Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that the patterns of social engagement by young men about issues concerning (a) anabolic steroids and (b) image and performance enhancing drugs are captured as part of improving men's health literacy.

On 19 November 2025, to coincide with International Men’s Health Day, we published the first ever Men’s Health Strategy for England. The strategy includes tangible actions to improve access to healthcare, provide the right support to enable men to make healthier choices, develop healthy living and working conditions, foster strong social, community, and family networks, and address societal norms. It also considers how to prevent and tackle the biggest health problems affecting men of all ages, which include mental health and suicide prevention, respiratory illness, prostate cancer, and heart disease.

We are taking a range of actions to improve men’s health literacy. For example, our landmark partnership with the Premier League will bring together football clubs and the Government to improve health literacy, particularly around mental health and suicide prevention. We are also ensuring health literacy improvements are embedded at the community level, building the evidence base on heath literacy in men, and identifying ways to build media literacy skills in men to help them critically assess health information and protect against misinformation that harms health.

We will consider the impacts on young men in the implementation of the strategy. The strategy sets up a strong foundation for improving how we think and act on men's health and we will learn, iterate, and adapt as new challenges emerge. As a first step, we will work with the Men's Health Academic Network and the voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector to develop and publish a one-year-on report, highlighting the improvements made and where future efforts will need to be targeted.