Trade Talk

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said in a recent television interview that the government may legislate to tackle childhood obesity if its new initiative Change4Life doesn't work.

You wonder whether he has a strategy in mind because it's hard to envisage a sensible, practicable and effective way of doing this. It wouldn't be fair to penalise the food industry for the failure of a government initiative any more than you could blame the car industry for drinking and driving.

The food industry has no control over people's behaviour.

The bottom line is that, to stop children eating too much, they must be given less. The government, rather than tackling the problem by education on volumes consumed, is attempting to catalyse mass reformulation of food so that if children ate the same volume it would contain less fat, sugar and salt. But how would you legislate for this? Different statutory limits would have to be set for different categories of food. This would be impossibly complex to do, let alone police. And exceptions would have to be set for foods such as olive oil and bags of sugar, for example. Another list, another problem! How would you define foods that should be in or out?

Lack of decent ready-made food on the shelves could drive people to make their own cakes, biscuits and fudge and save money in the process. Bags of sugar might then have to be banned to close this 'loophole'.

Instead of reformulation, another untenable approach would be to restrict what people are allowed to buy. Maybe permits could be issued for certain foods, a bit like newspaper vouchers.

Or how about creating an offence for selling fatty, sugary foods to children under a certain age? Well, that's difficult enough to do with alcohol even though it's easily distinguishable from non-alcoholic drinks. Also it wouldn't work where parents, who are arguably responsible for obesity in their children, buy the foods for them.

Large-scale reformulation of food could have undesirable consequences. Apart from palatability issues, it could be bad for the environment if more energy is needed for manufacturing more artificial foods containing substitutes for fat and sugar. It could be bad for health. The effect of eating a diet of less natural food is unknown. Also, reformulation could create waste where fat has to be removed without an alternative use for it.

Finally, the voters' viewpoint should be considered. They tend to object to nanny-state solutions. But they need to be motivated to take the issue of childhood obesity into their own hands. That is where government effort should be directed, not mass manipulation of the diet, and certainly not legislation.

Clare Cheney

Director general

Provision Trade Federation

clare.cheney@provtrade.co.uk