Obesity

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 4:51 pm on 10 February 2005.

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Photo of Jim Dowd Jim Dowd Labour, Lewisham West 4:51, 10 February 2005

This afternoon has been so disrupted by events in the Chamber that I think we are running about 40 minutes behind schedule. I shall therefore keep my remarks brief and to the point.

I add my thanks and congratulations to the Chair of the Committee, my hon. Friend Mr. Hinchliffe. Others have already given theirs. He is always a genial and firm guide to our proceedings in the Select Committee. None of us knows what may happen in the next few weeks and months ahead, but it occurs to me that this could easily be the last time he introduces a report from the Committee to the House, so I place on record my thanks to him for all his work over the years and for his unswerving friendship. It has been a pleasure to serve on the Committee with him.

There is a difficulty with the report. Mr. Amess, who unfortunately is not in his seat, said that the delay in the Government's response to the report was intolerable. I suspect that—in his own Southend, Basildon kind of way—he over-egged the pudding, but the delay makes life more difficult. We undertook our first evidence session well over 18 months ago, and that makes recalling the detail much more difficult. None the less, the inquiry was a fascinating and revelatory experience. I certainly learned a great deal from a variety of sources from a range of backgrounds.

Like the Chair of the Committee, I must mention the gross distortion that afflicted the report when it came out in May. The vilification of the Chair—that is what it was; it was very personal—was wholly and utterly inaccurate. One could understand it if some tabloids behaved that way, but it is a complete and utter travesty when a newspaper as self-regarding and allegedly serious as The Independent headlines a story, "How obesity report was undermined by the quest to grab public's attention".

The Chair has already outlined in detail the issue contained in the second paragraph of the introduction to the report. It occupied little more than a couple of hundred words and was not alluded to anywhere else in the report. The report, including appendices, comes to more than 500 paragraphs, so the idea that what was contained in that one paragraph skewed the whole publication is completely and utterly absurd. That is what happens when one is as self-important as The Independent, which also ran a leader article on 11 June saying that the Committee had acted recklessly in including that information "without checking its veracity". It continued:

"More than that, the committee has gravely damaged efforts to make Britain wake up to its obesity crisis."

That is plain and utter nonsense.

All the reports that have been produced over the years by the Health Committee and our sister Committees are excellent pieces of work, but this one will stand the test of time because of its focus on several different issues and elements of the obesity crisis, as it is called.

The Committee also learned when taking evidence that the so-called obesity crisis is, like climate change, not universally accepted, even in the scientific community. One witness said that obesity was "a big fat lie" and suggested that we completely misunderstand the nature of the problem, but rather like the argument on climate change and global warming, I believe that that is very much a minority view, if not an idiosyncratic approach to the problem, because we got a similar message right across the piece, whether from people who were individually affected by it—there was a debate on whether one should call obese people sufferers—or from food manufacturers, retailers and advertising agencies.

There are other examples of how the press trivialise things. The problem with the other paragraph was that it was the second in the report. Of course, most journalists will read only to paragraph 3 or 4 at the most and assume that they have read the lot. If the press had read further into the report, I am sure that what happened would not have happened.

When we were in New York, a commissioner told us that, for the first time in history, the generation of children and young people in the city would have a lower life expectancy than their parents. Evidence from this country and Australia also suggests that, and we make the point in the summary, because it looks likely to be the case in the United Kingdom if the trend is allowed to go unchecked.

The tabloids got hold of that, and I remember reading one article—I have not got it with me—that said that the crisis was so serious that children would die before their parents. That is patently untrue. If that were the case, the human race would be extinct in little more than a generation. Children are not going to die before their parents; they simply will not live as long as their parents can reasonably be expected to live. As the report makes clear, obesity is the most serious threat to public health not only in this country, but in other countries in the developed world, such as Australia and the United States.

