There is More Than A Little Flabby Thinking About the Government’s Plan to Tackle Obesity.

The UK has a weight problem to the point where a large proportion of the population could be said to be digging its collective grave with a plastic fork from the local take-away.

Two thirds of UK adults are overweight and a quarter are classed as being obese, nationally in 2018/19 there were 876,000 hospital admissions related to weight problems.

Being dangerously overweight and deprivation are linked with levels of obesity being highest in parts of the Midlands and the North of England that have been battered by decades of economic decline. Just to add a cherry on top of the not so appetizing cake being obese is, as Public Health England pointed out this week, linked to a greater risk of general ill health and a higher likelihood of dying from coronavirus.

Dr Alison Tedstone chief nutritionist at Public Health England told the BBC earlier this week that ‘the case for action on obesity has never been stronger’.

Quite so and the government have helpfully stepped in with a ‘plan’ for reducing the national waistline. Included in this are banning ‘buy one get one free’ offers on unhealthy foods, another ban on advertising junk food before the nine o’clock watershed and plans to make restaurants print the calories contained in dishes on their menus.

The traffic light system used to indicate the fat and salt content of food will be reviewed and GP’s will be able to prescribe exercise to their podgier patients.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph health secretary Matt Hancock says the coronavirus has ‘given us a wake-up call about the need to tackle the stark inequalities in our nation’s health and obesity is an urgent example of this’.

He later helpfully adds that if ‘everyone who is overweight lost five pounds it would save the NHS £100 million over five years’, it would help to turn coronavirus back from our shores too.

Health experts have expressed qualified support for the plan whilst at the same time pointing out that some of the messages being sent out are decidedly mixed. For example the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme applies to fast food outlets and, more pertinently, public health budgets have been cut to the bone.

Making a pun for which I have no intention of begging pardon there is something decidedly flabby about this grand plan to make us all slimmer.

For a start most of the measures announced have been around the policy block so many times it’s a wonder they aren’t dizzy. Food labelling has been ‘reviewed’ almost as many times as the exam system and is in about as much of a mess. Consumers, like parents, are left trying to make sense of competing systems trying to tell them the same thing but in different ways, sowing confusion and frustration in the process.

Public health budgets haven’t just been cut; they’ve been dissected by a decade of austerity; and that’s before the horror show that has been the first half of 2020 gatecrashes local authority balance sheets. GPs can prescribe exercise all they want, in fact in an ideal world or one that just works that would be the first option rather than reaching for the pill cupboard; but if there isn’t funding available the scheme will fall at the first hurdle.

What really rankles though is the breezy attitude of the government towards solving a problem that has built up over decades. They seem to think that all they need to do is publish a ‘plan’, commission some slick TV adverts and; shazam; problem solved.

When Matt Hancock prattles about the ‘stark inequalities’ in our nation’s health I find myself wishing his aides had tied the string of the natty ‘Save the NHS’ mask he has taken to wearing tight enough to keep his jaws still while his brain catches up. He is part of a government that created those inequalities, not to mention egging on cash strapped councils to sell off their playing fields.

Being poor and experiencing worse physical and mental health than more affluent members of the community have been links in a chain of misery for the past forty plus years. Along with environmental and cultural factors they weigh individuals, communities and whole regions down.

Solving the resulting problems is about far more than getting more people to choose salad over burgers. It is about government truly understanding the needs of those parts of our society that have been left behind and working with local communities to find solutions.

That can’t be done over to lifecycle of a single parliament, it will take as long to put things right as it did for them to go wrong. Like losing weight fixing inequalities in health and areas requires patience and commitment, neither of which are the current government’s strong suit.