Childhood Obesity

Diane Abbott Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Westminster Hall

[David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) on securing this crucial debate, and my other hon. Friends who have spoken.

I was in the Mall on Friday for what everybody agreed was a most wonderful royal wedding. However, my heart sank when I saw a very large, hugely overweight man hanging on to a railing for dear life and panting. He may have had a problem caused by steroids or something else, but it is most likely that he was obese. I thought how unhappy he must be with his life—my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) touched on the issue of happiness. One point we must get across to people who are obese is that they can be much happier if they overcome obesity.

My hon. Friends have made many points, but I want to touch on three issues. First, I want to look at the Change4Life programme and the changes that the Minister proposes to make. Secondly, I would like to say something about the impact of high-energy drinks that contain a lot of sugar and caffeine. Thirdly, I will speak about sizes of portions and clothes.

I will start by referring to the October 2007 Government report, “Tackling Obesities: Future Choices”, on what the human body is designed to do. It points out, with classic understatement, that our biological system is,

“not well adapted to a changing world, where the pace of technological progress and lifestyle change has outstripped that of human evolution.”

Many years ago in this Chamber—the old Grand Committee Room—I listened to a debate one evening, instigated by the food and health forum, that I have never forgotten. The speaker was a professor of nutrition and he said, “Look, in a nutshell, if you want to stay healthy, remember that we have not really evolved since the stone age; we are essentially stone-age people in the 20th century.” He said that if we want to be healthy, we should live like stone-age people. We should walk most of the time and run occasionally, eat berries and vegetables in season, catch fish when possible, and eat meat rarely. I was struck by that speech. Generally, our health problems arrive when we deviate from that simple model.

Last week, The Daily Telegraph looked at the problem of obesity as it affects parents. It pointed out that British men are among the fattest in Europe and that according to the World Health Organisation, we do less exercise as a nation than almost every other country in the world. In another article, I read that the World Health Organisation believes that in the regions of Europe, the east Mediterranean and the Americas, over 50% of women are overweight.

We have an enormous problem. All my hon. Friends have drawn on statistics. We tend to follow what happens in America, so we should be aware of what is happening in that country, where the problem is greater—obesity rates are 36% among women and 32% among men. The number of obese men in England has doubled since 1993, and the number of obese women has risen by half.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) referred eloquently to issues in his constituency, but in my constituency we do not have the problems that affect many others. For example, the prevalence of obesity among reception-age children in the east midlands is just under 10%, and for year six children by region it is 18%. In Hinckley and Bosworth, the figures are smaller at just over 7% and under 16% respectively. Those are still enormous figures, however, and we must put that in the context of my original point about happiness. How many of those children are very unhappy with their lives?

The Minister inherited the Change4Life programme from the previous Government and I hope she will say a few things about the changes that she proposes to make. As I understand it, the funding for that programme is to change and she will be looking for contributions from the food industry. That may be a good thing, but I would like reassurances that the food industry will not be driving the agenda. I know that she has already said that we will not legislate further to bring in a range of new standards, but I think the quid pro quo is that we must know that the food industry will be very supportive of measures that do exactly what has been suggested and ensure that we see a reduction in sugar. There is far too much sugar in cereal, for example. I suggest to my hon. Friends that if they really want a cereal that is sugar-free, they should make it themselves; it is not difficult. I look to the Minister for support on that issue.

My next point relates to high-energy drinks. I have not heard a word about high-energy drinks this morning; I think that that is a forgotten area. Children and adults are consuming drinks that have two or three times the recommended caffeine level and a very high sugar content. If people have far too much caffeine, they get behavioural disorders. It is very bad for them. It increases their heart rate, and there have been instances of children going to hospital in such circumstances. It is extremely dangerous.

I recommend that the Minister look at the research conducted by Johns Hopkins university, which concluded that energy drinks should be labelled with highly visible health warnings aimed at young people. I will not quote from the study extensively, but it based its recommendations on research that discovered that certain drinks contained as much as 14 times more caffeine than the average can of cola. That is the same as drinking seven cups of coffee.

While we are on the subject of coffee, is it not extraordinary that we are now being invited by coffee shops to drink half-pint mugs of coffee? Have we taken leave of our senses? Have we all gone mad? If I stop for a cup of coffee with a friend, I often order the smallest cup of coffee and split it into two mugs because it is too much. In the 19th century, coffee cups were tiny. That is another issue that we must address.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Drinking half a pint of coffee would be one thing. Is not the problem with coffee shops that often people are also drinking coffee with cream, sugar and additives? Sometimes with these half-pint cups of coffee, people would get fewer calories in an ordinary meal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) on calling this very important debate. I also congratulate you, Ms Dorries. I am sure that you have chaired many debates, but this is the first time that I have spoken under your distinguished chairmanship.

When we discuss childhood obesity, we should be clear that we are talking not about how children look but about how they feel, because one of the problems with debates about body size is that they can have an element of judgmentalism, which makes the issue more difficult and emotional for people. I think that we can all agree, as a Chamber, that everyone’s child is loveable and everyone’s child is beautiful. We do not want to get into being judgmental about body size, because the other side of the coin from childhood obesity is childhood eating disorders—particularly among girls, but also, increasingly, among boys.

