Hey, Streeting, leave our food alone
3 July 2025
SUGGESTED
Government and Institutions
Callum Price writes for CityAM
2 July 2025
Healthcare
Uncategorized
20 January 2026
Chris Snowdon writes for The Critic
Our Head of Lifestyle Economics Chris Snowdon has written for The Critic on the 10 Year Health Plan for England.
The article said:
“Fining businesses for not controlling what their customers buy doesn’t sound a lot like “less meddling” or “less nanny”, but I suppose it is preferable to putting big warning labels and regressive taxes on food, as the “public health” lobby would like him to do. We don’t know what the “mandatory targets” will be yet, but the idea is that supermarkets will simply sell us fewer calories and we will lose weight.”
“The plan has no chance of working and it would be a public health disaster if it did. Streeting imagines a country in which “everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day”, but this policy doesn’t target the overweight. If supermarket nudges work with the overweight, they will work with everybody, and not everybody needs to reduce their calorie intake at all, let alone by 200 calories a day. Some people should be eating more. Using the proper clinical definitions, there are more underweight children in England than overweight children. If every child consumed around 70 fewer calories a day, there would be two more underweight children for every child who went from being overweight to a normal weight. If they consumed 200 fewer calories a day, the impact would be catastrophic.”
Read the full article here.
The article said:
“Fining businesses for not controlling what their customers buy doesn’t sound a lot like “less meddling” or “less nanny”, but I suppose it is preferable to putting big warning labels and regressive taxes on food, as the “public health” lobby would like him to do. We don’t know what the “mandatory targets” will be yet, but the idea is that supermarkets will simply sell us fewer calories and we will lose weight.”
“The plan has no chance of working and it would be a public health disaster if it did. Streeting imagines a country in which “everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day”, but this policy doesn’t target the overweight. If supermarket nudges work with the overweight, they will work with everybody, and not everybody needs to reduce their calorie intake at all, let alone by 200 calories a day. Some people should be eating more. Using the proper clinical definitions, there are more underweight children in England than overweight children. If every child consumed around 70 fewer calories a day, there would be two more underweight children for every child who went from being overweight to a normal weight. If they consumed 200 fewer calories a day, the impact would be catastrophic.”
Read the full article here.
SHARE
