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Children in Britain are being "fed to death" by unhealthy foods, a leading medical expert has warned, telling MPs that the nation faces an "obesity pandemic" driven by commercial interests. Professor Chris van Tulleken, a global health specialist at University College London and a BBC TV doctor, informed the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee that many foods perceived as "healthy" – such as baked beans, fish fingers, whole grain bread, yoghurt, and breakfast cereal – actually lead to calorie intake far exceeding recommended daily levels. He highlighted the deceptive nature of food marketing, saying: "Everything about the packaging and the marketing and the regulations says this is healthy – there is not one red traffic light on any of these things, and none of these are HFSS (high in fat, salt or sugar), [but] you will definitely eat too many calories if you eat this kind of food." Professor van Tulleken explained that these products are deliberately designed to override natural satiety cues. "It is engineered so that you cannot eat to appetite, it’s engineered very specifically and cleverly to bypass appetite," he said. He added that even if consumers managed to stick to calorie guidelines, they would still consume "massively more salt, sugar and saturated fat than is recommended". He questioned the concept of personal responsibility in such an environment, particularly for parents. "So when we talk about personal responsibility as a parent, how do you go into a shop and go: ‘Well, all of this stuff says it’s healthy – there is no warning level, there is no marketing restriction, there is a monkey on the box and it says it supports my family’s health’?" he asked. "How can someone have personal responsibility? This is our national diet. I would say at the moment, there is no functional regulation that captures this," he continued, stressing the difficulty for those with limited resources to discern unhealthy options when "everything about it says it’s healthy". He pointed out that a popular children’s cereal, for instance, boasts 10 health claims on its packaging. The stark warning comes as new figures reveal that 10.5 per cent of children in their first year of primary school in England are obese, a figure that more than doubles to 22.2 per cent by year 6, according to data from the National Child Measurement Programme. Professor van Tulleken lamented that the nation has become "numb" to these alarming statistics. He said that the "pandemic of obesity and other diet-related diseases are driven by commercial incentives". Addressing MPs, he stated: "The problem of diet-related disease is commercially driven – so big food companies are feeding our kids and our adults ultimately to death, and they know they’re doing it, and they’re engineering foods that they know are harmful, and they’re marketing those foods directly to the most vulnerable kids." He further revealed: "We have food industry scientists on and off the record who say we deliberately engineer food to be consumed to excess." Professor van Tulleken attributed the lack of a clear definition for "unhealthy food" to "decades of industry interference, of food corporation interference." He called for the food industry to be "excluded from the room," arguing: "We can define unhealthy food, I think using much tighter rules around salt, fat, sugar and calories." He urged immediate policy action, stating: "We don’t need more research to have really strong policy action." His recommendations included stripping cartoon characters from children’s food packaging, implementing stricter regulations, and severing ties between food charities, policy officials, and the food industry. Highlighting the pervasive nature of the problem, he noted that 95 per cent of ultra-processed food in the UK is high in salt, fat, sugar, or calories. "We have a deeply unjust food system where people are essentially forced to eat unhealthy food," he concluded.
