Cake in the office should be viewed like passive smoking, says food regulator
Bringing cake into the office should be seen as harmful to your colleagues in the same way as passive smoking, Britain’s top food watchdog has said.
Professor Susan Jebb, chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, also expressed frustration with ministers’ decision to delay a television watershed for junk food advertising, which she said led to a “complete market failure” that marginalised healthy products.
She urged doctors to be more willing to broach the topic of patients’ weight and offer diet help, saying it was bad for the nation’s health that medics “mostly ignore it”.
Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford and a member of The Times Health Commission, said it was not enough to rely on the “extraordinary efforts” of personal willpower needed to avoid overeating in a society that is constantly plying people with food.
Speaking in a personal capacity, she said: “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment,” she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”
While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.
She argued: “With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel like that about food.”
The Times Health Commission is a year-long inquiry into the NHS and social care in England, which launched this week.
At its first meeting on Monday night, Lord Rose of Monewden, the chairman of Asda and former head of Marks & Spencer, suggested that workplaces should do more for people’s health. Rose, who undertook a review of the NHS for David Cameron, said that businesses already had to report efforts on equality, diversity and pay, asking: “Why don’t we lobby to say that also in that process as employers, we have a legal obligation to do something about our employees’ health?”
Two thirds of adults are overweight, including a quarter who are obese, a proportion that has doubled in the past three decades. By the time they start school, a fifth of children are already overweight, with most people in Britain now too heavy by the age of 25.
A succession of prime ministers have repeatedly rowed back on anti-obesity measures because of the apparent difficulty of reconciling the need to improve the nation’s health and reduce pressure on the NHS with Conservative hostility to “nanny state” measures.
Boris Johnson initially derided such policies but announced a crackdown on obesity in 2020 after accepting that being “way overweight” had contributed to his near-death experience with Covid. He set out plans to ban junk food advertising on television before the 9pm watershed and end “buy one get one free” (Bogof) deals on unhealthy products.
However, last month Steve Barclay, the health secretary, kicked the advertising ban into the long grass, pushing an implementation date back to 2025, beyond the next election.
Barclay, who is said to be resistant to bans and wants “more positive ways to promote healthy living”, must now consider whether to press ahead with the Bogof ban due to take effect in October. Labour has said it should not go ahead during a cost of living crisis.
Jebb told The Times that advertising of junk food was “undermining people’s free will” and insisted restrictions were “not about the nanny state”.
She said: “Advertising means that the businesses with the most money have the biggest influence on people’s behaviour. That’s not fair. At the moment we allow advertising for commercial gain with no health controls on it whatsoever and we’ve ended up with a complete market failure because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower.”
She said that the health service was so busy fighting crises in A&E, ambulances and waiting lists that we “never get into the root causes”, adding: “ We’re so busy mopping up the overflow from the butt that’s overflowing, we never get around to turning off the tap.”
Jebb urged the medical profession to warn patients when they needed to lose weight and offer them help in doing so.
“If a doctor comes across somebody with high blood pressure, they would feel, culturally, by training, by guidelines, by practice, that they must offer this patient treatment for their high blood pressure and explain to them why it was important,” she said. “At the moment, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it ... The status in medicine comes from treating rare diseases with very expensive medicine and technology, and obesity isn’t either of those.”
However, Jebb insisted that obesity could be treated, citing “pretty cheap interventions [that] yield huge benefits”, such as NHS weight management programmes that have put type 2 diabetics into remission.
The problem, she said, was to change a “culture in which people, health professionals, doctors, and particularly the sort of powerbrokers in the system, are pretty reluctant to go there”. She added: “We can change that. We’ve changed it with smoking. It took a very long time.”
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