Food retailers and manufacturers in Britain will make the healthy choice the easy choice in a world-first partnership between the UK government and industry to tackle the obesity epidemic and ease pressure on the National Health Service (NHS).
As part of a ‘10 Year Health Plan’ tabled this week, large retailers including supermarkets will be set a new standard to make the average shopping basket of goods sold slightly healthier. Businesses will be given the freedom to meet the standard in whichever way works best for them, whether that’s reformulating products and tweaking recipes, changing shop layouts, offering discounts on healthy foods, or changing loyalty schemes to promote healthier options.
UK Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “Obesity has doubled since the 1990s and costs our NHS £11 billion a year, triple the budget for ambulance services. Unless we curb the rising tide of cost and demand, the NHS risks becoming unsustainable.
“The good news is that it only takes a small change to make a big difference. If everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day – the equivalent of a bottle of fizzy drink – obesity would be halved.
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“Our brilliant supermarkets already do so much work for our communities and are trying to make their stores heathier, and we want to work with them and other businesses to create a level playing field. Through our new healthy food standard, we will make the healthy choice the easy choice, because prevention is better than cure.”
Public health experts believe cutting the calorie count of a daily diet by just 50 calories would lift 340,000 children and 2 million adults out of obesity. If everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by just 216 calories a day, equivalent to a single bottle of fizzy drink, obesity would be halved.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed said: “Britain has some of the best farmers, growers, food manufacturers and retailers in the world, which means we have more choice than ever before on our shelves. It is vital for the nation that the food industry delivers healthy food that is available, affordable and appealing.
“Our food strategy will bring together the health plan, food producers and retailers to make sure we can feed the nation more healthily while growing the economic success of our food sector.”
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The policy will see all big food businesses report on healthy food sales. This will set full transparency and accountability around the food that businesses are selling and encourage healthier products.
The government will then set targets to increase the healthiness of sales in communities across the UK and work with the Food Strategy Advisory Board on the sequencing of this policy.
