A lot of coverage today of Boris's Damascene conversion on obesity (as revealed in this excellent @JGForsyth column thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-…). And at the risk of having my free-market membership card taken away, he's absolutely right.
Over the last year (for reasons explained in my pinned tweet) I've done a load of research on liver disease - fundraising, talking to doctors and policy experts. They told me there is a lot of stuff we could or should be doing...
...but if we want to save the most lives, then minimum alcohol pricing and fat taxes would be by far the most powerful interventions. (See eg this Lancet commission report, which got together the country's top liver experts thelancet.com/journals/lance…)
Now I'm as conflicted on this as anyone. There's a large part of me that's in the @cjsnowdon camp, and reckons it's a damn imposition for nanny-state public health fascists to be snatching the burgers out of the mouths of free-born Englishmen.
When I questioned @MattHancock about alcohol pricing, he argued - persuasively and legitimately! - that he preferred to target problem drinkers rather than punish everyone for the sins of the few.
But Boris's fundamental analysis, as per James's piece, is completely right. For example, it's now estimated that 1/4 to 1/3 of the US and UK populations are walking around with fatty liver, which is going to lead to all sorts of awful complications in the coming years
(Fatty liver and diabetes tend to go hand in hand. This is one reason why even though we're drinking less, liver disease is the only major cause of death in the UK whose numbers are rising.)
We can debate exactly how we tackle the obesity crisis, and the balance between freedom, nudging and nannying. But it's not just COVID where it's having, and is going to have, an enormously detrimental impact on very many people's health. (Ends.)
