I beg to move,
That this House has considered the impact of food and diet on obesity.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating parliamentary time to this crucial issue. We were actually going to have this debate before Christmas, but we decided that before Christmas was not a good time to discuss obesity; we were then going to have it last week, but it was postponed. I am really grateful to colleagues across the House for supporting the debate.
Our country has an obesity crisis that is threatening the health and wellbeing of the whole nation. It is a cross-party issue: since 1990, rates of obesity have doubled. Two thirds of all adults in the UK are carrying excess weight, and a quarter of adults are classified as obese. The figures are even more worrying in children: 10% of children aged four, when they enter school, are obese; that figure rises to 22%—nearly one in four—in year 6. One problem with obesity is that, as many of us know, once someone becomes overweight, it is difficult to shift. That is why the most important age group to concentrate on is young people.
Obesity is now the single most important modifiable risk factor for the prevention of disease, and I will briefly go through its effects—as a doctor, I cannot resist. Around 4 million people in this country have type 2 diabetes, which is five times more likely in obesity. Type 2 diabetes almost doubles a person’s mortality rate, with 22,000 people with diabetes dying early every year. Ischaemic heart disease, the leading cause of death in the UK, is much more common in obesity, as is hypertension and osteoarthritis, which causes joint pain and reduced mobility. Something that a lot of people do not know is that 13 cancers are directly attributable to obesity—it is actually also the second commonest cause of cancer.
As a GP, there are other things I see quite regularly, such as reflux, varicose veins, infertility and even thrombosis, all of which diminish quality of life. The commonest cause of liver disease is now obesity. I will not go into the cost too much but, as we can imagine, obesity costs the country an absolute fortune: on average, four extra sick days a year; and, taking into account the cost to the NHS and so on, an estimated £98 billion a year, or 4% of GDP. The cost to the NHS is £19 billion a year.
What is the cause of obesity? From the evidence, it is clear that the main cause of obesity is diet—it is what we eat. The food system in this country is fundamentally broken. I welcomed the statement from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed) about sustainable food production: nutritious foods grown while restoring nature, and farms with good food production at its core, rewarded properly. There is a complicated relationship in food production, whereby farms mostly exist on Government subsidy with very small profit margins and then the supermarkets make profits out of what they sell. We need to look into that complicated relationship.
One problem is that unhealthy and ultra-processed foods—UPFs—that are high in fats, salt and sugar are often the easiest, cheapest and most convenient. Crucially, they make the most profit for the food industry. The other problem with these types of food is that they are addictive—salty, fatty foods are addictive. Another problem, revealed by the Food Foundation, is that healthy foods, calorie for calorie, are twice as expensive as less healthy foods. So there are a lot of issues there to unpick.
Inequalities and deprivation are very, very strong causes of obesity, with less well-off people being twice as likely to be overweight. Therefore, one strategy has to be to increase the living wage, reduce child poverty, improve health and social services, and invest in education —all of which the Government are doing.
On pregnancy, obesity actually begins in the womb—it does not even begin when we are born. In one fascinating experiment, one group of pregnant women were fed a lot of carrots and another group did not have any carrots. The children of the women who ate carrots loved carrots, so a memory is made in utero. It is therefore really important that pregnant women have a very healthy diet, as this is a risk factor for obesity in young people. Another is formula feed. Breastfeeding protects against obesity, but formula feeds do not. Follow-on feeds, hungry baby feeds, are just normal milk packed full of calories, so they tend to increase obesity. That is perhaps something we need to discuss, too.