Are you addicted to the bliss point? That’s the deadly ratio of sugar and fat junk food firms cynically exploit to get us hooked, and after two years’ investigation HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL says we must fight back — before it’s too late
- Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigates the obesity crisis in a new BBC1 series
- The NHS spends £1.5m an hour on treating diabetes and £10 billion a year
- Researchers believe half the population will be obese by 2050
- Hugh questions why the traffic light system isn’t mandatory on all food products
- He received over 100,000 signatures on a letter to speak to the Health Secretary
- He shared the importance of not relying on the food industry to fix the crisis
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The news that British children are guzzling 22st of sugar by the age of ten has been a shocking start to the New Year. It’s no wonder Britain has the worst obesity rate in Western Europe.
Twenty-two stones is the equivalent of almost 140 bags of sugar, and if you see a picture of all those bags piled up together, it’s hard not to feel alarmed — and a little queasy.
Every ten minutes a child in the UK is having one of their excessively sweet teeth removed.
But premature dentistry is just the start of the problem. Our toddlers’ taste for sugary treats means that one in three kids are now overweight by the time they leave primary school.
The personal cost for these youngsters is immense.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (pictured) spent two years investigating the UK’s obesity problem for his latest BBC1 series, Britain’s Fat Fight — The Battle Continues
By the age of 12, they are already on a fast track to obesity, and have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease as a result. Couple this with the fact that amputations related to type 2 diabetes are the fastest growing surgical procedures in the NHS (about one limb is being amputated every hour), and that the Government spends more on treating overweight and obesity-related diseases than it does on the police and the fire services combined, you can see why I am convinced that the obesity problem in the UK is more than just a crisis. It is now a national emergency.
What has caused this catastrophe, and what we can do about it, are two of the big questions I’ve been grappling with while making my latest BBC1 series, Britain’s Fat Fight.
Fifty years ago, most people tended to eat three square meals a day and no snacks. Sweets and cakes were just an occasional treat, and only two per cent of the population was obese.
I don’t remember any particularly over-weight children in my primary school class in the seventies.
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Then the idea of eating between meals was jumped upon by marketing executives as a clever way to boost sales of a whole bunch of products, old and new — many of them high in sugar, salt, and fat.
They created a snack market that barely existed before. And they have been astonishingly successful — today, the UK’s snack market is worth around £18 billion a year. Combine this with the arrival of fast food on the High Street in the mid Eighties, plus a new takeaway culture which promises to deliver fast food right to your front door, and it is easy to see how the average adult now eats 200-300 more calories than they need every day.
Everyone I met while making Britain’s Fat Fight seemed to want to eat more healthily, but there was always something that thwarted their attempts to do so.
For some it’s biscuits, for others it’s crisps. Some lose all self-control when confronted with a pizza.
Scientists claim when we eat foods high in both sugar and fats, the neural circuits in our brain’s reward centres light up (file image)
For me, it’s the Toffee Crisp. There’s something about the way the chocolate melts on the tongue and combines with the chew of the toffee and the pop of the rice which means I have been known to eat three of them back-to-back . . .
What is it about these snacks that gives them such a vice-like grip over us? I went looking for the answer — and what I discovered is perhaps even more alarming than the amount of sugar that our children are eating.
A few years ago, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in Florida found that when rats were given unlimited access to pure sugar, they ate a lot of it, but didn’t get fat because they adjusted their consumption of other nutrients to make up for it. And when the rats were given as much fatty foods as they wanted, they put on a bit of weight, but not too much, as they generally chose to eat less.
But when the rats were fed a combination of sugar and fat, the researchers found that they ate the sweet fatty food continuously and exclusively, becoming sedentary and gaining masses of weight. It was as if they lost their ability to say no.
Then last year, Dana Small, the director of Yale University’s Modern Diet and Physiology Research Centre, used brain scanners to prove that very much the same thing happens in humans.
When we eat foods high in both sugar and fats, the neural circuits in our brain’s reward centres light up like Christmas trees. And starchy carbs such as wheat and potatoes can be combined with fat to produce similar effects.
Hugh has been trying hard to get Nestle and Kellogg’s to use the traffic light system (pictured) on the fronts of their breakfast cereal boxes
Which are the foods high in both sugar and fat that create these intense cravings?
The answer, of course, is all our favourites. Doughnuts. Chips and crisps. Biscuits. Pizzas. Burgers. Chocolate bars . . . my old friend the Toffee Crisp.
Interestingly, this almost intoxicating combination of high levels of sugar and fat doesn’t generally occur in nature. There are lots of natural sugars in fruits and roots, and there is plenty of fat in nuts and fish.
But very rarely do you find them together in a single natural food source. It’s almost as if Mother Nature didn’t want us to eat them together.
In fact, one of the very few places where you find sugars and fats together naturally is in breast milk. Which, of course, is the only food humans are designed to continue eating until we are so full we physically can’t take any more.
What these researchers have demonstrated was that we are genetically pre-disposed to find these sugary fatty foods irresistible . . . but, of course, the food companies hardly needed to be told. For years now, their own scientists have been developing new foods with the perfect combination of sugar and fat they know will trigger our greed the most.
They’ve even got a name for this holy grail of snack design: they call it the bliss point.
When you discover all of this, it is hard to see how anyone can blame individuals for the obesity crisis. Yes, we are all ultimately responsible for what we put in our mouths.
Hugh (pictured) says we all need to get better at reading food labels and start making more sensible choices about what we eat
And yes, we all need to get better at reading labels, and make better, more sensible choices about how much we eat and what kinds of foods we pick off the shelf.
But if the food companies make it so difficult for us, what hope do we have?
