LORD DARZI: We must stop destroying the lives of our children with sugar-stuffed foods

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For the past 30 years, I’ve worked as a cancer surgeon in the NHS and I know prevention is better than cure. 

Just ask any patient or their family.

Far too many people attending St Mary’s Hospital in central London, where I work, could have avoided the trauma and upset of ill health if we’d intervened earlier to help them lead healthier lives. That is heartbreaking.

We now know more than ever before about what causes cancer – from tobacco to red meat. Yet we still have a national sickness service, not a national health service. It’s still too easy to be unhealthy, and too hard to make the healthier choice.

Today, as many as two in five NHS patients wouldn’t need our help if they had led healthier lives. The cost of illness arising from poor diets, too much alcohol and smoking tobacco costs the NHS in England more than £11billion a year

Today, as many as two in five NHS patients wouldn’t need our help if they had led healthier lives. The cost of illness arising from poor diets, too much alcohol and smoking tobacco costs the NHS in England more than £11billion a year. As our society ages, we can’t afford to go on like this.

But the biggest challenge is obesity. Childhood obesity continues to rise. While obesity rates in middle-class communities are falling, obesity rates are rising for the poorest kids. It is a national scandal that we now see cases of children with diabetes caused by obesity.

It is good that the Government and the NHS have said that prevention is a top priority. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said it’s the best hope for a ‘happier, healthier future’. But our policies must now go much further than ever before.

That’s why I’ve been working with the Institute for Public Policy Research to come up with a fresh plan to tackle the public health crisis head on.

It is a national scandal that we now see cases of children with diabetes caused by obesity

We now know more than ever before about what causes cancer – from tobacco to red meat

Our plan says that we need dramatic action across society. It simply isn’t good enough to keep repeating the old mantra of individual responsibility when we face a public health emergency. The blame culture might feel good for some, but it isn’t working. We need a smarter approach. We need to make it easier for people to make healthier choices. It’s time to make doing the right thing the right thing to do.

There’s little point preaching about individual responsibility when high streets are stuffed full of junk food outlets. In the poorest communities, there are up to five times as many fast food outlets as in wealthier areas. The food industry spends 30 times more money trying to get people to eat food that’s bad for their health than the Government spends promoting healthy eating. The supermarkets promote highly processed foods – laced with sugar, fat and salt – at ultra-low prices. When the food industry spends millions to persuade us to eat poorly, it’s nonsense to pretend this is just about individual free will.

We still have a national sickness service, not a national health service. It’s still too easy to be unhealthy, and too hard to make the healthier choice

We need to tackle obesity just like we took on smoking. Smoking rates have more than halved over the past 50 years and we need to similarly cut obesity rates.

In the IPPR plan, we propose introducing plain packaging for all chocolate, sweets and other confectionery along with crisps and sugary drinks. This would put it on a level playing field with fruit and vegetables, which usually have limited branding with see-through packaging – and so would reduce temptation for shoppers, especially children, attracted to the bright colours and images of cartoon characters.

More than that, it would make the millions spent by corporations such as US giant Kraft (owner of Cadbury) simply pouring money down the drain.

Plain packaging would begin to change the behaviour – and the scale – of the sugar industry, just as our measures against smoking have had an impact on the tobacco industry. To support this further, we should stop companies advertising unhealthy foods on TV, especially those aimed at children, before the 9pm watershed.

At the moment, a staggering 4.5million tons of ‘wonky’ fresh fruit and vegetables are wasted every year for cosmetic reasons. These should be given to local schools to provide free fruit and vegetables for pupils. We want to help people to cook healthy meals at home, so we also propose a new levy on the profits of the largest supermarkets to fund the provision of community cooking classes.

As our politicians argue constantly about Brexit, they’ve ignored the health of the nation. For two decades, preventable illness and deaths declined. But as the IPPR has shown, this progress stopped in 2012.

If we had maintained it, then some 130,000 deaths could have been prevented. We don’t need nannying – but we do need a return to eating what our grandparents would have recognised as ‘real food’, not eating too much of it, and to a diet with more fruit and vegetables and less highly processed junk.