Action on Sugar in drag
A tiny pressure group is dressing up as the World Health Organisation
Extend success of UK sugar tax to cakes, biscuits and chocolate, experts urge
The sugar tax has been so successful in improving people’s diets that it should be extended to cakes, biscuits and chocolate, health experts say.
What success? Since the sugar tax was introduced in 2018, rates of so-called obesity among 4-5 year olds has risen from 9.5% to 10.4% and rates among 10-11 year olds have risen from 20.1% to 23.6%. The bulk of this increase came during the pandemic but rates were already rising before that.
The levy on the soft-drinks industry led to a 34.3% fall in total sugar sales from such products between 2015 and 2020 and many fizzy drinks containing much less.
That’s what the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities (née Public Health England) claims, but did it really? A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2021 claimed that the tax was associated with a 9.8% reduction in sugar consumption from soft drinks, but it was retracted last year after the authors found a major error in it. It has since been replaced by a new version of the study in which the decline is said to have been just 2.7%. That amounts to eight grams of sugar per week - just under five calories per day. Not only is that a negligible amount, but there is evidence from other studies that people compensate for consuming fewer calories from taxed drinks by consuming more calories from other drinks.
In summary, the impact of the sugar tax on health was either nil or very close to nil. It has, however, cost consumers £300 million a year, ruined several cherished soft drink brands and tanked the share price of the makers of Irn-Bru.
The plea is published in the WHO’s bulletin, which urges governments worldwide to use the reformulation of food to address the growing crisis of excess weight.
If it’s in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization it must be a serious piece of impartial research, right?
Not so fast. Who are these ‘experts’? One of those quoted in the Guardian article is Graham ‘mad dog’ MacGregor who is the chairman of Action on Sugar. Another is Kawther Hashem who is described as a ‘lecturer in public health nutrition’ at Queen Mary University of London, but who is also a founder member and leading spokesperson for Action on Sugar.
Katherine Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, is not one of the authors but the Guardian includes a supportive quote from her to show what a groundswell of support exists for taxing cakes and biscuits. Jenner is also a founder member of Action on Sugar and was its director until 2022.
The other authors of the WHO paper are Mhairi Brown, who is the head of policy at Action on Sugar, and Hattie Burt, who is the Policy and Communications Officer at World Action Sugar, Salt and Health, which is Action on Sugar by another name and shares the same charity number.
None of the authors of the WHO study mention their affiliation to Action on Sugar in the text and it is not listed as a conflict of interest.
Consensus Action on Salt, Sugar and Health - to give it its full name - is a tiny organisation based at Queen Mary University of London. It employs four people and received £74 in donations last year. In 2022, it received £7 in donations (yes, seven pounds). If it didn’t have a load of cash in the bank after getting a big grant years ago from the mysterious Marcela Trust (whose circular charitable object is to provide ‘support to selected causes in line with the Charity’s objects’) it wouldn’t be a going concern. It is essentially a mouthpiece for Graham MacGregor who is a bona fide fanatic.
Who better to produce an evaluation of the sugar tax than the people who work for a single-issue pressure group that you could fit in a phone box and who lobbied for it in the first place?! (This is not the first time this has happened.) They conclude that the tax rate should be increased and it should be extended to food. Of course they do! They’ve been saying this all along. They were saying it before the sugar tax was even introduced.
And now they can say that they have the WHO’s stamp of approval. It is not an official WHO report but it is the next best thing and most people don’t know the difference anyway. The Guardian clearly doesn’t…
The World Health Organization wants the next UK government to expand coverage of the levy to help tackle tooth decay, obesity, diabetes and other illnesses.
I suppose that sounds more compelling than ‘Action on Sugar wants the next UK government to expand coverage of the levy to help tackle tooth decay, obesity, diabetes and other illnesses’. In any case, it is probably true that the WHO wants the government to do this, because the WHO is staffed by the same kind of people who join nutty lobby groups such as Action on Sugar.
And so, in conclusion, defund the World Health Organisation.
"ruined several cherished soft drink brands"
Really? Which brands are those??
If these crackpots can be given a space in a national daily to preach their guff to its audience (which, being the Graun, probably laps it up) you should be able to get a national column to debunk it. I fear your are too tainted by the Tufton Street badge to make it across the threshold of the Graun but others might oblige. This stuff can’t be allowed to go unchallenged in national fora or it becomes accepted truth.