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Children in Britain are being “fed to death” by unhealthy foods, a top TV doctor has warned. MPs on the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee were told that the nation is facing an “obesity pandemic” which is being driven by commercial interests. Chris van Tulleken, professor of global health at University College London and a BBC TV doctor, said that a typical diet seen as “healthy” – which could include baked beans, fish fingers, whole grain bread, yoghurt and breakfast cereal – would lead to someone eating more than the recommended daily level of calories. “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,” he said. “It is engineered so that you cannot eat to appetite, it’s engineered very specifically and cleverly to bypass appetite. “Even if you stuck to your calories, you would still end up eating massively more salt, sugar and saturated fat than is recommended.” He went on: “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’? “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. “I have no idea how someone living with little money and limited educational resources would tell that this was unhealthy. “Everything about it says it’s healthy.” And he highlighted how a popular children’s cereal has 10 health claims on the pack. He said that existing dietary guidance around fat, salt, sugar and calories could lead to these products being labelled and taxed properly to shift people to a “much healthier diet”. It comes after new figures revealed that one in 10 (10.5%) children in the first year of primary school in England is obese. This rises to 22.2% of children in year 6, according to data from the National Child Measurement Programme. Prof van Tulleken said that the nation had become “numb” to these figures. He called for cartoon characters to be stripped from packs of popular children’s food products and urged governments to make stricter regulations around unhealthy foods. He also called for food charities and policy officials to sever ties with the food industry “that deliberately market the food that is causing the crisis that we’ve seen grow over the last 30 years”. “The pandemic of obesity and other diet-related diseases are driven by commercial incentives,” he said. And he told MPs: “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. “We have food industry scientists on and off the record who say we deliberately engineer food to be consumed to excess.” Prof van Tulleken said that the reason there is not a clear definition of “unhealthy food” is because of “decades of industry interference, of food corporation interference”. He called for the food industry to be “excluded from the room”, adding: “We can define unhealthy food, I think using much tighter rules around salt, fat, sugar and calories.” “We don’t need more research to have really strong policy action,” he told MPs. He highlighted how 95% of ultra processed food in the UK are high in salt, fat, sugar or calories. “We have a deeply unjust food system where people are essentially forced to eat unhealthy food,” he said.
