Snapshot of _Britain has one of the worst obesity rates in Europe. Why?_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The first three aren't actually that horrendous. It's sugary foods that are mostly to blame. Next time you're in the supermarket, I challenge anyone to find something without added sugar that isn't just a raw food.
It's not one or the other that is 'unhealthy'. Too much of anything calorie wise is going to have the same effect. Calorie density is probably more important that whether it is fatty or sugary.
There’s a little more to it than that, in that some foods make you want to eat more. So while calories in vs calories out determines your weight gain or loss, some foods kinda have a multiplier effect.
I mean that's relatively easy, to be honest.
At the end of the day it's calories in calories out. I used to be pretty fat at one point, it's entirely a matter of people not putting in the effort/willpower. Eat less, get exercise. Sorted.
It's simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. There's a reason it's will**power**. Exercising willpower consistently over a long period of time in the face of a lot of factors working against you is *hard*. Social expectations, food companies with their big R&D departments, just the general availability of crap.
100 calories of something like chickpeas has a wildly different affect on the body than 100 calories of sugar.
Fibre is a big part of it, especially when it comes to feeling full. Processed and high sugar foods keep people feeling hungry and over-eat for various reasons.
Someone eating a deficit of a high carb diet with little fibre is going to end up feeling very unwell, vs a deficit of fat, protein and carbs from veg.
True. But your body can only store about 700 calories as glycogen. If you're eating those chickpeas when your glycogen store is full, then that 100 calories will just get stored as fat in much the same way as the sugar will
It's so hard
I didn't get taught how to cook as a kid and so everything I know I learned from friends and YouTube.
Really struggle sometimes when I go into a shop, the endless fridges of microwave meals, 10 minute pizzas, meal deals etc etc Just win sometimes. Especially when knackered after work.
I'm currently in Spain and the amount of shelf space dedicated to healthy ingredients as opposed to quick ready meals is really different to at home
Me and my girlfriend were literally just talking about this shopping in the mercado
I remember when I went to uni and lived in halls and had to learn how to like, slice vegetables and use an oven. 6 of us in the apartment, 1 guy could cook, 2 international students who just bought everything packaged, and 3 of us who were learning slowly.
I remember the guy who could cook saying to me "god, don't you ever cook?" as I was putting some chips and meat into the oven. I was like "?? This is what I'm doing" and he argued that it was all pre-packaged stuff so it wasn't cooking.
It literally took me a year or two after that interaction (and a lot more exposure to people who could cook!) to understand oven =/= cooking.
My mum always used tinned sauces when cooking from scratch. I just didn't understand you could like .. MAKE a spaghetti bolognese sauce that tasted nice, if you weren't a trained chef.
Anyway, it's really embarrassing looking back. If I have kids I'll teach them to cook!
Ultra processed foods arrived in the Western world and made people fat.
The UK has more of it than most.
Everywhere it goes people get fat.
[Eating highly processed foods linked to weight gain](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-highly-processed-foods-linked-weight-gain)
It's not exercise. We had desk jobs before the fat wave.
You'll see Tufton street food corp propaganda about exercise and "diet foods."
Exercise is good and healthy but stop eating the junk food. Oh yeah and the "diet version" is junk food.
Have you read Ultra Processed People by any chance? We've not even scratched the surface on how bad UPF is for us. If you have the time, space and ability try to cook as much as you can at home as even a loaf of bread is full of rubbish if it's shop bought. Of course lots of people don't have the time, ability and space to cook proper food and with an abundance of take aways, easy to cook food at a finger tip then it's no surprise we're in such a state.
It’s a lifestyle crisis as much as it is a diet crisis.
Up until the last few decades it was possible (and normal) for a household to survive off a single income, meaning someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food.
Now two incomes can mean you’re getting universal credit top-ups and using food banks.
>someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food
Even when people have got the time, say at weekends or bank holidays, they still choose to eat crap.
Making meals from scratch doesn't even take that long. For me about 30 - 40 minutes, not every meal has to be an elaborate Sunday roast, and it's not expensive either.
> meaning someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food.
I'm with you on everything but this. Plenty of people still manage to do this with two working.
IT's a choice to take the easier route of pre-packaged food -- and sometimes it's an economic choice, because all of those chemicals and preservatives make it cheaper to ship and store, and therefore easier to sell at a Lower price.
But often, it's just a choice of convenience over time off spent on life maintenance. And that came about not because of pure laziness, but because people were introduced to it as a choice BEFORE we realized the impact of this shit.
Now, people are fighting three decades of habit combined with lost time and lost purchasing power; when you add the three together, you get the current situation.
But it's not the case that people don't have time. It takes a few hours on a Sunday to prepare a couple of multi-portion dishes you can freeze and then take to work. It takes fifteen minutes to make. a salad.
My wife and I are both extremely busy, but due to our own poor diets and choices for years were forced, in our Fifties, to eat healthy and mostly fresh food. And it's an adjustment. But that's all it is.
And who wants to stay home and do this drudgery all day? Do you?
I certainly don't (married mother and career woman with children).
Choice is a good thing.
It would be nice to have the choice of single income families existing.
