Tackling Obesity

Maggie Throup Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) on securing this debate. Tackling obesity is preventing ill health; I want to make it very clear that it is not nanny state, because good health provides choices.

We are already looking at these issues through the way we are tackling smoking, and I commend my right hon. Friend the Minister for her proposed actions on that. Smoking is an addiction, and obesity is becoming an addiction—an addiction to food high in fat, salt or sugar. We need similar, world-leading action to tackle obesity. The Obesity Health Alliance has said that obesity is the new smoking.

We have already heard that 30% of adults are obese, and 25% of children starting school are either obese or overweight, so we need to take serious action. The food giants are making us addicted to food that is high in fat, salt and sugar, so we need to tackle that in the same way we are tackling smoking.

Obesity causes cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The reason the food giants are spending huge amounts on advertising chocolate, crisps, biscuits and ice cream—much of which is marketed at children—is that those products make them huge amounts of profit. I am not against profit, but I am when it comes at the expense of people’s health, and particularly the health of our children.

A recent study by the University of Oxford shows that, for seven of the top 10 global food manufacturers, two thirds of their food and drink sales in Britain came from unhealthy foods. In 2022, it was estimated that the biggest manufacturers spent £55 million on online adverts for food and drink products associated with childhood obesity. I have no doubt that that did not decrease in 2023, and I do not think it will decrease this year either.

In addition to the marketing, the packaging of unhealthy food is designed to appeal to children, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) implied. In a way, the issue is similar to the way disposable vapes are marketed to children. That is another issue my right hon. Friend the Minister is tackling, but we need to sort out the way unhealthy foods are marketed to children too. Children and young people do not ask to be bombarded with the ads they see time and time again, yet they are being bombarded—they cannot escape them at all. That is why Government action is needed, and needed now. I ask my right hon. Friend the Minister to update the House on the progress being made to implement the measures in section 172 of, and schedule 18 to, the Health and Care Act 2022 on the advertising of less healthy food and drink and to ensure that we are on schedule to deliver those messages.

Going back a number of years, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) mentioned, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced the soft drinks industry levy. People at the time said it would not work, but it has; it has cut huge amounts of sugar out of soft drinks across the board. We need to look at how we replicate that measure for other foodstuffs. I am proud that I was a member of the Health and Social Care Committee when it asked for it to be put in place. It is one of the Committee’s great achievements, and we can do even more. We need to apply that type of measure across food and drink production to incentivise healthier food and drink. Manufacturers and retailers want a level playing field, so it is important that we do that.

In conclusion, we need to tackle obesity, which the Government first identified as a priority in the early 1990s in the “Health of the Nation” White Paper. Over 30 years on, we are still only talking about tackling obesity. The health of our nation is running out of time. We need action, and we need it now.