Drinks: Obesity

(asked on 30th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to limit (1) the size of servings of obesogenic drinks such as carbonated soft drinks, fruit juice, fruit-flavoured drinks and energy drinks, and (2) promotions encouraging customers to "size-up" servings at low cost.


Answered by
Lord Bethell Portrait
Lord Bethell
This question was answered on 20th July 2020

To ensure United Kingdom labelling remains effective for consumers, we will consider a range of measures to build on the success of our current ‘traffic light’ nutritional labelling scheme.

All sectors of the drinks industry have been challenged to reduce sugar levels in juice-based drinks by 5% by 2021. The reductions can be achieved through reducing the number of calories and/or portion size of products and shifting consumer purchasing towards lower or no added sugar products.

Public Health England oversees the voluntary sugar reduction and wider reformulation programme on behalf of the Government, as set out in all chapters of the childhood obesity plan and the 2019 Prevention Green Paper. We have seen some important successes including the average sugar content of drinks subject to the soft drinks industry levy decreasing by 28% between 2015 and 2018.

We will be setting out our responses to the consultations on restricting promotions of products high in fat, sugar and salt by location and by price, and calorie labelling in the out-of-home sector as soon as we can.

Reticulating Splines