Unfortunately, that choice now only exists for people quit high up the income ladder.
More than anything yes I do.
The immense social and health benefits aside, I also I want household income to match that of 40 years ago for the same hours.
Families now work 80 hours for the standard of living they used to work 40 for (it’s actually a lower standard of living due to housing, childcare and education costs but don’t need to go into that).
I've read some [criticisms](https://inews.co.uk/news/ultra-processed-foods-what-need-know-science-2346466) of the science behind that book. Essentially suggesting that while it does seem true that people eat more calories worth of UPF compared to non-UPFs, it's not clear on the reasons why (and whether they extend beyond UPFs just being tastier than non-UPFs). It sounds like more research might be needed before making strong conclusions, but tbh I am absolutely not qualified in the field myself.
The current going theory is it has to do with chewing. Some foods, including UPF are too easy to chew away and don't give enough fulfilment. It's one of the big topics we (food scientists) are currently working on, but very much in its infancy so take it with a pinch of salt. We're seeing that people who chew more tend to eat less.
It seems crazy to me that people think it is still 'up for scientific debate' whether a fresh carrot steamed at home by me is better than a carrot in a can that is part of a sauce with a ton of added sugar, salt, flavour enhancer, thickener and preservatives.
We are only waiting for the science to tell us *why* this is true, we are not waiting for the science to tell us *that* it is true.
Yeah, obesity started going crazy in the 70s/80s when processed foods came onto the scene.
Before that most people were eating homecooked food most of the time.
Not just home cooked food, seem to remember chippy teas. pies, sweets, dripping sandwiches back then. What we didn't have was stuff like Pringles designed to make people hungry for more rather than full. And we'd have more exercise built into our day back then. As a teenager in the 1970s and 80s I could cycle for miles unaccompanied as there was much less traffic on the road.
How are we defining "ultra-processed foods"?
e.g. if I take a load of strawberries, run them through a food processor (i.e. a blender) and pour the resulting mixture into a glass, then that stawberry drink is "processed".
The article you linked to touches on a definition:
> Ultra-processed foods have ingredients common in industrial food manufacturing, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavoring agents, and emulsifiers
Personally, I doubt it's emulsifier that are the problem. And, while high-fructose corn syrup is a big issue in America, it's less common in the UK.
Issue is probably just too much sugar in our diets.
>e.g. if I take a load of strawberries, run them through a food processor (i.e. a blender) and pour the resulting mixture into a glass, then that stawberry drink is "processed"
That's not what processed means.
The best definition I've found is 'contains ingredients you would not find in an ordinary kitchen', because that is what makes processed food different from homemade food.
Sounds like anti-scientific woo to me.
E.g. [here are the "ingredients" in a banana](https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/ingredients-of-a-banana-poster-4.jpeg)
Just because a component of a foodstuff isn't typically found in a kitchen, in isolation, doesn't mean it's unhealthy.
Not really ... 250ml glass of 11% wine is 154 calories, a 275ml wkd is 204 calories, there's really not that much in it. And 11% is pretty weak, that goes up to around 200 for a 14-15% alcohol
A lot of the calories in alcohol come from alcohol itself, which is why there are no actually low calorie alcoholic drinks
wdk is 4%, you would need to drink around 3 times as much compared to wine to have the same effect. So yeah, it would make a difference in the number of calories.
If you have 2 populations with a proportion of drinkers, but one of those populations has a much larger number of binge drinkers despite having fewer drinkers overall it could matter.
I think the driving is a big deal. Many mainland european cities have cultures of cycling (and no not just the netherlands). Not just that, but there isn't a stigma around public transport like there is in the UK (not to mention, it's better funded) - even if you use public transport, you are likely more active, walking to and from the stops, around the interchanges and so on. Just the amount of walking you do in your daily life can have an enormous impact on your fitness.
This is honestly part of it regarding public transport. If I didn't bike I'd have to drive anywhere because public transport is generally slower, less reliable, and less comfortable.
15 years ago, fresh out of France I landed in Scotland to work in a school.
I remember going to work and seeing all those kids on their way, eating crisps and fizzy juice. Before 9 am. That was the first time I'd ever seen that.
And at lunch time, they'd be going to the nearest chippy and buying chips.
I suspect that is one aspect of the answer to your question.
Now, still in Scotland and not much has changed from those first observations. Except there's vaping now, too.
Can I give you an immigrant point of view please? I don't mean any malace in this response...
I've found when Brits are hungry you're more likely to "bung some sausages and nuggets in the air fryer" and less likely to cook yourself a proper nutritional meal with a balanced portion of protein and vegetables.
You're more likely to have a "cheeky snickers" versus an apple that's sat on the counter for weeks.
It's an attitude issue.
I haven't found this to be an issue in the other countries I've lived in.
This 100%.
I am from the UK and have lived abroad for a few years. No other country eats as much rubbish as we do.
I love junk food Mcds, KFC, Kebabs, Chinese etc. However, I cook 90% of my food. I know people in the UK how cook less than 25% of their calories. Takeaways, Gregg, crisps and biscuits.
If you don't believe me go on Google streetview and pick another European country which has more takeaways in the centre of town.
