Top TV doctor warns big food companies are ‘feeding our kids to death’ with mealtime favourites parents wrongly think are healthy
British children are being ‘fed to death’ on ultra-processed foods that are engineered to cause harm, MPs have been warned.
Professor Chris van Tulleken, a TV doctor and global health expert, said weak regulation allows firms to effectively dupe parents into thinking junk food is healthy.
It means kids may end up eating too many calories even if they are consuming products with green ‘traffic light’ nutrition labels on the packaging.
This is causing them to gain weight and fuelling the nation’s ‘obesity pandemic’, he added.
Giving evidence to the Commons health and social care committee, Professor van Tulleken said the crisis is being driven by ‘commercial interests’ at the expense of people’s health.
He highlighted that a typical diet seen as ‘healthy’ – which could include baked beans, fish fingers, whole grain bread, yoghurt and breakfast cereal – would lead to someone eating more than the recommended daily level of calories.
Pulling the items out of a shopping bag under his table, he added: ‘Everything about the packaging and the marketing and the regulations says this is healthy – there is not one red traffic light on any of these things, and none of these are HFSS (high in fat, salt or sugar), but you will definitely eat too many calories if you eat this kind of food.
‘It is engineered so that you cannot eat to appetite, it’s engineered very specifically and cleverly to bypass appetite.
Chris van Tulleken, professor of global health at University College London and a presenter of BBC show Operation Ouch, gives evidence to the Commons health and social care committee
‘Even if you stuck to your calories, you would still end up eating massively more salt, sugar and saturated fat than is recommended.’
He went on: ‘So when we talk about personal responsibility as a parent, how do you go into a shop and go: “Well, all of this stuff says it’s healthy – there is no warning level, there is no marketing restriction, there is a monkey on the box and it says it supports my family’s health”?
‘How can someone have personal responsibility? This is our national diet. I would say at the moment, there is no functional regulation that captures this.
‘I have no idea how someone living with little money and limited educational resources would tell that this was unhealthy.
‘Everything about it says it’s healthy.’
Professor van Tulleken, professor of global health at University College London and a presenter of BBC show Operation Ouch, said products could be labelled and taxed in a way that shifts people’s shopping habits to a ‘much healthier diet’.
It comes after new figures revealed that one in 10 (10.5 per cent) children in the first year of primary school in England is obese.
This rises to 22.2 per cent of children in year 6, according to data from the National Child Measurement Programme.
Chris van Tulleken, professor of global health at University College London and a presenter of BBC show Operation Ouch, gives evidence to the Commons health and social care committee
Professor van Tulleken said the nation had become ‘numb’ to these figures.
He called for cartoon characters to be stripped from packs of popular children’s food and urged governments to make stricter regulations around unhealthy items.
He also called for food charities and policy officials to sever ties with the food industry ‘that deliberately market the food that is causing the crisis that we’ve seen grow over the last 30 years’.
‘The pandemic of obesity and other diet-related diseases are driven by commercial incentives,’ he said.
And he told MPs: ‘The problem of diet-related disease is commercially driven – so big food companies are feeding our kids and our adults ultimately to death, and they know they’re doing it, and they’re engineering foods that they know are harmful, and they’re marketing those foods directly to the most vulnerable kids.
‘We have food industry scientists on and off the record who say we deliberately engineer food to be consumed to excess.’
Professor van Tulleken said that the reason there is not a clear definition of ‘unhealthy food’ is because of ‘decades of industry interference, of food corporation interference’.
He called for the food industry to be ‘excluded from the room’, adding: ‘We can define unhealthy food, I think using much tighter rules around salt, fat, sugar and calories.’
‘We don’t need more research to have really strong policy action,’ he told MPs.
He highlighted how 95 per cent of ultra processed food in the UK are high in salt, fat, sugar or calories.
‘We have a deeply unjust food system where people are essentially forced to eat unhealthy food,’ he said.
