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This episode of the story is sponsored by IBM. AI can change the way you do business. We know that. But does your organization know it or start? No matter the size of your organization, you can get started on the road to greater productivity if you have the right tools.
which is where IBM's AI assistants come in. They can be trained to fit your needs. It could be automating repetitive time-consuming tasks or using an AI assistant to help improve your customer service with language and context that's based on your business processes.
IBM's AI platform Watson X is here to help if your business is dipping its toe into AI or wanting to scale it up. Learn more about AI from IBM at IBM.com forward slash Watson X. From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Luke Jones. Into this album, Mary Turner's mother has stuck pictures of her baby daughter.
What sort of girl and woman will she grow into? This will depend very largely on what she has to eat and drink. To a certain extent, the state has been nannying us for years. She is gradually weaned so that she will soon be on the way to a mixed art. This start will of course include milk and fruit or vegetable juice as food to give her plenty of good blood and there's food to make her active alert and gain.
But is there even further to go? The Prime Minister has said that new weight loss jobs could be used to help overweight people get back to work. This drug will be very helpful to people who want to lose weight, need to lose weight. Next year, in the UK, adverts for unhealthy fast food will be banned on telly before nine o'clock.
Kistama's government has made a start on the ballooning issue of obesity, but is more nanny-needed though. People shouldn't forget they are costing this country about half the budget of the NHS, getting on for £100 billion a year. That's hitting everyone's pocket.
the story today. Tim Spector on how the government should get aggressive on obesity. My name is Tim Spector. I'm a professor of epidemiology at King's College London. I'm also a co-founder of the Nutrition Science Company, Zoey, and author of several books on nutrition and gut health.
Are you surprised about the position you've now arrived at in UK culture life? I mean, you're a proper guru now. I mean, people obviously won't be from the pandemic and the rest, but what do you make of the position you're now in?
Yeah, definitely rather strange. I find myself as one of the clues in the Times quiz today. Ooh, I would never have guessed. I would be the subject of that. So I do have to sort of pinch myself sometimes and say, how do they get here? We're having started off life as a humble rheumatologist. But it's interesting, it's fun. Yeah, and doing not only really cool science, but hopefully changing potentially millions of people's lives.
And in the same way that GPs always talk about going to dinner parties and then having the person next to them invariably say, oh, can you have a look at this or inspect this rash? I mean, are people forever running their breakfast choices past you or asking you about what they make for dinner and how that is?
No one asks me for dinner anymore because they're worried I'm going to judge what they're eating. So that's been something new in my life. I have to say, listen, doesn't matter. I don't mind if you just get a takeaway, you know, I just quite like to chat, but yes. So certainly it's different topic of conversation is usually about their guts or their meal or, you know, want to show off their zoe scores and show they can beat me. They've got microbes a healthier than mine. Yes.
We're going to talk quite a bit about obesity and the issues that there are for the whole country really at the moment. But just as a starting point, how obese are we? I mean, how big a problem is this before we get into what to do to tackle it?
Well, the majority of people in the UK are either overweight or obese. This is the highest rate in Europe. And our children are even a worse state with huge numbers of even toddlers now obese before they've gone to school.
And this is really setting us up for a complete disaster in the future if we don't do something. Because inevitably that's going to cost those people, particularly in early life, you know, a lifetime of ill health, not only physical, but also mental health.
Yes, and lots of people will want to look for someone to blame for this state of affairs. If we vote on the government and governments that we've had, first of all, there was quite a damning report out of the House of Lords, Food Diet and Obesity Committee, which sort of blamed two things really. We'll get to the industry problems in a moment. But firstly, suggested that actually governments for decades have failed us on this. Do you think that's the case and why might that be the case?
I think it's definitely the case. There's been no preventive action, there's actually no action at all, apart from lots of reports and they've resulted in absolutely no effect whatsoever because there hasn't been the political will and maybe also the cultural will of the country. We come from a country of fairly poor food culture where we're used to spending less on our food than any other country in Europe.
And cost seems to be the only real parameter that we've worried about. So I think it is a combination of things, but ultimately to get major action, it does require government action in the same way it did for cigarettes and alcohol. And we wouldn't be seeing to be serving those to children at the moment.
On those two points, then, you think that all four of the problems in government policy, apathy about prevention, fixation on the cost of food and seeing really more through economic eyes, that actually flows from what us the public are thinking.
