25 July 2020
Reading in today’s Times newspaper, Mr Johnson is planning to ban junk food promotions and encourage Britons to ‘eat less’ in a bid to cure the obesity epidemic that is so severely affecting our ability to fight this coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, Mr Johnson, you are missing a crucial and fundamental point at this pivotal junction of our nation’s health.
Currently the biggest issue I see with clients is a lack of education about nutrition – our children do not learn enough in school, our GPs are not taught enough in medical school and our adults are now a generation who were not brought up on home cooked meals and the value of eating a diet rich in natural, whole food produce.
Encouraging people to ‘hit the gym’ will improve their cardiovascular health and inducing them to ‘eat less’ may help them lose weight if they achieve a calorie deficit. But without educating people on what foods to eat, and why, means they very quickly revert to their old habits and any weight loss is quickly reversed. People need long term support and guidance to make fundamental changes to their attitudes to food and nutrition.
The current Government guidelines for nutrition, including the Eatwell plate, are outdated and have been superseded by new science and knowledge. People need to be shown how to make healthier choices. They do not understand why their can of diet soda is unhealthy when the packaging says ‘sugar free’ and ‘1 calorie’. They do not understand how their food choices impact their body’s natural ability to manage weight and body fat.
More than three quarters of adults and secondary school children do not get their five a day (foodfoundation.org.uk). A 2018 Cambridge study showed that ultra-processed foods made up 50.4% of the food in the average UK household (it was only 10.2% in Portugal and 13.4% in Italy).
People in the UK eat less than 20g of fibre per day, 32g is recommended, (nutrition.org) and this is seriously impacting their digestive health and increasing their risks of obesity and metabolic syndrome.
We are learning all the time about how the right balance of gut bacteria can support our health (and mental health) but we are spending billions of pounds a year on probiotics while overeating sugars and refined carbohydrates that feed the ‘bad’ bacteria.
In my experience, it is not advertising that is causing this huge discrepancy, it is a lack of a culture of eating a whole food diet and choosing local produce, cooked healthily from scratch at home. When I speak to clients, it is not the adverts they see on tv that drive this appetite for foods that make us ill and fat, it is a lack of understanding of real nutrition and how to cook real food.
You are right that the single biggest impact on our nation’s nutritional health is processed foods. But unless you teach people why these foods are bad for their health and how to select whole foods and unrefined products, how to understand the way chemicals and preservatives interfere with their body’s natural processes you will never be able to alleviate this burden of chronic disease that cripples our NHS.
You have an army of passionate, innovative and extremely well qualified nutritional therapists in the UK who work enthusiastically to support their clients in learning about how diet and nutrition can affect their health, drive chronic conditions and, of course, lead to weight management problems and obesity.
Let this workforce help you to help the NHS and take the pressure off the amazing doctors and nurses who are working tirelessly to support the nation in this corona crisis.
Please see this time as an opportunity to renew our nation’s passion for real food and take this moment to enable these amazing nutritionists to bring about the change we need.
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