Here’s a fundamental truth about the food industry: it is really hard to get people to eat what you want them to. Rarely is this better evidenced than in the development of health-related food policy.
In the UK, there have been 689 policies and strategies to reduce obesity since the 1990s, yet rates have continued to climb. It is not action on obesity that is lacking, just success.
Such a dismal record has not diminished the enthusiasm of campaigners, lobbyists and minor celebrities. The assumption is that we have not cracked down hard enough, have not targeted the right things, or that a few extra tweaks will push us over some magical tipping point.
It is striking that policy recommendations rarely show much innovation. Front-of-pack labelling. Taxation. Advertising bans. Rationing. Education. The complete dismantling of capitalism.
It is a mix of stuff that hasn’t worked in the past, and things that are unpalatable in a free society. Are Kit Kats too cheap? Would people accept limits on the amount of chocolate they can buy? Would replacing traffic lights with Chilean-style black warning labels shift the dial? Should we use a UPF model rather than nutrient profiles?
The answer to all those questions is almost certainly no. In the case of Chilean warning labels, obesity rates in Chile have steadily risen since their introduction. Brazil created guidelines based on the ultra-processed food model in 2014, and there has been no discernible impact on dietary health. UK sugar taxes have not shifted BMI. If we are measuring obesity policies on their actual impact on obesity, these are not the way forward.
Food classification
At the heart of this failure is the fundamentally flawed idea that we can, or indeed should, classify all foods as good or bad. UPF or not. HFSS or not. High sugar or not. This binary thinking is dangerous, ineffective and creates a host of unintended consequences.
Foods will be reformulated to cluster just below cut-off points. There will never be an incentive to improve the least healthy options. And for those with a problematic relationship with food, such black-and-white thinking can cause great harm.
There’s another problem: policymakers and campaigners are utterly clueless when it comes to changing people’s food behaviour. Brands and retailers are the masters of that dark art, and so it should be their responsibility to create change. This might be unsettling for those who instinctively want to limit their power, but change will never happen without putting brands and retailers in the driving seat.
Good food policy probably looks like mandatory brand and retailer targets based on sales-weighted averages, such as those recently proposed by Nesta. Rather than incentivising the movement of a few options over an arbitrary line, sales-weighted averages would measure and reward all nutrition improvements. Combined with the new generation of obesity drug treatments, this sort of policy might just start to actually move the dial.
It will be hard to garner enthusiasm. Sales-weighted averages don’t create dramatic headlines, have few celebrity advocates and will never sell popular diet books. But if campaigners are interested in real change, as opposed to column inches in the Daily Mail, then these are the sorts of policies they should be backing.
Failing that, I’d be up for a bit of dismantling capitalism, although that hasn’t worked too well for our food supply in the past.
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