That’s why I’ve been pushing so hard to try to get Nestle and Kellogg’s to put traffic light warning labels on the fronts of their breakfast cereal boxes. These little red, amber and green blobs are a great way to check at a glance if you are buying foods which are high in sugar, salt or fat.
I can’t understand why they are not mandatory on all food products . . . but as things stand, it is still up to the food company to decide if they want to be clear about what is in their products or not.
Neither Kellogg’s nor Nestle wanted to talk to me on camera about their decision not to put coloured labels on their packets, but when I turned up at Nestle’s HQ with my own set of traffic lights and a camera crew, I’m delighted to say that they changed their minds pretty quickly.
Kellogg’s were a much harder nut to crack, but after a year of trying, a few weeks ago they announced that they too are going to put coloured labels on their cereal boxes in the UK, finally falling in line with the rest of the breakfast cereal industry.
I also worked with the Soil Association to encourage child-friendly High Street restaurant chains to stop offering endless refills of sugary drinks to kids, and puddings containing the amount of sugar in one serving that’s equivalent to four times a child’s daily allowance.
I’m happy to say that pub chain Hungry Horse eventually withdrew their ‘popping candy wafer boat with strawberry ice cream’.
But tackling these problems one by one is never going to be enough to turn the tide on the obesity crisis and start reversing the increasing number of patients being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Hugh (pictured) revealed half the population is likely to be obese by 2050, at the current rate. At the moment only 1.2 per cent of food advertising is focused on fruit and vegetables
The NHS spends £1.5 m an hour on treating diabetes, and for the first time, children under ten are developing type 2 diabetes — a disease which that previously only usually affected adults.
The overall cost to the NHS is £10 billion a year and counting. Like many others working on the problem of obesity, I believe that we can’t rely on the food industry to change their ways, and solve the problems for us.
At the current rate, half the population will be obese by 2050 — a situation that would surely break our already struggling NHS.
If we are going to have any hope of defeating that grim possibility, the Government needs to act fast.
I first tried to talk to the then Secretary of State for Health about his plans to deal with the obesity crisis at the Conservative Party Conference in September 2017.
Jeremy Hunt didn’t mention obesity once in his speech about the future of the NHS, and for months ducked my approaches to get an on-camera interview.
How common is type 2 diabetes?
Type 2 diabetes was once known as adult-onset diabetes as it mainly affected people over 40. Now it’s often seen in teenagers — and even in under tens
So I put my questions to him online instead, and asked members of the public to co-sign my letter to him. If he didn’t want to talk to me, then maybe he’d reply to tens of thousands of voters.
I asked whether he was prepared to restrict junk food marketing directed at children, and to remove promotions for sweets and chocolates from the tills.
I wanted to see if he would ban the sale of energy drinks to under-16s, and force restaurants to put calorie information on their menus.
I wanted to know why front-of-pack traffic light labelling isn’t mandatory, and find out if the Government would fund a national advertising strategy to promote the consumption of fruit and veg.
At the moment, only 1.2 per cent of food advertising is focused on fruit and vegetables. After nearly 100,000 people signed my letter, I finally got the phone call that proved people power really does work. It was Jeremy Hunt’s diary secretary, inviting me for a meeting. I duly headed to the House of Commons, and waited. And waited.
Hugh (pictured) says the Government are looking at introducing a 9pm watershed on TV advertising of junk food
The allotted time for the meeting came and went, and ten minutes later, his personal secretary came in and told me that Jeremy Hunt was not going to be able to make it after all.
My disappointment and frustration was about to boil over . . . when in walked Jeremy Hunt with a wry grin.
It’s good to know that our now Foreign Secretary has a sense of humour . . .
He talked me through his plans for the next chapter of the Government’s childhood obesity strategy. The jewel in the crown of the proposals is the commitment to halve childhood obesity by 2030.
This is an ambitious and difficult target, but it’s great to have it on the official record.
It means the Government now has to measure and report on its progress all along the way. In my experience, what gets measured has a chance of getting done.
Achieving that target would make a huge difference to the lives of millions of young people, and, in the long term, start to ease the huge burden that obesity is putting on the NHS.
But halving childhood obesity is much easier said than done. It will only happen if a multi-pronged approach is taken, which tackles as many of the different problems as possible.
Which is why it was great to hear that the Government is indeed considering banning the promotion of unhealthy foods at the checkouts, and the sale of energy drinks to under 16s. They are also looking at making calorie information mandatory on menus, and introducing a 9pm watershed on TV advertising of junk food.
Hugh (pictured) revealed he has met people who have no access to fruit or veg as well as those who’ve lost limbs due to diabetes
But we must remember that these are just the proposals. Ideas. Good things for ministers to talk about on television.
We are now in the middle of a lengthy consultation process, and I imagine industry and food retailers and manufacturers will be lobbying hard to make sure that most of these things don’t happen, allowing them to sell us unhealthy junk with impunity. And, of course, Jeremy Hunt is no longer in charge . . . the responsibility now lies with Health Secretary Matt Hancock. It is up to him to deliver.
Over the past two years, I’ve witnessed shocking things I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes.
I’ve met patients who have lost limbs due to type 2 diabetes born out of poor diet choices made when they were younger. I’ve seen how hundreds of thousands of people around the country live in food deserts, with little or no access to fruit or veg.
And I’ve seen how tightly we are in the grip of food companies who put their corporate profits above the nation’s health.
There is a golden opportunity, right now, to change things. The health of the nation really is at stake.
The future of our children — their very lives — depends on it. Let’s not let this chance slip away.
Britain’s Fat Fight — The Battle Continues is on BBC1 tonight at 8pm.
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