I think so, because governments try and do as little as they can that they can get away with and try and focus on what people that put them in office really want them to do. In the past, there's been a bit more of a moral fiber to our governments thinking they have to do the right thing. But I'd say the last 25 years, we haven't really seen that. It's a very different
scenario than when we were dealing with things like smoking and passive smoking in the 1980s, when there was a real feeling that governments were there to protect people. Even when they were pushing things through like even seatbelt laws, there was a huge lot of resistance from the public on some of these measures.
But the government still pushed them through and did the right thing. And as soon as they were introduced, then people saw, of course, that was the right thing to do. So it does need a sort of moral resolve and also longer term thinking. And this has been more of a problem recently where governments have just said, well, what can we do in the next two or three years so that we can get reelected?
and doing something long-term on the National Health Service, or preventively that's going to take 10 years before you see an effect, just just being off the agenda. And it makes me really think that we should be taking these NHS decisions, these long-term strategies out of political control, and more like the Bank of England.
But we'll get back to that a little bit later in terms of what the government couldn't should be doing. But the other prong of the diagnosis of the problem at least according to this law's report was industry and how they approach our nutrition and what they're serving up to us. The report recommended that mandatory regulation has to be introduced on the food industry. Part of that is to exclude businesses that drive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products, from any discussions on the formation
of policy on food diet and obesity prevention. Have they hit the nail on the head there? They absolutely have, yes. They've been lobbying governments to make sure that they don't change the rules for the last 25 years. And they have huge budgets to be able to do that because these big companies, and I think the top 10 companies account for about 70% of our food,
they have budgets that are the size of small countries so they can easily influence government and they've also infiltrated a lot of the nutrition advisors as well so that it's very hard to get independent advice because about a third of the grants in most of the universities are given by these big food companies into nutrition departments.
So actually that's slightly links to what you're saying early on about the tobacco industry because that was the problem for years of tobacco, wasn't it? There was a lot of tobacco money into some of these bits of research which were suggesting that maybe cigarettes weren't as bad as some people were suggesting they are. Are you saying that the lessons from that haven't quite been learned?
Well, absolutely. And a lot of the tobacco companies went and bought into food companies and the same people set them up with the same moral stance. So all the big food companies, only about a third of their products are actually not ultra processed. So 70% of what they're peddling are these really cheap, really addictive
highly refined industrial products and that's giving them huge margins so they can afford not only advertising to kids and big grants to universities, places on boards and they can set up pseudo-scientific institutions and they're doing this in every country.
which often full journalists are thinking they're independent. And they can commission reviews by their academics to muddy the water. And so every time, just like in the cigarette, a debate about passive smoking says, oh, we're not quite sure.
The evidence isn't crystal clear. It's not ready for prime time yet. And why do you think that that seems to work as it does? Because, OK, with something like ultra processed foods, I guess some people can have a bit of an argument about it because that's not quite clear. But we know that sugar isn't the best thing for you. We know that it costs the NHS lots. We know what the impacts are. How is there still this confusion that food companies and others can play with when actually, broadly speaking,
We all know what the problem is. We all know what the solution could be. Well, they're very skilled at making what should be a very simple choice, as you said, into a very hard one. And that was the, in a way, they convinced David Cameron not to extend the sugar levy from a very narrow range of fizzy drinks to all kinds of dairy products and other products across the borders.
as other countries have now done. And they did that with sort of very spurious arguments. So, well, if you do it to dairy products, you're depriving little children of calcium, or we've got added vitamin D in that, more vitamin C or something else, or it's very difficult to tell where your threshold should be. All these sort of vague difficulties that were just piled on and either through experts or directly through lobbying politicians,
to make sure that didn't happen. So there were lots of very clever ways of doing this just to make sense. Well, it's a bridge too far at the moment. Let's see how this goes.
And you may remember Boris Johnson after his COVID scare claimed he was going to go and expand the sugar levy and do something about obesity. And again, the lobbyists managed to persuade him that it was all a bit too complicated. And there's too many factors involved. And it's going to put the prices up and you don't want to be unpopular, Boris.
Tim, how do you feel about the phrase nanny stayed? That's something which some people are concerned about. The idea that the government is telling people too much, how to live their lives and a lot of this should be down to personal responsibility. Does that have any shock with you?
