Dolitics: The food environment we live in is making us sick

Dolly Theis | 27th September 2021 | Uncategorised

The government can keep cooking up the same old obesity policies but nothing will change until the problem is tackled head-on.

“The first consideration of a minister should be the health of the people,” said Benjamin Disraeli in a speech in 1872. What could be truer today? Covid-19 has shot public health right up the government agenda. It is still shocking to think that last year Covid nearly took the prime minister’s life. As Boris Johnson emerged from intensive care and set about tackling the pandemic, he made publishing a new obesity strategy an immediate priority. “It’s all right for you thinnies,” he told his team after recognising that his own weight was likely to have been the reason why he fared so badly. The strategy – published in July 2020 – was the 14th government obesity strategy in England.

This year marks 30 years of obesity policy in England. It was in 1991 that the UK government first formally recognised that it needed to do something about the fact that so many people were getting sick and dying from diet-related diseases. Three decades and 14 obesity strategies later, and the state of the n...

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