National Food Strategy author Henry Dimbleby has warned the government it is sleepwalking into a health disaster if it relies on weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to tackle the obesity crisis.
Delivering a keynote speech to the Rowett Institute at the University of Aberdeen last night, Dimbleby said he feared the new Labour government was failing to take action such as introducing new HFSS health taxes because it hoped the revolutionary new drugs would solve the problem.
Dimbleby said he worried millions of Brits would end up medicated by the appetite-suppressing drugs, which would burden the NHS with extra costs and could have unforeseen side effects.
He urged health secretary Wes Streeting and Chancellor Rachel Reeves to listen to calls from campaigners and the recent House of Lords report to bring in new taxes on unhealthy food, which could be used to increase access to healthy food.
Dimbleby’s report in 2021 recommended a raft of taxes on salt and sugar, which he claimed should replace the soft drinks sugar tax to encourage a massive shift to reformulation.
There has been widespread speculation Labour will revive the strategy as an ‘off the shelf’ solution to the obesity crisis, with a recent report by fellow former health tsar Lord Darzi urging Streeting and the prime minister to take “bold action” to regulate the industry.
However, Dimbleby accused ministers of dragging their feet.
“The new government has an opportunity,” he said. “So far they have ideas, they have a framework, but we haven’t seen enough by way of policy.
“We haven’t seen a plan. We don’t have boots in the mud and until we do and unless we do we will end up an impoverished and sick nation.”
Dimbleby, who quit his role with the last government in protest at its lack of action on health, warned ministers that drugs like Ozempic risked becoming the “obesity version of Prozac”.
“There is a whole array of these drugs coming down the pipeline,” he said. “This is going to completely change the nature of our society and I wouldn’t be surprised if in 15 years we didn’t have a situation like we have now with millions of people on anti-depressants.
“I think for some people these drugs are going to be life-changing, but they persuade the politicians not to act.”
Dimbleby said that the UK was being left behind by other countries, including the US, which was taking localised action to tackle obesity and health inequalities.
“If you go to America, things that we see as nanny state are being done in the name of capitalism.
“We have evidence in the National Food Strategy of programmes in Washington where insurers have been going in to provide discounted fruit & veg to people living in poverty.
“They are finding this is a more effective way to deal with the problem than drugs.
“If you just rely on drugs it won’t work work and there will be a huge cost to the NHS for something which is a policy failure.”
Dimbleby’s stance puts him on a collision course with influential nudge think tank Nesta, which at the weekend urged the government to use a two-pronged policy of weight loss drugs and mandatory targets on supermarkets, which it claimed could could halve obesity rates by the end of the decade.
It followed a two-year assessment of policies available to ministers, which looked at evidence from 3,000 different studies, with Nesta recommending a blueprint of “treatment and prevention”. It also includes a call for a compulsory front-of-pack health score system, further measures to crack down on junk food ads, and a ban on promotions for HFSS-laden takeaways.
However, the report warned that despite their likely high impact, a policy of new taxes on food risked pushing up food prices, which in the current economic climate would not attract sufficient political support.
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