On October 24, the House of Lords published a damning report on the nation’s food and UPF (ultra-processed food). The report highlighted their massive influence on the UK’s mental and physical health and the total failure of the government to act. We can no longer ignore the role that an unhealthy diet plays in our nation’s current and future health. As a child, I remember eating stews, gammon steaks and liver with onions. It wasn’t particularly good but it was freshly made and there was no constant marketing and encouragement to snack between meals.
Now, young children are more comfortable drinking puréed fruit from a pouch than they are biting into an apple. While all of them are used to opening packets, many have never touched real food and can’t recognise it. This is down to the rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs or fake foods), full of added chemicals you wouldn’t find in your kitchen cupboard, which now account for nearly 70 per cent of what youngsters are eating. To put this into perspective, our children’s diet is worse than in the United States.
UPFs are bad for several reasons, especially for children. They contain little to no fibre and are full of chemicals like emulsifiers, colourings and artificial sweeteners, which disrupt their gut microbiome and impact their health. They also increase appetite levels by around a quarter and make children crave other unhealthy foods.
As well as putting them on the path to metabolic diseases such as obesity, these junk foods weaken children’s immune health, leaving them vulnerable to infections, allergies and inflammation, while worsening their cognitive function, mental health and sleep quality.
Children who develop poor metabolic health early in life are much more likely to be unhealthy adults at huge societal and economic cost (it’s estimated that the bill for poor diets in the UK is £98 billion per year). But some simple steps could easily help tackle this crisis.
1. Ban health claims and cartoons on unhealthy foods aimed at children
You will have seen brightly-coloured packaging on supermarket shelves branded with happy cartoon characters and text bubbles claiming that the foods it contains are high in calcium, vitamins, protein and wholegrains or low in fat. It’s comparable to putting labels on cigarettes to claim they “stop overeating and anxiety” or “contain menthol”.
These so-called health halos, which are especially prevalent in children’s cereal and snacks, are distractions for selling incredibly unhealthy products to children – and they should be banned. Large, black warning labels should also be added to prevent these foods from masquerading as healthy.
The UK wouldn’t be the first to take such action. In fact, we’re way behind other countries, such as Chile and Mexico, which have implemented similar measures.
While I have no objections to giving an occasional unhealthy snack or bowl of cereal to children, parents should not be tricked into thinking these products are a healthy staple that should make up part of their everyday diet.
2. Expand free school meals and ban snacks from home
Free school meals are available to all primary children who attend state-funded schools in London and this should be extended to the rest of the country.
As it stands, around 65 per cent of the calories in school meals come from UPFs (though some schools are getting it right and offering up mainly plant-based and fibre-rich meals). A maximum limit of around 10 per cent should be set for an acceptable level of UPFs in our schools.
And, unless there’s a good reason, children shouldn’t be bringing in snacks from home. That was the rule in my generation.
We should also be enhancing food knowledge in schools by taking inspiration from Japan, where every school has a responsible teacher who has received training in nutrition.