The government should ban all junk food advertising and tax firms who add too much sugar and salt to their products, a House of Lords report says.
The Food, Diet and Obesity Committee calls on ministers to fix the ‘broken food system’ and turn the tide of the ‘obesity public health emergency’.
Peers say relying on fat jabs to trim the nation’s waistlines would place ‘considerable’ pressure on the NHS and not tackle the underlying cause of the problem.
They say it could cost £16.5billion a year to halve adult obesity by 2030 using drugs and suggest this money would be better spent on improving diets.
The ‘Recipe for Health’ report notes two-thirds of adults are too fat and says the average UK tax bill is around £400 per person per year more than it would be if everyone was a healthy weight.
It puts the total annual cost of overweight and obesity at £98billion, including costs to the NHS and social care, lost productivity, workforce inactivity and welfare payments.
The report warns there has been an ‘utter failure’ to tackle the crisis and insists industry must be mandated to make changes as voluntary measures have not gone far enough – nor stemmed rises in obesity.
Other recommendations include making large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and using revenues from expanded sugar and salt taxes to subsidise health food for poor people.
Baroness Walmsley, chairman of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, said: ‘Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill.
‘Both the Government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right.’
Karen Betts, chief executive of trade body The Food and Drink Federation, said: ‘Our industry takes the issue of obesity and poor diets really seriously, and we know we have a key role to play in addressing this.’
