Obesity: Food and Diet

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) on securing this hugely important debate.

When I was writing my maiden speech back in July, I did some research into my predecessors, as one does. It was fascinating to see that it had been nearly 120 years since the voters of Chelsea elected a non-Conservative MP. He was Mr Emslie John Horniman, lately of the Horniman museum. His father, Frederick Horniman, was an MP under Queen Victoria. I was thinking that Mr Horniman senior would find a lot of similarities between his time as an MP during the Victorian era and the job today. The main building is largely the same, although it was possibly even colder in those days; some of the rules and procedures are the same; and he would probably even find some familiar faces among colleagues in both Houses.

Thankfully, one of the big differences between Mr Horniman senior’s time and today would be the food. That is not just because the Victorians would not be enjoying the famous parliamentary jerk chicken, but because when it came to the food that people ate in Victorian times, the story was one of adulteration and contamination. Describing the Victorian history of adulteration and contamination of food, the US professor of history Anthony Wohl says:

“The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent chemist”.

If we had enjoyed a glass of beer here with Gladstone or Disraeli, we might also have been drinking strychnine and hallucinogens. With wine, we could have imbibed sulphate of copper. The mustard with our lunch would probably have come with added lead chromate. Our Gloucester cheese afterwards might well have owed its rosy hue to red lead. It is no wonder that indigestion cures in Victorian times were so popular.

Thank goodness things are so different today. Thank goodness we have food standards. Thank goodness we do not allow people to eat things that make them so ill—except that we do. Day in, day out, food manufacturers add substances to food that, on the scale at which they are eaten today, quite legally damage people’s health. Supermarkets promote them and sell them. As a result, obesity, type 2 diabetes and the many other medical problems to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud referred have become huge issues in this day and age.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. When the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) takes an intervention, he must be seated.

[John Glen]

The hon. Gentleman is making a thought-provoking observation, but does he acknowledge that in times past, the proportion of income that any individual, from whichever class, spent on food was considerably higher than it is today? If we are to get to the heart of the matter, we have to address the wider challenge of our society’s expectations of how much money we should spend on food. Does he not agree that we are addicted to cheap food?

[Ben Coleman]

The right hon. Member makes an excellent point that I will come to in a moment.

The additives that cause so much harm today have simpler names: sugar, salt and fats. In moderation, all of those are fine, but the problem is that they are being shoved into our food willy-nilly in an effort to preserve it and—on the right hon. Member’s point—to make it cheap, alongside making it more addictive by design. As a result, we have what the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee’s report rightly describes as a public health emergency. We now have one of the highest rates of obesity among high-income nations. Only tobacco shortens British lives more than poor diet.