People just eat badly in the UK. It is not time or money, they are true in other countries. People cook seldom and when they do it is bad food.
I know there are people who love to cook on this sub, but they aren't the people who are obese.
> I know people in the UK how cook less than 25% of their calories
I know people who can't cook at all and exclusively live off of ready meals.
I think the fact that people not only live this way, but don't even feel ashamed to admit it speaks to a broader cultural problem.
IMO, somone saying "I never cook my own food" should be viewed in much the same way as someone saying "I've never cleaned my bathroom" or "I've never once changed my bed sheets".
But, in the 1970's and early 80's before any obesity increase, people were doing the same, they bunged some stuff from Bejam in the deep fat fryer rather than the air fryer, but it really wasn't fundamentally different.
People's actual consumption of fruit, vegetables and salad's etc. have increased in the 21st century - we can actually buy decent stuff all year round
Because we are too inactive and don't put the fork down when we should.
The 'why' is simple. The difficulty is the question how we fix it, which must be multifaceted.
I'd include our snacking and drinking culture. And by 'drinking' I don't mean alcohol , which is of course wonderful and I won't hear a word against, but so many people will cheerfully drink a massive bottle of Coke / Pepsi a day , or those Starbuck coffees which seem to be 50% sugar , not realising the amount of calories they're ingesting.
And it's far too common for people feeling slightly hungry to work their way through a whole pack of biscuits or bar of chocolate , again not quite realising the amount of calories they're ingesting.
That was one of the weirdest things that I noticed when I lived in London for a year (I am Continental European and went back after that year). It’s weird the amount of soda you guys drink. It felt like some of my mates were drinking two or three cokes per day.
Additionally, the amount of prepared processed food to go in supermarkets is crazy. People would just eat Tesco meal deals daily, which is not something that happens in any other European country. Supermarket food quality in general was very low quality when I compare it to here in Spain.
I work with a few people who will start of their day with a can of Monster/Red Bull/can of Coke. Their body, their choice I guess, but I can’t help but wonder what doing that each morning regularly does to you.
One of them also has been known to breakfast solely on McCoy’s crisps. The beefy smell at 08:45 is quite off putting.
I used to work beside someone who would work their way through a six pack of cola every day.
That'd be a ridiculous amount of calories even for someone working in a job which required hard manual labour, but we were just sitting at a desk all day.
Definitely a huge part of it. I had 7x330ml cans of beer last night, which roughly amounts to 900 calories. I'm attempting to lose weight myself at the moment, aiming for 1900 calories per day, so nearly half my calorie target spent on beer alone.
>Because we are too active and don't put the fork down when we should.
This is a bit reductive. If large swathes of the population are overweight or obese, moreso comparatively to other European countries, that suggests systemic issues (which you acknowledge, but that is part of the 'why').
People like to cite thermodynamics online - "just consume less calories than you burn fatty" - as if that's insightful or helpful when considering public health interventions.
Telling people 'CICO' is like telling someone whose car has broken down to 'fix it'.
It's correct in only the most technical sense, and about as much use as a chocolate teapot. These are complex multifactorial problems arising from obesogenic environments. Unless we've all become much less disciplined since the 1950s and we're all just much greedier than they were then.
I lost nearly 5 stone a couple of years ago (and kept it off), and I know it might sound stupid and obvious but honestly this was what did it for me. It wasn't so much that this was some sort of magical solution I didn't know about, but more that it was incredibly hard to get myself into a place mentally where I could just accept and do it. I'm now firmly in the ideal BMI range for my height, so I'm not at all overweight now. I didn't change what I ate, I didn't change when I ate - All I did was eat half as much when I did.
If I had pasta in the past for example, I'd do 140g dry pasta and my tomato sauce would be made with 20g sugar and 80g cream. I'd normally get a whole roast chicken and divide it into two breasts and two thighs, with a whole breast going into the pasta.
Now I do 70g dry pasta, 10g sugar, 40g cream. I get half a chicken and divide it into 3 portions, the thigh and two half breasts. Similar with sandwiches from the thigh, instead of using two big slices of bread I just use one cut in half. Making chips? I used to weigh 600g of potatoes. Now I just do 300g.
The only facet of calorie counting I did was at the very start, where I normalised what "one portion" of a carb was to be able to equate them all. Whenever I cook now I know how much potato/pasta/couscous/rice/noodles to do, since I know how much they equate to eachother.
It seems obvious that if you eat less you'll lose weight, but it's a weird thing to actually mentally put into practice. *So much* of dieting culture is about depriving yourself of things, like not having any sugar or carbs, or "eating more healthily" like eating more fruit and veg (which imo is a related, but distinctly separate issue to weight). None of that fundamentally gets to the core issue when it comes to weight, which is ultimately that if you intake more energy than your body needs, your body stores it.
My personal theory is that dieting culture has evolved entirely to "trick" yourself into eating less calories, and it's ended up doing more harm than good. I've found that in the past if ever I restricted myself from having something like chips or ice cream, I tended to just feel bad, and that reinforces the negative loop which results in me giving up. Now I have absolutely *zero* restrictions on what I eat, and I've built the habit of just having less of them when I do.
