The Guardian view on childhood obesity: forget small steps, tackle big food

We are in a global health crisis, and it grows worse by the year. By 2030 almost half the world’s population will be overweight or obese if current trends continue, the World Health Organization has warned. There are already 124 million obese children: a more than tenfold increase in four decades. More than a million of these live in the UK, which has the worst obesity rates in western Europe. Four in five will grow up to be obese adults; and the leader of the UK’s paediatric body warns that this will cost them 10 to 20 years of healthy life.

This is a social problem, both in cause and consequence. The chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has warned that obesity could bankrupt the health service. Yet the government’s response has been as modest and inadequate as these figures are shocking. Medical experts describe its childhood obesity strategy as weak, embarrassing and even insulting. Though it inherited a tax on sugary drinks – which comes into force this year – from George Osborne, it rowed back from restrictions on price-cutting promotions and junk food marketing or advertising. Instead, the strategy relies heavily on measures such as school activity programmes. [...]

But one factor leaps out: greed. The problem is not gluttony by a generation of Augustus Gloops but the avarice of the Willy Wonkas who press junk food on consumers, then profess surprise at the results. The tactics of big food are, as the global health organisation Vital Strategies points out in its report Fool Me Twice, strikingly similar to those of big tobacco over the years. But big food has the advantage that everyone needs to eat, while no one needs to smoke, and that a biscuit does not damage health as a cigarette does. Thus, these companies tell us that we should not restrict individual freedom; that it is up to people to show self-discipline; and that their products are fine as occasional indulgences. Never mind that they present family-size packs as if they are suitable for individuals (nor that highly processed foods, packed with salt and sugar, tend to be cheaper to produce, store and deliver – as well as being habit-forming).

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