The Fat of the Land

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges this week encouraged us all to drink more beer. Well not in so many words they didn’t but an unintended consequence of their proposal to introduce taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20% could be just that.  The Academy is a "united front" of the medical profession from surgeons to GPs and psychiatrists to paediatricians. They are currently recommending:

• 1.       A ban on advertising foods high in saturated fat, sugar and salt before 9pm
• 2.       Further taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20%
• 3.       A reduction in fast food outlets near schools and leisure centres
• 4.       A £100m budget for interventions such as weight-loss surgery
• 5.       No junk food or vending machines in hospitals, where all food must meet the same              nutritional standards as in schools
• 6.       Food labels to include calorie information for children

As they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and these recommendations may just be one step on that road.

A ban on advertising foods high in saturated fat, sugar and salt before 9pm

Hands up all of you who actually watch TV advertising? Thought so. The advent of video recording, through Sky Plus, Freeview and TiVo means that if your household is even vaguely similar to mine, it’s rare that you actually watch an advert. Recorded the programme? Let’s skip through the commercials. Watching live? Let’s go put the kettle on or pop off to the loo. There is much debate as to whether the ban on tobacco advertising on TV and in cinemas had as much impact on consumption as did negative advertising. Indeed there is a widely held belief that tobacco advertising is related more to brand loyalty than overall consumption and a similar argument holds true for these food groups. Adverting doesn’t necessarily drive people to eat junk/convenience food that they would not have if it had not been advertised but rather it means that they eat at McDonalds rather than Burger King, or Pizza Hut rather than Dominos.

The sinister aspect of convenience food advertising are the promotions tied in with films books or TV programmes that connect the latest fad with the food. The notorious clout that pester power has when exerted by a child is enough to bend the will of the strongest parent, so on the whole you have to say that such a ban may at least make for a more peaceful life among the nation’s parents. Will it reduce the consumption of foods that are high in saturated fat, sugar and salt? The cynic in me says not to any appreciable degree.

Further taxes on sugary drinks to increase prices by at least 20%

Look at point two. No, look at it and examine the possible (unintended) consequences. Your local JD Wetherspoon pub is currently selling Carlsberg lager or John Smith’s bitter at £2.09 a pint. They also sell a fourteen ounce glass of Pepsi Cola for £1.70, which works out at £2.42 per pint, or after the proposed twenty percent increase, a swingeing £2.90 per pint.

Now I grant that the academy’s target group are the teens and pre-teens who don’t drink alcohol (well not officially at least) but an unintended consequence of their proposal, should it actually come to pass, could be encouraging increased alcohol consumption in adults, driven by price.

A reduction in fast food outlets near schools and leisure centres

A cursory examination of the secondary schools in my local area reveals that none are within easy walking distance of a fast food outlet. Now my area may not be typical, but if there happens to be a fast food outlet on your local school’s doorstep, what precisely is envisaged here, closing said outlet? Restricting their opening hours? Common law in this country, as outlined in the case of Mitchell v Reynolds (1711) is that,

"It is the privilege of a trader in a free country, in all matters not contrary to law, to regulate his own mode of carrying it on according to his own discretion and choice. If the law has regulated or restrained his mode of doing this, the law must be obeyed. But no power short of the general law ought to restrain his free discretion."

I await with eager anticipation, the first time that the law steps in to either close an existing McDonalds store, or oppose planning permission for a new one, on the basis that it is too close to a school. My experience, gleaned over years of commuting, is that school children get the bus from school into town, buy and devour their fast food and then get another bus home. For the hungry child in possession of an Oyster card, distance is no object.

A £100m budget for interventions such as weight-loss surgery.

The NHS website states that “Weight loss surgery, also called bariatric surgery, is used as a last resort to treat people who are dangerously obese (carrying an abnormally excessive amount of body fat).This type of surgery is only available on the NHS to treat people with potentially life-threatening obesity when other treatments, such as lifestyle changes, haven't worked.”

The telling phrase in the above is that this sort of surgery should be available only when other treatments, such as lifestyle changes, haven't worked. This proposal opens the floodgates for the lazy and weak willed to demand surgery because they have zero will power and less common sense, diverting resources from those truly in need, and I include people who are obese in the category of those in need, assuming that non-surgical methods of weight loss have proved ineffective.

No junk food or vending machines in hospitals, where all food must meet the same nutritional standards as in schools.

No argument from me on that one, although as the recent horsemeat scandal has shown, I wouldn’t hold schools up as a beacon of nutritional enlightenment, but that is another story.

Food labels to include calorie information for children.

Now most of the pre-packed food I buy in the supermarket already contains calorific information, fat content, sugar content etc, etc, so I’m not sure how effective this is expected to be, especially when you consider that printing “Smoking Kills” on cigarette packets probably hasn’t scared everyone in the UK into giving up, albeit that consumption declined by almost 50% between 1990 and 2009. Also you can print all the health, calorie, fat and sugar content information on a fast food wrapper that you want and the average teenage isn’t going to read it far less take any notice of it. Besides, remember how you were as a teenager, that feeling of immortality, that belief that it would never happen to you? I doubt very much whether there is a teenager in land who takes one iota of notice of health warnings, nor ever will.

On the day that The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ recommendations came out, I happened to be listening to a radio phone in and one listener spotted a major flaw in all of this, namely the absence of the “R” word, R being for Responsibility. You can legislate all that you want, place any number of restrictions and print any number of health warnings and the effect will be a big fat zero unless people, that’s you, me and the man on the Clapham omnibus, take responsibility, responsibility for our own actions and those of our children until they are old enough to do it for themselves. So it is and thus it ever was.