Children and Young People: Obesity

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for initiating this debate. I declare my interest in the register as president of the British Dietetic Association, which is the TUC-affiliated union that organises the 10,000 dieticians who work mainly in the National Health Service, and which is looking forward to meeting the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, whom it has invited to meet it.

I mention in passing that the biggest problem faced by dieticians is malnutrition among the elderly, a group that is often forgotten, but we welcome the government strategy on childhood obesity, published in August 2016, particularly the action to reduce sugar intake, such as the recently introduced sugar tax, and the guidance on the reformulation of high-sugar foods and calorie-reduction programmes.

I do not want to rain on the parade, as they say, but I would like to add a bit of context to the debate. The numbers are often misinterpreted. We often hear the fact that 65% of men and 58% of women are overweight or obese. That is because we like to confuse “overweight” and “obese”. They are two very different things. Only 27% of those people actually have a BMI in excess of 30—and, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl, will tell you, it is your weight, not your BMI, that matters anyway. But it is also notable that of the children who were obese, 48% of their mothers and 43% of their fathers said that their child was “about the right weight”, so it is not necessarily identified by the carers that they are obese.

I would like next to mention something from the Minister’s own department. The Minister has had a varied ride at my hands but tonight he might actually be pleased because in 2016, his department produced and published a study done by the Office for National Statistics. I am very fond of the Office for National Statistics, which often comes out with things that are rather controversial but generally held to be true. Let me read what it had to say about childhood obesity. It said:

“Compared with the general increase in childhood obesity from 1995 to 2005, the obesity rate has subsequently levelled off. The prevalence of childhood obesity has varied little in recent years. This is consistent with international evidence that childhood obesity rates in developed countries are stabilising and that they may be declining”.


That is our Office for National Statistics, which generally gets it right. Even for parents, while there has been a gradual drift upwards, it said that,

“the trajectory of overweight and obesity has plateaued, as there has not been a statistically significant increase since 2010”.

Those are ONS figures in an ONS report published by the Minister’s own department, so I am just saying that we need to keep it in context.

That does not mean to say that we do nothing because clearly there are problems and we need to address them. In particular, and I rely on the British Dietetic Association for this as my own family experience is somewhat out of date, there is the promotion of breast-feeding. Dieticians have much evidence that this has a protective effect against obesity and cardiovascular disease in later life; therefore, the BDA strongly recommends that HMG’s obesity strategy should include initiatives to promote and encourage breast-feeding. I am sure that that is correct.

We also look for strong controls on the promotion, marketing and advertising of unhealthy food and drink, with particular attention given to limiting price promotions. These are apparently much more prevalent in the UK than in other European countries. Public Health England has shown that price promotions increase the amount that people buy by around 20%, and the amount of sugar purchased as part of these foods by around 6%. There is also a school of thought, supported by the BDA, that advertising should be restricted until after the 9 pm watershed. I take the point about leaving the EU but Scandinavia has a pricing policy which basically forbids predatory pricing. In other words if something is 200 grams in weight, it should cost twice as much as something that weighs 100 grams and not one and a half times as much. That policy could be introduced.

There is no magic bullet in this area. There clearly is a strong link between poverty and obesity. Twice as many children in the lowest 20% are obese as in the highest 20% and we look to address this. What I am saying is that if we can keep the problem in perspective, we might find solutions. If we constantly look for high numbers that look good on the front of newspapers, the likelihood is that we will not solve the problem but go away, throw our hands up in horror and say, “It’s too big for us to do anything about”. Within reason, we have a chance of solving this problem and moving forward.