The @food_strategy focuses on 2️⃣ most urgent problems embedded in the food system:
1. The “Junk Food Cycle” 🍔🍫🔄 🍕🍟
2. The “Invisibility of Nature” 🐝🌳👩🌾
The aim?
🌍 Healthy planet
🫂 Healthy people
🆘This is critically urgent given the Covid pandemic & climate crisis.
Tragically our diet in Britain is killing us and making us sick.
It’s the diet we’re raising our children on.
Four out of the top five risk factors for years of healthy life lost to avoidable illness, disability & death are diet related (the four largest pink bubbles)👇🏽
🇬🇧On Britain’s diet being so bad for health:
“It’s extraordinary, really, that there isn’t public uproar about this.”
“The trouble is, this disaster has crept up on us so slowly that we have forgotten to be shocked by it.”
📈Example: the rise of crisps & sweetened cereals👇🏽
🤷🏼♀️How did we end up with a food system that can feed the world, but makes us and our planet so sick?
The answer in 3️⃣ lines and a pie chart👇🏽
Tucked away on pages 49, 50 & 146 are 2️⃣ critical points:
🗣People want help. People want it to be easy, affordable, convenient & enjoyable to be healthy✅
🗣Food industry wants Government intervention & welcomes legislation to reduce unhealthy food & increase healthy options👍🏽
📚The 14 @food_strategy recommendations aim to meet 4️⃣ key objectives:
Nourishing Britain: A Political Manual for Improving the Nation’s Health
@HenryDimbleby & I interviewed 20 prime ministers, health secretaries & other top politicians from the last 30 years about the politics of obesity, food & health policy
Here’s what we found…🧵
All 20 politicians agreed that the government had not done enough to tackle obesity & food-related ill health, and that the government can and should do more.
Many expressed personal regret about not doing more during their own time in power.
They urged politicians to act now.
The 20 politicians we spoke to are highlighted in red below. You can also see the key obesity & food-related health strategies published during their time in office.
The politicians described 4 main obstacles to tackling food-related ill health in government. These were…
2/5: To help do something, he published a bold obesity strategy 'Tackling Obesity' (2020) containing policies to legislate against unhealthy food & drink promotions.
The aim was to rebalance what food & drink is promoted, so things would be tilted in favour of healthy options.
3/5: However, this was not the first time Government proposed this policy idea. Far from it!
This policy was originally going to be introduced by David Cameron in his Childhood Obesity Strategy (2016).
However, his resignation led to the strategy being passed to Theresa May.