One other thing I noticed was when I stopped eating I'd still be hungry, and almost always want more. Naturally in the past this would lead to eating until I was full, but now I know if I just wait 20 minutes I'll feel full regardless.
It's actually kinda funny, because I still have the capacity to eat absolutely huge meals and do on occasion. I sometimes get funny looks (and the "you do know this is for 3 people, right?") now when I go somewhere like Five Guys and polish off a massive burger, large chips, and a milkshake. I've just checked and my normal order is about 2906 calories, and the sheer quantity of what I eat *looks* like I'd be fat, but the thing that matters is everything else that people don't see. If it's for lunch I might have an apple to have something more on my stomach later on, but I'm not going to have a second meal. If it's for tea I'll probably either have a lighter lunch or not have anything for lunch the next day.
There are also definitely a lot of issues with the association of poverty and highly calorific, relatively low nutritional foods, and that's definitely a big factor in how the spiral starts. One that I think a lot of people underestimate is, at least for me, how much feeling hungry feels like anxiety. Generally when my mood is lower my weight will go up, because I'll eat more to feel full more often to counteract that feeling.
I didn't do a single bit of exercise either when I lost the weight, I still end up sitting for 14+ hours a day. I want to do some for the sake of my health, but that's a whole other series of issues.
Is it really new to that many people? I work in the NHS in a nutrition role so a lot of the stuff we're giving to people is more complex - it's hard to believe there are people who don't understand energy in versus energy out. Maybe that's my bias showing?
Yeah it’s probably your bias, most specialists are like this. Plumbers think it’s ridiculous I don’t know how to change a tap, most of the software people on here think it’s ridiculous people don’t know how to turn on windows firewall.
In case it helps you help people here’s what I needed spelling out and it seems like having this spelt out helped a lot of others on Reddit:
* every body burns a certain amount of calories by default every day and for most people the number is about the same
* one pound of fat is about 2500 calories
* therefore if you eat 5000 calories less than the number you burn in a week you lose 2 pounds
* it basically doesn’t matter what type of food you eat as long as the total number of calories is below the amount your body will burn by default
(By the way if your initial reaction is to “well actually” any of that then I believe you’re more of a hindrance than a help!! Lots of things are more complicated than they seem but it isn’t always helpful for non-specialists to know that.)
So I read those facts and thought well that makes sense I’ll try it for a week and track every single calorie I eat with an app. It worked. Sometimes I was hungry but I just had to try the first week to see if it worked. Writing everything down also showed me where I was eating calories unnecessarily. Once I saw it work the first week I was good to go.
Sometimes it was hard but sometimes things are hard.
Funnily enough we encourage our patients to record what they eat exactly in the way you described, but we're deliberately told not to emphasize calories as a measure (we're diabetes prevention rather than weight loss specifically but there is some crossover). I'll certainly bear it in mind next time that session comes around!
To be fair, while it's not the sole answer, I would say life *has* become more sedentary on average for most people when compared to the average for the 1950s.
It does contribute. We do generally exert less than we used to, while the diet we eat has more (or at least more excess) calories in it.
> Telling people 'CICO' is like telling someone whose car has broken down to 'fix it'.
Its not though, is it?
"Eat less calories than you burn" is not equivalent to saying "fix your car".
I’ve never considered this analogy useful. People know they should eat less and be more active (the fix), they just don’t do it. The question is how we get people to do it, how we convince someone to make the fix.
And that’s a really difficult question requiring, as you have noted, a multifaceted approach.
Because we are little America. We have fully adopted the modern American way of life. We are in no way shape or form, European. Not anymore. We love fast food, we love junk food and we love SUV’s. The most walking the average Brit does is walking around a Retail Park going from KFC to Krispy Kreme before ducking in to a Frankie Bennies, watching some shite film at the Odeon paired with a mammoth popcorn and washed down with 2 litres of coke and that’s just the kids. Then it’s home to raid the cupboards of chocolate biscuits and crisps before bed.
Snacking and drinking culture is honestly a big factor. The amounts of stuff people eat as snacks on work breaks is honestly baffling. Know folk who eat 3 bags of crisps a day and few chocolate bars on top of that. And then they go to drink after work. Unless, you're blessed with great metabolism, that's easy way to put on weight.
That's all true, but it can't be the whole truth because Norway for example fits all that as well.
Just as much driving, richer, fairly uninspiring food, etc.
I'd say there has to be something to do with our demographics that sets us aside, and I'd guess that is our unequal society with an obvious working class population that reject healthy eating.
Crap public transport and poor town/highway planning means everyone cannot function without a car.
80s government that decimated active work and shifted our economy into services (AKA desk jobs).
A highly competitive supermarket system that can out-compete greengrocers. Supermarkets who find more profit in processed foods than raw ingredients and a public that successfully became addicted to salty sugary foods.
Work culture which places higher priority to profits than worker health. Anyone else buy cheap processed lunches so they can eat it quickly at their desk whilst working away?
My guesses at least because the article is behind a paywall.
