processed to make them hyperpalatable, which encourages us to buy and eat more of them, but they are bad for us. Processing the food can also alter the energy intake of the food in question.

Understanding the combination of the effect of the additives, the palatability and the energy intake is critical to assessing the health risk. The ZOE science team, led by Professor Tim Spector, together with Dr Federica Amati, ZOE’s head nutritionist and nutrition topic lead at Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine, found that 38% of the foods they analysed were both energy-dense and hyperpalatable. This reinforces our call for clearer, more accessible information about making healthier choices when buying processed food.

So, my noble friend Lady Browning will welcome the news announced this morning of the development of ZOE’s processed food risk scale, which is currently being tested and validated. It is very good news for us consumers. It will help us navigate the often confusing landscape of processed and ultra-processed foods to better understand the health risks associated with their consumption. The plan for the future of this new tool is that by photographing the packet of food using an app, within seconds one will know whether there is no health risk or whether there is a low, medium or high risk. That will start to enable us consumers to choose a better diet.

Thank goodness for those in the private sector who are doing something to help, because the Government are doing very little. Nor are the food manufacturers. They did not want to be asked difficult questions by the committee, so they refused to attend. Ms Betts, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, responded to our reports by saying that if UPF or processing raised concerns,

“industry would of course act quickly”.

My response to her is, “Pull the other one: it’s got bells on”. Evidence there is aplenty, and there has been even more since the publication of our report. Most of the industry has done the bare minimum. Let there be no misunderstanding: the food manufacturers are in it for profit, and ultra-processed food is the source of the biggest profits. Like the tobacco industry, they will fight all the way to delay change, regardless of whatever damage is done to our health in the process.

The Minister tells us that a smoke-free UK is a pillar of the Government’s health mission to help people stay healthier for longer and forms part of their plan for change, focusing on the crucial role prevention can play in cutting waiting lists and making the NHS fit for the future. Our report records that:

“Obesity has been predicted to overtake smoking as the main preventable cause of cancer in women by 2043”.


The total annual economic cost to the UK of overweight and obesity is £98 billion. That is nearly 4% of GDP and about 350% more than tobacco costs us. If stopping smoking is a key pillar of the Government’s health mission, how much more important is a good, affordable diet and reducing obesity? That should be a tower of strength to the Government. The Secretary of State has abdicated the driver’s seat on the steamroller, which, when in opposition, he said he would drive over the food industry, which was blocking reforms. He is now the man busily waving the green flag at it. The Government are neglecting us all, but in particular pregnant women, infants and children.

Diets: Fat

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests. I am a member of the committee to which noble Lords have already referred and I have a problem in keeping my weight down, so it is a subject that has been of great interest to me and I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord McColl for introducing this debate.

One of the difficulties, perhaps the greatest difficulty, when we are discussing food and diet is the tendency now to use hyperbole and oversimplification in dealing with a very difficult, complex subject. Of course, the press loves hyperbole and simplification, because it increases sales, but it does not actually solve the problem of obesity.

From our report I take out two important factors. One is that obesity has overtaken tobacco as a risk factor for disability in England. The second is that the total cost of obesity is now calculated at £100 billion a year, equivalent to a tax rate of £400 per head. So, there is a lot to be gained by getting obesity under control.

When we talk about simplification, the word “fat” is an oversimplification. There are good fats and bad fats, as my noble friend Lord McColl said. Some fats are extremely important to us. They are a source of energy; they help vitamin absorption; and they provide fatty acids, particularly omega 3 and omega 6, which are essential for keeping our nervous and brain systems healthy. Indeed, fat can be used to help reduce the urgency for food. Sarah Berry, associate professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at King’s College, says:

“Fat makes us feel full for longer. It delays the rate at which our stomach empties food, which again helps us create that feeling of fullness. So, it also controls our blood sugar levels as well, so that we tend to consume less calories, potentially later in the day”.


The idea that one can solve this problem of obesity with weight-loss jabs and get people back to work, which the Prime Minister seems to think is a good idea, is very flawed. Trials of the drugs have shown that people need help as well as just taking the drug. Eligible people who will require support cannot access the support to achieve behavioural change. These drugs will not work for everyone; all the trials have shown that. I repeat that obesity is a complex issue and trying to solve it with an injection is a poor cure when prevention would be far better.

There is of course the question of obesity stigma in the workplace, which is a huge barrier to satisfactory employment and leads to poor well-being and burnout. On the barriers, it is not obesity alone that causes a person to be unemployed; there are many other problems.

When we talk about oversimplification, we must remember that diets and our bodies are very complex. New research is demonstrating the importance and relevance of our gut microbiome. It demonstrates that we need to eat over 30 different plants of different colours weekly, 30 grams of fibre a day and around 100 grams of protein a day. We need to stop eating foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, especially those that are ultra processed. There are other issues. We need to eat within a certain timeframe. All our daily consumption should be within a 12-hour period.

To pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, exercise is not the panacea. I was very sorry to hear Chris Whitty say that this was going to be the new solution to obesity; it is much more complex. Exercise can help on the fringes, but it is not the main solution. The main solution is eating a healthy, balanced, varied diet, but that is not what the Eatwell Guide tells us to do. I hope the Minister will look at our report where we analyse this very carefully, because we come up with some sensible solutions, including raising tax on people that produce the wrong food for us.