I want to touch on the introductory remarks made by the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth about the origins of childhood obesity. She talked about parenting. I do not disagree with anything that she said, but let us stand back and realise that we live in a world that has changed since the days when Nye Bevan set up the national health service. At that time, fewer than one in 10 households had a television and fewer than a third owned a car. Nowadays, 98% of households have at least one television, if not two or three, and 19.5 million households own a car.

When the NHS was set up, the only form of processed food available was spam. Now, there is an infinite variety of processed food; it is possible to eat it three times a day, with all the problems of trans fats, added sugar and so on that that involves. It is also the case that when the NHS was set up, many more people did manual labour. We are looking at a world that has changed. It is not just that people are making different personal choices; they live in a much less mobile, much less active, much more sedentary world.

When I was a child, I was not as sporty as some of the Government Members present, but in the summer holidays I would have my breakfast and then go out and play all day. Children played out all day. Their parents did not worry about where they were; they just knew that they were playing out. Children played down back alleys and in other people’s gardens. We might or might not come home for lunch, but we came home for tea. I am a parent myself—my son is now 19—and I would not have dreamt of letting him play out on the streets of London. Whereas parents 30 or 40 years ago thought nothing of letting their children play out unsupervised, nowadays parents feel much happier if their children are at home watching television or playing a computer game. They think that they are being good parents and they are certainly less fearful parents.

When I was a child, children routinely walked to school. Now, I see children driven to school over much shorter distances than I used to cover when I walked to school. Again, those parents think that they are being good parents. Perhaps my family was not as grand as those of some hon. Members, but when I was a child, we always sat down for a family meal together. We waited for my father to come home from work and we all sat down and ate as a family. There was not the snacking that my son routinely did when he was at home. Our world is very different from Nye Bevan’s.

Even over the past 20 or 30 years, however, the world has changed. People’s notions of what it means to be a good parent have been attenuated, certainly in big cities, although things may be different in Shropshire and more rural areas. In big cities, people think being a good parent means having their child safely at home. They think it means that their child is never hungry and that there is always food in the fridge to feed them. They think it means that they must feed their child the most heavily advertised and expensive products. The issue is not, therefore, just one of individual choices; we live in a changing society with changing ideas about parenthood.

Altogether, this is a more sedentary and materialistic society. As Members have said, even if children are active at school, that activity will stop when they leave. That is particularly true of girls. There are also the attractions of television. When I was a child, there was no daytime television, so children could not sit at home in the daytime watching television. We were out in the garden, on the swing or up the park; we were chasing people up and down, shouting at our brother and doing all the things that helped us work off the calories bit by bit.

We live in a changed world, which is part of the reason why we have seen a gradual increase in children leading more sedentary lifestyles, eating more processed food and snacking on processed food between meals. When I was a child, the only form of fast food was fish and chips or food from a Wimpy bar. I remember begging my father to take me to a Wimpy bar, which I thought was the height of sophistication and glamour. There was no question of children routinely stopping off at some fast-food shop on the way home from school or having fast food between meals; we lived in a very different world.

What can the Government do in a world that has changed and become commodified—one in which the average British child recognises nearly 400 brand names? We have touched on a number of issues that I am interested to hear the Minister talk about. In particular, there is the issue of what happens in school. As we have heard, one important thing is that children can learn to cook in school and can be taught about good nutrition. There is also the issue of the sort of school meals that are made available. There was some resistance to Jamie Oliver-type school meals, particularly when they were introduced at secondary school level, but introducing children to healthy food at primary school will set up habits that see them through life.

There is also the issue of food labelling. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about traffic-light labelling, which is the easiest for mothers in places such as Hackney to understand. Mothers there are not going to read a label or to try to do the sums to work out how many calories there are in a packet of food if there are 60 calories per 100 grams. However, a traffic-light label in red, yellow and green is easy for them to understand.

I will be interested to hear the Minister explain how the commissioning model of health care in public health will engage with these issues. I am particularly interested to hear what she says about the extent to which Change4Life is working with the food industry. As one Member said, we might as well have the Silk Cut marathon, but I have an open mind and I am waiting to hear what the Minister has to say.

Childhood obesity is about how our children feel, not how they look. If somebody was a little chubby when I was a child, people used to say, “Oh, she’ll grow out of it,” but 70% of obese children stay obese well into adult life, with all the outcomes we are so familiar with in terms of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and blood pressure.

The striking thing about child obesity in 2011 is the extent to which it is a problem of poverty in the United Kingdom and the United States. Historically, it and the gout that went with it were problems that rich people had. Increasingly, however, heroes in popular culture in America and elsewhere are strikingly obese, which never used to be the case. Obesity is a problem of poverty; it is about a lack of information and a lack of access to a healthy diet.

We have heard about the increase in the numbers and about the real danger that significant numbers of today’s children will live shorter lives than their parents and spend their lives in poor health. We as a political class, and the Government, cannot simply leave childhood obesity as a matter of parental or children’s choice. Of course, choice is a big issue, but we have to set out a policy framework, whether it relates to schools, labelling or schemes such as Change4Life.

We have to set out a policy framework that makes things easier for parents, who are under more pressure than ever from commodification and materialism, and who are more frightened than ever about simply letting their children out to play. We have to set out a policy framework that makes it easier for parents, including Members of the House, to make the right decisions and to determine not only how their children look now, but how their health will be in years to come.