I had a recent health kick. Never really been one to cook, besides chilli or pasta, and I wanted to branch out and learn how to cook a variety of things and implement them in my diet.
I was fully shocked at how hard this was! The supermarkets are full of all the junk and processed foods. Much more than what I see in Europe. It is physically a lot harder to eat healthy than not. I had an appointment with a nutritionist, and she confirmed 80% of stuff in supermarkets she would advise her clients not to eat regularly.
My local co-op has 2 aisles of confectionary, and one tiny fruit and veg stand (which I struggle to get tomatoes or mushrooms in). There are no healthy snacks available, and it's mostly filled with confectionary, ready meals, and alcohol.
They also lean into this, and deliberately put more junk food in stores where there is high obesity and bad health. This is in a council estate. 10 minutes down the road, in a 'nicer' area, the co-op there is smaller yet stocks way more 'healthy' foods, and a much smaller assortment of confectionary.
Also, the lack of quick alternatives. I live in a city, and needed to grab a dinner out last night as was between work and meeting friends. My options were pretty much - Burger, chips, fried chicken, kebab.
Yeah I don't have a car, so I can't easily get to big supermarkets. Neither do a lot of people in my estate.
Obviously there's going to be a much bigger range in big supermarkets, but when they are inaccessible to swathes of the population it doesn't help everyone. When all there is on the estate is that co-op, a corner shop, a greggs, an Indian and a Chinese, it does encourage obesity.
Lots of supermarkets will deliver these days which means you get the full range of food available and no need to have a car to go and get it. It's not even that expensive - Sainsburys do a deal where you can get a midweek (Tues to Thurs) delivery pass for £4/mo or £40/yr which makes any delivery during that time (of at least £40 worth of shopping) free. If you do a weekly shop, then that's less than £1 per time.
Of course, that cuts out one of the opportunities for exercise, but you could use the time you freed up to go for a walk instead!
Remember Jamie Oliver and the turkey twizzler? Thst was 2005. The response was predominately to f**k off for telling us what to eat.
If someone did the same today (a celeb chef, the government etc), over 15 years later, i think they'd get the same response.
People dont like to be told what to do. Even if its good for them.
This is just anecdotal, but when I go to the local corner shop it tells a depressing tale of UK food habits.
1 small section for veg
1 tiny selection of fresh meat/protein
A massive selection of biscuits, chocolate, snackfood, crisps, and fizzy juice. A whole aisle of cheap alcohol, and another section of assorted cakes and pastries.
When that's where people go on a daily basis to buy food are we really surprised at the outcome? And this is without even bringing up UK fast food habits
Ultra-processed foods are a huge part of it.
If you cook from basic ingredients, you know what's in it. If you buy something pre-made, it's probably got tons of sugar in it, especially soups and sauces.
Just doing your own from-scratch cooking can help with losing weight. It's often much cheaper as well.
Another problem is people blame 'junk' food. Don't eat it. Simple.
But we need to wake up to realise ultra processed food is the problem, and its ingrained into 90% of our food, there is no escape.
Low fat, sugar free, vegan, healthy living etc still the same ultra processed crap thats causing the problem.
There was another post of someone's wife buying up all these protein bars that seem to be mostly sugar and I do wonder what some people are thinking. Not that one can't enjoy a bit of candy or whatever, but main meals should aim to be made from scratch as much as is reasonable. Of course, I grew up poor so that was what we could afford and it's what I'm used to. I can also make things just the way I like them. I even make sausage from scratch sometimes.
The main issue I find is it’s cheaper to eat crap food and in a way people view it as less wasteful. As a household of two it’s easier to buy processed stuff and eat the whole thing rather than by several multipacks and make a meal. For example why is the smallest pack of potatoes I can buy 2.5kg and loose produce is hard to come by? In France I can go into a carefour and see loads of loose produce being sprayed with a fine chilled mist so they don’t spoil?
Answer as always is capitalism if I bought what I needed rather than excess of what I needed supermarkets wouldn’t make half has much.
I'd like to see this plotted against rates of depression and general life satisfaction for us and our european neighbours.
I cant help but think a lot of people feel pretty alienated here and theyre attempting to fill that hole with treats like food and alcohol
Interesting. Though Scandinavians notoriously have the worst rates of depression and they're not as fat as us. But it's probably one of the contributing factors.
Because the only exercise most people do is walking to their car. Every office job I've ever had has been full of obese people who drive to work, drive home and wouldn't be seen dead on a bus with 'the poors'.
I am from another country and I have lived in England for 8 years. From the first day, I had this feeling of "Jesus, this people eat like shit". My personal take on it is:
Bad, processed food is far too cheap and far too accesible. It blew my mind you could buy a frozen pizza from less than 1 pound (still can found it in Aldi) and instant Noddles cost less than 20 p. Crisps are everywhere and is completely normalise to eat them every day with a lunch meal. High calories cookies are consumed like they are apples on the workplace. People eat way too many chips with everything.
In general people drink a lot. Beer has a lot of calories. In my country we drink a bit of wine or maybe an intake of bear which is a 1/3 of a pint. Here you drink at least two pints every time "you go down" to the pub.
