Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to communicate the importance of a healthy and balanced diet to the general public.

The Government supports behaviour change through the Eatwell guide, catering guidance, its social marketing campaigns, the reduction and reformulation programme and providing advice to the consumer through the National Health Service website to promote making the healthier choice, the easiest choice.

We published ‘Tackling obesity: empowering adults and children to live healthier lives’ on 27 July. This strategy demonstrates an overarching campaign to reduce obesity, takes forward actions from previous chapters of the childhood obesity plan and sets our measures to get the nation fit and healthy, protect against COVID-19 and protect the NHS. The strategy is available at the following link:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/tackling-obesity-government-strategy/tackling-obesity-empowering-adults-and-children-to-live-healthier-lives

Public Health England also launched Better Health, a campaign which helps people to make healthier choices by providing the most up to date evidence based healthy eating and physical activity advice including calorie intakes, portions of fruit and vegetables and recommended physical activity levels. As well as teaching skills to prevent weight gain and providing helpful tools like balanced recipes and the Food Scanner app which helps shoppers make healthier product choices, Better Health also supports people who wish to lose weight.