Astonishingly, the Committee even took evidence that suggested that signs of obesity are emerging in Africa, and certainly in South Africa, which is the most advanced part of that continent. That is happening for various reasons, including the fact that as people move towards cities and away from essentially agrarian economies, they not only tend to have sedentary jobs rather than do manual work, but have access to buses, trains and other public transport systems. In more rural areas, they would walk quite a lot, whereas in cities they ride around in cars and on public transport. Even people who are not particularly wealthy have access to those facilities, and South Africa has started to experience the same trends that we have experienced in the more advanced economies for many years.

There is no simple way through the problem—indeed, the report makes 60-odd recommendations across the piece. The evidence that people eat too much of the wrong things and do not take enough exercise in return is at the heart of the calories-in, calories-out argument.

To some degree, obesity is a problem of affluence. Paradoxically, however, the richer someone is, the less likely they are to suffer from obesity, which peaks on a kind of curve. Richer people tend to be the ones who drink mineral water, join gyms, have pedometers and so on. Past a certain point of prosperity, the curve starts to fall, although the vast majority of people are on the rising part of that curve, which is the challenge before us.

I will mention a couple of other things. The human body, like those of most species, has defensive mechanisms and tends not to indulge in risky behaviour that jeopardises the individual. I asked one of our witnesses why that is not true of how we eat. We like things that are bad for us. We do not like the things that are good for us and find it a trial to eat properly. She explained the issue in a graphic way, saying, "In stone age times, the whole tribe would gorge themselves when the tribe killed a mammoth, because life was so precarious that people did not know where the next meal was coming from."

We are many centuries away from that and hardly anyone in this country does not know where their next meal is coming from, although there may be a few at the margins who do not. However, we still behave in that stone age way and have a stone age psychology and physiology. In part, that makes dealing with the issue difficult, because it requires most people to behave counter-intuitively. Society has progressed much more rapidly than our approach to food and healthy eating.

I am delighted that the hon. Member for Southend, West mentioned the other thing that I want to talk about—the traffic light labelling model. I was not going to call it that, but when I discovered that he dislikes the term so much, I could hardly resist. I accept what others have said about how that model can be simplified and welcome what the Government are doing to try to reach agreement on it.

We have said that we will give the Government and the industry a chance to reach agreement, but that other steps should be taken if they do not, because food labelling as it is now is fact without information. It is just numbers on the side of a tin saying how many calories and kilojoules and how much sodium and so on the contents of the tin contain. While those numbers are factually accurate, they do not convey information to people in a useable form. If we were to move to a traffic light model or some variant of it, much would be generalised.

I accept what was said about the so-called avocado problem. Obviously a bag of sugar would have a red label on it under any circumstances because it has a lot of sugar in it, but as it is a bag of sugar that is hardly surprising. The same would be true of dairy products, which have large amounts of fat in them. However, I agree with the hon. Member for Southend, West strongly on the argument about healthy and unhealthy food, which emerged when we were putting the report together. Although we slipped into using such language occasionally in the report, my impression is that there is no unhealthy food. If we were trying to tell people living on 50 cents a day in sub-Saharan Africa that there were unhealthy foods, they would look at us askance. There are no unhealthy foods; there are unhealthy diets. We need to put in place a balance.

Of course, everyone likes a treat such as chocolate from time to time, but they should not have it all the time. People like McDonald's. Dr. Taylor admitted to that predilection. Once in a while such things are okay, but they must be part of a balanced diet and a more active lifestyle. That is patently obvious.

The other point that I want to mention is the one that the hon. Gentleman raised on recommendation 58: measuring the body mass index—BMI—of school children. I was pleased by the Secretary of State's announcement yesterday on funding. I was also pleased that every area will essentially have to restore the school nurse. I noticed last week that that is exactly what is to be done in the United States, although I cannot remember whether it will be in one state or by the federal authority. All schoolchildren will be weighed and measured, and a confidential report sent home to their parents. I am delighted to hear about that and hope we can do the same here.

In conclusion, it was a pleasure to work on the report. There are a lot of things in it, some of which will be easier to do than others, but if it helps to focus on a major threat to public health, the Committee and the House will have done a public service. I broadly welcome the Government's response, but hope that they can be slightly more positive and reduce some time scales accordingly.