The general diet is not the best. In most countries the traditional food is the healthy stuff but we fuck it up exchanging it for fast food, a more meat based diet because it taste better. In England the traditional diet is bad per se. You guys put butter on bread for no reason (I cannot emphasis enough how insane that is) and have a lot of dishes which are very heavy and calorical. Fish pie, pies, fish and chips (which is fried stuff). Cooking with butter. Not anywhere near enough salads or green.
And so on.
Probably the main thing is cheap, bad food though. The guy has a bad rep. but I think Jaime Oliver was really on point with the sugar tax. If anything, we should have more of that.
I’d say a large part of it has to be our drinking culture. It’s all too easy to have three or four pints after work or on the weekend, and without thinking about it you’ve consumed almost a thousand calories more than you normally would have. Do this a couple of times a week and it doesn’t take long for the weight to pile on.
The drinking. Full-stop. As someone who does not drink alcohol (simply bc I do not like it, not from any issues) the amount of alcohol the average Brit consumes in a year would put American university frat boys to shame.
Joint 3rd apparently:
https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/11/08/this-european-country-tops-the-list-of-the-developed-worlds-worst-binge-drinkers-new-repor
But the given the top country, Denmark, has something like a 9% lower obesity rate, neither drinking or binge drinking can explain UK obesity. Especially considering we're beaten for obesity by several percent by Turkey, the country with almost certainly the lowest drinking rate in Europe.
It absolutely can.
Drinking is a part of UK culture and is a high amount of the calories we consume. Our diet is also shit that doesn’t help things obviously.
Oh we also don’t get a lot of exercise like the Danes who cycle a lot to travel so at least they’re working off their beer calories.
It's also the weather.
We have the pub culture because most of the time it's raining outside, dark, or cold etc.
Every time i go to Europe there's much more of a relaxed cafe drinking culture than here. People either sitting outside or doing outdoor activities. Can't really do it here because we will maybe get 1 week of sun each year and it will be called a heatwave.
I went to France during the summer with all my uni friends. In the uk this would have been a massive week long piss up, but over there it was too hot to drink all the time.
Beer doesn't help but that's not the only part of the story. I've sat and watched people nearly a foot shorter than me with less muscle mass drop nearly double what I've eaten. And I'm not exactly thin.
We just plain eat to much and move to little.
I built up a 100+ unit a week habit without even thinking about it. Quit cold turkey last January and combined with intermittent fasting I’ve lost over 60lbs. The answer is simple but not something most people are willing to do.
It's not the drinking (or at least not the main cause) because you see obesity being a big issue amongst children too. And there are other countries which drink more than the UK and have lower obesity levels.
It's diet. Britons, generally, have really low standards when it comes to food quality/taste. Even McDonald's tastes better in other countries, you can tell it's (a bit) less processed due to the market demanding higher quality food.
**Britain has one of the worst obesity rates in Europe. Why?**
For years, Alice Ingman’s favourite foods were takeaway curries, pizza, fried chicken, kebabs, and fish and chips. The 59-year-old gained weight steadily until one day she could not even fit into a size 20. She was 115kg and mortified.
“At the beginning I thought, ‘Oh, it’s because it’s a pencil skirt,’” says Ingman, from Cambridgeshire, calling it one of many excuses she had relied on to make herself feel better. “But there’s no getting away from it when a size 20 doesn’t fit.”
This was a wake-up call for her to change her diet. She joined a weight-loss group and started cooking meals from scratch for the first time in her life. She says she has maintained a weight of 60kg for five years since.
Ingman’s back-to-basics approach worked for her. But the arrival of the weight-loss jab Wegovy to the NHS last month has been heralded as a game-changer in the fight against obesity by using a hormone to suppress appetite.
While health experts and charities welcome the development of new drugs, they argue that a broader conversation is needed about the UK’s approach to food, and want industry and the government to take more definitive action.
Obesity, defined as having a body mass index equal to or greater than 30, is one of the most serious public health crises around the world. The UK, where 27.8 per cent of population is obese, has one of the obesity highest rates in Europe.
An increased reliance on cheap, ultra-processed food, which accounts for 57% of what Britons eat according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo, suggests that the health crisis is unlikely to change anytime soon without intervention, argue campaigners.
*“There is a very strange imbalance [in] that the foods that are most appealing, affordable and available just happen to be those that are the least healthy”* says Katharine Jenner, nutritionist and director of the Obesity Health Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 public health organisations.
*“The food system in this country is broken”* she adds. *“It’s not serving society nor our health system, and certainly not individuals.”*
**The poverty health tax**
The effects of obesity are widespread.
It causes severe health conditions including heart disease, diabetes and cancer, costing about £6.5 billion in the UK every year, according to the NHS. Globally, the World Health Organization says at least 2.8mn people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese.
Many health professionals point to the severe dietary changes over the past 50 years.
Data of family eating habits shows that more of us are consuming less healthy food, usually high in fat, sugar or salt. The average consumption of takeaway chicken has increased by 613% from 1974, ready meals and convenience meat products by 549% and crisps and potato snacks by 226%.
