Food junk

Another week of silliness from the anti-obesity folk

There had been a glut of food-related junk in the news recently. Here are four stories to ponder.

First up, a study was published by some activist-academics which supposedly showed how dreadful the ‘food environment’ is.

The killer graphic is shown below. It shows the proportion of brand sales of the world’s top 20 food and beverage companies that are classified as ‘healthier’ and ‘unhealthy’.

Overall, 89%% of the top 20 global food and beverage companies’ brand sales were classified as unhealthy according to the WHO Euro NPM.

The NPM is the nutrient profile model created by the Reverend Mike Rayner, a man who claimed to hear the voice of God telling him to bring about a sugar tax. As you can probably guess from the chart above, the NPM sets a pretty high bar for ‘healthier food’ (see my briefing What Is Junk Food? for details). You can imagine the vast majority of Mars’s products being classed as ‘unhealthy’ but Kellogg’s? That miserable old progressive John Harvey Kellogg must be spinning in his grave.

About 70 per cent of Danone’s products are classed as unhealthy and yet they specialise in producing avowedly healthy fare to such an extent that they were recently lobbying the government to introduce taxes and advertising restrictions on food that is deemed high in fat, sugar and salt to nobble their competitors.

But this study doesn’t look at the portfolios of each company. It looks at sales - and sales are not dictated by the producer but by the consumer. All it shows is that people really like ‘unhealthy’ food. What are the busybodies going to do about that?

Incidentally, I met Mike Rayner in the Eurostar waiting room in Brussels once. He was buying a sugary drink.

On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.

The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.

Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?

As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.

Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to ‘society’ was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.

Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.

The ‘report’ that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a ‘full analysis’ but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.

Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.

Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion - now rounded up to £100 billion - was a direct cost to government…

The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.

The findings in question involved the shocking revelation that KFC objects to local busybodies trying to stop new KFC shops opening. I have since written about this for the Spectator…

Mr Turnbull is one of England’s 130 public health directors. The job of these health directors, handsomely remunerated with salaries well over £100,000, is to make a nuisance of themselves at council meetings, waffling about ‘health inequalities’ and objecting whenever anyone tries to open an off licence or kebab shop. During the pandemic they were about as much use as a chocolate teapot because they don’t know much about infectious disease. They don’t know about non-infectious diseases for that matter, except that they are caused by capitalism.  

More and more local councils are banning new fast food outlets within 400 metres of schools - i.e. where people live - but it is an evidence-free policy.

Finally, I was amused to see this story in the Guardian recently…

Ultra-processed foods are viewed as no more appealing than less processed foods, research has found.

A University of Bristol study compared the taste perception of different food types to test the theory that calories and level of processing are key factors influencing how much we like and desire food.

The study’s lead author, Prof Peter Rogers, said the results “challenge the assumption that ultra-processed foods are ‘hyperpalatable’, and it seems odd that this has not been directly tested before”.

As ammunition against the likes of Chris van Tulleken, this is appealing, but I’m afraid the study doesn’t stack up.

Our original plan was to carry out a laboratory-based study, but COVID-19 restrictions in the UK prevented face-to-face testing. Instead, therefore, we conducted this virtual study, testing more participants on more foods than would have been feasible in a laboratory ‘taste-and-spit’ study. The participants made their judgements based on imagined consumption of the various foods, displayed as high-quality colour images.

Yes, you read that correctly. No food was tasted in the making of this study!