No, I hate the term. As I mentioned, you know, with Nanny's State, we would have no speed limits, but we'd have no age limits for kids riding motorbikes, no seat belts, no airbags, no control on medicines, drugs, and it's a brilliant industry phrase to, you know, stop some new legislation and, you know,
I'm not in favour of banning ultra-processed foods, I think they should be available here to buy, but they should have clear warnings that they are unhealthy like cigarettes or alcohol, and they should be taxed appropriately for foods that don't provide any real nutrition, and are just there as a sort of brief sugar kick that will get some people addicted to them.
People shouldn't forget they are costing this country about half the budget of the NHS, getting on for £100 billion a year. That's hitting everyone's pocket. Coming up, how does that solution actually work in practice? And ultra-processed foods aren't all created equal, so which are worse for you than others? That's the moment.
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So then thinking about how to tackle this problem then, if it is so expensive in NHS and such an enormous problem, is there not something really radical that you would want to see? I would like to see that, but I'm a pragmatist and I realise it's not going to happen. There's about at least 15 countries in the world now that has
legislation about ultra process food. So, you know, we've got to come back from being 20 years behind all these other grown up countries that have a public health policy and start from there. But on the economic point, though, I take your point that when that partial sugar tax was introduced, things were reformulated to the cost didn't necessarily come down. But if you think of something broader across more foodstuffs, people are already worried about the cost of it.
Do you think that could be a real sticking point for policymakers still?
Definitely, it will be the major consideration because economic reasons are things that politicians worry most about and what probably the food companies will be playing on as well. But we have to change the playing field for these food companies because they're making enormous profits, whereas farmers and people who produce real produce are not. And it just seems that we have to somehow equalize things so that
Whole food producers are given the same chances in life as those making synthetic products in a factory to make them appear like real foods. So that means taking money from those companies, some of their profits, and giving them back to people making real foods with either the form of subsidies or grants or whatever it takes.
So just to be clear, you could see a world in which decent taxes levied on ultra-processed foods, and then let's directly put that into subsidies for people creating whole foods.
Yes. I'm not saying that we shouldn't ask big companies to switch some of their products. They can make some real good foods as well. But we've got to give them the right incentives and the right playing field. They can do it. If you told them, you know, we want you to produce, say, breads that don't have all these ultra-processed ingredients in it, have a more fiber, so they're healthier. And at the moment, that's expensive to produce. Well, you know, maybe there will be a subsidy or
They would say, well, we're going to make sure that all our schools, hospitals, prisons, you know, buy your bread so that you've got to market for it. There are lots of ways you can do this. You know, we've got to remember that cigarette smoking didn't stop overnight, just because people started taxing it. As the taxes got higher, there was a direct correlation with reduction in smoking, and that happened over years and years.
And even the adverts and things, they had very small effects, incremental effects. None of these things had a massive overnight effect. Well, that's not exactly true. I think the first thing that did was when people said these are unhealthy and we haven't even done that yet. And to change people's habits, you can't necessarily just go around pointing at all ultra processed foods and say, this is bad for you. We should love them in altogether. So do you think actually there needs to be
more scientific work to actually understand better why they might be not good for us to then allow greater messaging back to people. I mean, just to return to that law report, they said that even though the evidence showing a correlation between consumption of ultra process foods and poor health was alarming, they said that it seemed like it was, they said it was casual links and it hadn't been clearly demonstrated. Does it need to be more clearly demonstrated? Scientifically thinking.
Yes, I mean, we don't know the exact mechanisms. There are about four or five major mechanisms by which ultra-processed foods cause these problems. But we don't know for each food, which one it is. And also, the studies that we've done so far have really been what we call on the population or epidemiology level.
doesn't allow you to go into the details of mechanism, and therefore makes it harder for people to choose which ones are the really the worst ones compared to others, because there are some things that are clearly not all the same, not all potato crisps with the same, for example. Some have 30 ingredients and are pretty addictive and not made from potatoes.
and other. Whereas at the other end of the scale, there are potato crisps that still have the skin on, obviously look real, and they've only got potatoes, you've got salt, and you've got high quality olive oil. And they're a world apart, but they're all at the moment, categories together. So we need to improve all this work, but it's been had no funding at all from government. And of course,
The food companies have made sure that our universities don't focus on this. And that's what Coca-Cola did. They gave out all these grants to study exercise in children, propagating the idea that doesn't matter really what you ate or drank, as long as you exercised enough, you'd be fine.
and they brilliantly obscured the field for over 10 years with this this tactic. Thinking about government then, this new government has certainly made a song and dance about how they want to pivot the health service in particular away from just
Treating people and actually preventing ill health in the first place. We've already had a budget where there was more money for the NHS, but there wasn't a lot of talk about how to pivot the NHS. Do you look at where's treating and co and think that's a man with a plan or do you still need convincing that they might be on top of this?