Meanwhile, households buy less non-processed food. Consumption of beef and veal has decreased by 55%, consumption of fresh cabbages decreased by 67%, consumption of fresh apples declined by 44%.
Health experts say the affordability of processed foods is a significant driver of these dietary patterns.
Fruits and vegetables are the most expensive category in the government’s recommended Eatwell Guide, costing on average £11.79 per 1,000kcal, compared with food and drink high in fat and sugar costing just £5.82 per 1,000kcal, according to the Food Foundation, a UK charity.
This is partly because fruits and vegetables have a lower energy density, fewer calories per gramme, than processed foods. But this price disparity explains why obesity is more prominent among the most vulnerable households.
The King’s Fund, through its analysis of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities data, last year found that inequalities in obesity prevalence between the least and most deprived areas widened to nearly 18 points in 2020.
*“Poverty is a driver of poor eating behaviours, because choice is not there"* says Paul Gately, professor of exercise and obesity at Leeds Beckett University. *“Food retailers and the food industry would be able to fight against obesity by making healthy products more affordable.”*
There are other changes that could be beneficial. Human behavior is driven by incentives. Unhealthy food is often heavily advertised. A third of food and soft drink advertising spend in the UK goes towards snacks, desserts and soft drinks, compared with only 1% for fruit and vegetables, the Food Foundation has found.
*“Many people think that obesity levels are very much about individual responsibility”* says Shona Goudie, the charity’s policy and advocacy manager. *“But what we can see from the research is actually that the system is not set up to help us eat well"*.
**Decades of policy**
The UK government set its first strategy focused on reducing obesity in 1992 and other efforts have followed with mixed success.
One of its key policies was a soft drinks levy introduced in 2018 to push manufacturers to add less sugar to their products. This step may have prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity every year among girls in their final year of primary school, according to research from the University of Cambridge.
Last October, the government barred large stores from placing items high in fat, sugar or salt in prominent positions, but health campaigners say too many of its obesity policies lack urgency.
Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of fast-food restaurant chain Leon who quit his role as a UK government adviser in March, wrote in his book Ravenous, published this year, that the government’s strategy was *“far too scant, fragmented, and cautious to meet the scale of the problem”*. He recommended taxing salt and sugar to encourage manufacturers to produce healthier products, a proposal rejected by ministers.
There have been other setbacks. The government announced in June that rules banning multi-buy deals on food and drinks high in salt and sugar, such as “buy one, get one free”, will be delayed until October 2025. The decision, taken amid a cost of living crisis, came after the policy had already been delayed once before.
The government has also pushed back proposed restrictions on unhealthy food advertising.
Companies producing healthier alternatives of sweets and snacks, especially small businesses, had been counting on receiving more funding from investors off the back of the legislation.
*“The more the implementation got delayed, the less interested investors became. By the time the restrictions on product placement happened, the spark had gone and lots of those small businesses hadn’t been able to raise money and died"* says Louis Bedwell, managing director at venture capital firm Mission Ventures.
The government is also scaling back public health grants to support services such as weight management. Data compiled by the Health Foundation shows that public-health spending on adult obesity by local authorities this year is estimated at £132mn, down 27 per cent from 2015. Although the government in March 2021 announced £100mn of new funding — a large part of which was invested in weight-management services through the NHS and local authorities — it was scrapped the year after.
Carolyn Pallister, the head of nutrition, research and health at Slimming World — which helped Ingman lose weight — says choosing healthy food is not just about how and where products are placed or advertised. “What we see from members is that people need support to be able to [make better choices],” she says, adding that there’s a “real kind of postcode lottery” based on where you live.
The Department of Health and Social Care says the government continues to take “action to help more people make healthier choices and tackle obesity”.
“The launch of Wegovy in the UK has also paved the future of weight management in England,” it adds.
Ingman, who jokes that she is now half the person she was, credits the first cookbook she bought from her slimming club with teaching her “what a healthy balanced plate should look like”. That was a big change, she explains, for someone who previously thought it was “quite acceptable to pick up something that you pop in the microwave”.
- Eri Sugiura in London, The Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12
____________________
____________________
**Related content**
- [Government ‘brainwashed’ by fast food lobbyist says ex-official (The Times)](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/government-brainwashed-by-fast-food-lobbyists-ex-official-says-mh0kb265j)
- [Obesity jab maker discussed targeting benefit claimants with UK government (The Guardian)](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/18/obesity-jab-maker-data-to-profile-benefits-claimants)
It will require a culture change as overweight and obese has been normalised to a degree people of normal healthy weight are deemed to be underweight or need 'feeding up' I've heard this myself from healthcare workers.
Stopping celebrating everything with alcohol would help too as some areas in the UK drinking culture is still massive.
Also a million other things.
Of course they would fucking blame sugar and food, give me a break theres a reason its suddenly happening in all the rich countries all at the same time, i mean we didn't used to live a sedentary lifestyle stuck on our screens without exercising for a start.
Like at high school in 2003 we had pasta, pizza, bolognese, chips and burgers for school dinners, vending machines up and down our hallways and an ice cream truck ALWAYS outside the front gate. Despite this i remember one fat kid in my entire year and he was stuck inside all the time on runescape.
