People Need Cheap Healthy Meals Not Higher Food Bills

‘We will only tackle obesity by encouraging responsibility’

- Ross Clark

IT is not hard to see why the Government thought it needed a National Food Strategy, published yesterday. Even before the pandemic, figures showed ab sad picture of a nation eating itself to unhealthy lives and early deaths. In 2018/19 there were 11,117 hospital admissions directly related to obesity and 876,000 admissions where obesity was a factor.

It is hard to recognize today’s Britain from 1960s photographs not just because the vehicles and buildings have changed but because the people have ballooned. In 2018/19, 67 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women were overweight or obese. More worrying is that 20 per cent of kids in the last year of junior school were obese.

And this was before the sedentary lifestyles were forced on us by the lockdown. At the same time, obesity proved to be a big factor in Covid deaths. According to one study, people with a body mass index (BMI) of between 35 and 40 had a 40 per cent greater chance of dying from the disease, while those with a BMI of over 40 had a 90 per cent greater chance of dying.

How tempting, then, to think we need the Government to step in and change our diets.