Tackling Obesity

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett), and I agree with pretty much everything that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) has just said as well. In July 2020, the House of Lords produced an excellent Select Committee report, “Hungry for change: fixing the failures in food”, which is pretty shocking. We are one of the most overweight nations in Europe, and that is not an accident, because our diet is pretty appalling. Page 19 of that report says:

“In the UK, more than half (50.7%) of all total dietary energy from purchases came from highly processed foods, compared to only 10.2% in Portugal and 13.4% in Italy.”

Our diets are so much worse than those of our fellow European nations. We are bombarded with advertising for unhealthy food. In 2017, £300 million was spent on the advertising of less healthy foods, compared with only £16 million a day on fruit and vegetables. We are doing really badly at even getting our five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Only 31% of adults, and only 8% of teenagers, are achieving that; parents in the room will recognise that challenge.

All these figures are worst for the poorest members of our society. I commend The Times on its excellent health commission report and on some of its recommendations. It thinks it is outrageous that some of these highly processed foods can have “natural” and “organic” on the front of the packaging. That is deceptive and misleading, and many of the big food producers have a lot to answer for. The Times says that all children should learn to cook properly and that those lessons should be inspected by Ofsted with as much rigour as maths and English. This matters. If people turn up to university able only to open a packet and put it in the microwave, they are probably not set for the most healthy life and it will probably cost them more as well.

Children are bombarded with these images. Bite Back, with which I have worked very closely, wants to get rid of the use of cartoon characters and other tactics that appeal to children, which hook our young people into unhealthy food. The Times also says that we should not have just environmental, social and governance for our businesses; it should be environmental, social, governance and health because employers can do their bit as well.

How do we know how many calories we are eating each day? I, as a man, am supposed to eat no more than 2,500 calories a day. For women, it is 2,000. How do we know? The signs in some of the restaurants are tiny. Let us make it easy for people to do the right thing. That is a generally quite a good strapline: make the right thing the easy and affordable thing to do. I salute my local markets in Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, which provide fresh fruit and veg and often at very good prices; I have to say that my supermarkets do so as well. We all know that exercise is important, but I have a little caveat on that: you cannot outrun a bad diet, but exercise is always brilliant for all of us and we should all do more of it.

It was great to hear the speech from the Liberal Democrats because this is not a nanny state, entirely private matter. This is why: children don’t get to choose what they eat. They get fed what their parents give them; what we feed our children really matters. We have to be honest; there is limited supply in the NHS for all of us, so if other people eat really bad food, that means that NHS capacity is being taken up with dealing with type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart problems and other issues. We all have a stake in us all eating well, and I hope we can combine on that issue.