I've only had one brief meeting with him, but I was impressed that he does have ideas on what to change, he does realise it's important. We will deliver three big shifts in the focus of the NHS, from analogue to digital, hospital to community and sickness to prevention. And what gives me confidence that this can be done,
is the innovation we already see taking place in our health service and our country today pointing away to a better future. But of course he's got a huge problem in trying to do prevention at the same time as our health service is falling apart.
The danger is they won't be able to do both. And they've made the right start with this advertising ban, but that's the sticking plaster on a sharp bite, really.
When you say advertising, you mean the ban on junk TV adverts, which is going to come in? For children, yes. Yeah. They're not going to be shown before 9pm. It's fairly trivial in the space of things. So I'm hoping that his reply to the Lord's report, which I think I have to do in January, is going to tell us how serious they are.
about really tackling this in the same way that the UK was at the forefront of tackling smoking. And we're now at the back of the packet in insulting this out. Just finally Tim, I worry this might be a red rag to a bull, but we should ask it.
is all of this a bit of a moot point when we have all of these fat lots jabs coming down the slip way and will that not in a few years deal with the issue of obesity and you know problematic weight issues and the rest of us can crack on eating sugar and unhealthy crisps as and when we want to as long as it's part of a healthier diet.
I think it's a good question because there's no doubt that these jobs, these GLP1 drugs are here to stay. They're going to be in pill form. They're going to be much cheaper. Again, the UK is way behind the rest of the world and using them effectively, hardly any have been given out on the NHS.
And they are game changers, as any doctor will tell you for people living with obesity. But they don't address a number of problems. There will always be people who can't tolerate them at the moment. It's about one in six, have quite severe side effects and can't take them.
children who've gone through, say, six years with obesity will have had major problems that you can't reverse completely with these drugs. And also there's the other problem with these foods having major effects on the gut microbes that cause things like inflammation and other problems that aren't going to be reversed just by the fat jabs themselves.
So we do have to at the same time deal with the quality of our food as with treating purely the weight issue. But it's the perfect time to do it because people can change their diets if the pressure of that hunger and the addiction to these junk foods is taken away. So I'd like to see more research looking at not just the jab, but using the jab plus healthy nutrition advice and education. And the food companies are going to lose profit.
pharmaceutical companies will make more and the big food companies will be making less. So that means they'll be trying harder to attract people who aren't obese into eating more of them and making them obese. So it's going to be a bit of a war out there. So it doesn't change the argument in my view at all. You know, we need to double down and this is a great time to get people to eat healthily because it has so many other benefits.
As well as your food choice being the most important one you can make for your health, your food choice is also the most important one as an individual you can make for climate change in the planet.
We reached out to the government about this and the Health and Social Care Department said to us in a statement, quote, this government inherited an obesity crisis which is costing the NHS and the economy billions of pounds. They say they're committed to tackling the issue head-on, adding, we have already made a strong start by restricting junk food advertising on TV and online, limiting school children's access to fast food and confirming that we will take steps to ensure the soft drinks industry levy remains effective and fit for purpose.
Tim's back to Professor in Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London and author of the Food for Life Cookbook. If you'd enjoyed this episode, try this one on for size, the new science of aging and the quest to live forever. We may be the only species that's aware of mortality. So for example, if a baby elephant dies, the elephants in the herd will know that and even mourn it.
But I don't think any other animal is aware that they have an expiration date. So that knowledge of our mortality has driven culture and human behavior for centuries. But for most of that existence, there was very little we could do about it. It's only in the last 50 years that
Serious efforts have been made to understand the underlying biology of why we age and why we die, and that in turn is leading to efforts to combat aging. We'll put a link to that in the description of this episode. Today's producers were Olivia Case and Sam Chantarassac. The executive producer was Kate Ford, and sound design and theme composition was by Malicella. I'm Luke Jones. See you soon.
How often can you say a gift is truly unique? When you gift a loved one an Ancestry DNA test, you're giving them the keys to unlock their own personal journey of discovery. And with our festive sale now on, you can save on a truly meaningful gift. Help them discover their heritage, learn about their ancestors, and make new family connections this Christmas. Visit ancestry.co.uk to give them a gift that is truly unique. Terms apply.
