Addiction to junk food costs UK £268bn a year

The growing addiction to unhealthy food costs the UK a "staggering" £268bn a year, far outstripping the whole NHS budget, the first ever research into the subject has found.

- Denis Campbell

Increasing consumption of foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar or have been highly processed is having a "devastating" impact on both human health and Britain's finances.

"Far from keeping us well, our current food system, with its undue deference to what is known colloquially as Big Food, is making us sick. The costs of trying to manage that sickness are rapidly becoming unpayable," the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission's (FFCC) report says.

The £268bn figure has emerged from the first academic research looking at the total costs associated with Britain's increasing consumption of food which, according to the government's system of assessing its nutritional quality, is deemed to be unhealthy.

Of that, £92bn is the combined price tag for the direct costs to the government from tackling the impacts of what the FFCC calls "Britain's unhealthy food system". It involves spending by the NHS (£67.5bn), social care (£14.3bn) and welfare (£10.1bn) systems on tackling diseases closely linked to diet, such as diabetes, heart problems and kidney disease, and their consequences.

The remainder comprises the indirect costs of lost productivity from people who are too sick to work because of diet-related illness (£116.5bn) and £60.4bn in "human costs", such as pain and early death.

"The £268bn cost is staggering. I was shocked by how high it was when I arrived at it," said Prof Tim Jackson, an economist at Surrey University, who undertook the research for the FFCC. But, he added: "£268bn is a very, very conservative estimate of these costs."