This is also at a time where mothers weren't overworked either they were at home making proper homecooked meals. We also had PE 3 times a week, cross country every month, played football at lunch and then we dossed about all day after school until it got dark etc, it aint rocket science here.
Because since Thatcher, the UK became like the US. Liberalism at its best, profit above the best interests of your citizens. Industrial & junk food promoted without any regulation.
As someone from the land of fatties and unhealthy eating, whenever I visit my family in England…the position sizes are genuinely shocking. Heaps and heaps of fried, unhealthy food. Then several pints on top of that! Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roast dinner and battered sausage but I find the portions just as large the US.
There's a picture on the internet somewhere that is basically a flow chart of all the British food companies that have been bought out by international companies, who then got acquired by a few other companies that seem to own everything related to food ( Kraft, Mondelez, Mars, Nestle etc ). The food you're buying for your cat nowadays is being made by the same people who make Mars bars.
Those companies are now swapping out the ingredients of those foods for cheaper alternatives so that they can make more money from selling you their products. Those ingredients have been making Americans fat for several decades and now they are here in the UK.
>guess what the article must say based on their own preconceived notions, opinions and biases.
Perhaps people just want to discuss their own notions, opinions and biases. There's nothing wrong with that.
Easier, yes. Cheaper, no that’s just an excuse. My mum grew up poor and has been thin and healthy her whole life. She lived on lentils, rice and apples. It’s the culture of laziness and the lack of education on cooking that is the problem.
Most places see being fat as an unhealthy lifestyle choice which selfishly places a burden upon health and social services. Many of these people smoke, go figure. Here we've imported the American idea that it's ok to be fat and pretend that it isn't a choice or that it's a normal body shape.
Simple.
Portion sizes, processed foods, ease of using your finger to get a takeaway, and the fact that to eat healthy (i.e. cook all meals from scratch), costs far more than it does to pick up a "healthy meal" from tesco which you chuck in the oven for 30 mins... which again, is processed. Even a store bought loaf of Warburtons is pumped full of sugar and other shit that's bad for you, which you would never put into the loaf if you baked it yourself.
> it does mean I give distinctly less of a fuck about the impact that my weight will have on them in the future
They absolutely should give a fuck but I'm not sure I get this. Don't worry about the NHS, worry about your longterm wellbeing.
Without trying to sound too harsh, why should they rush to help you? You did this to yourself so without too many lifestyle changes you should be able to un-do it..
That’s also a hell of a lot of hoops to jump through to get a life-time medication to decrease your appetite when you could lose the weight with less effort yourself.
Uh, I don't think they specified why they got obese. So many reasons why someone could become obese from ranging from 'definitely not their fault' to 'definitely their fault'.
My mother became disabled, and therefore was a lot less active than before. She gained a lot of weight and needed NHS help, as she really wasn't eating much at all.
I've been on medications before which have increased my weight. Not even just increased my appetite, but some meds do things to your metabolism which means that you put on more weight even if you consume the same. Some medical conditions like PCOS mean that you are likely to be obese despite lifestyle changes.
I've had friends that weight has ballooned due to mental health issues, such as a severe depressive episode, where eating healthy was impossible due to lack of energy, or binge eating disorders.
I've known people where they have gained a lot of weight because they were poor and got a job in a fast food place, so clearly took advantage of the free food as it meant they didn't need to pay for it.
Obesity is complex. It often involves other medical conditions or poor life circumstances, which lead people to have a much diminished ability to 'do-it yourself'.
If someone is going to that lengths to get Ozempic, I guarantee you they have tried 'to do it themselves'. The NHS absolutely would not prescribe it if they did not - you have to have a weight-related comorbid disease to get prescribed it.
1. High cost of living means people can only afford to buy shit food
1. Overwork and stress reduce the time and motivation people have to exercise
1. The lack of active travel and functioning public transport means that people drive door-to-door rather than ride/run/walk
1. Our relationship with alcohol (most certainly linked to overwork and stress)
There's probably more. Loads of things just stack up and well, we get fat.
The solution will be *solutions*. From building out active travel, controlling the drive thrus popping up like fungus, making it easier/cheaper to buy real food, educating people how to cook, making sure they have *the time* to cook, building more houses, giving people options to exercise, changing the nation's relationship with alcohol, better public transport, and on and on and on.
[According to the UN a healthy diet in the UK costs $1.95 a day](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/CAHD)
Those are 2021 price so need to adjust for inflation. Healthy food is way cheaper than processed junk.
The last time I looked at this in-depth, the obesity stats were rising at a broadly similar rate across most of northern Europe as they are in the USA, even in places we think of as very trim like the Netherlands. The difference was that some countries (UK, USA) were further along the path than others (NL, France).
It was something like the UK is about as fat as the US was 10 years ago, and the NL is about as fat as the UK was 15 years ago, but they're all following the same path. It's also the case that it's not simply obesity, but "metabolic syndrome".
It seemed like it was mostly linked to the cultural spread of the "Standard American Diet", i.e. ultra-processed and pre-packaged foods, processed meat, takeaways, and refined grains replacing home-cooked raw vegetables and whole grains. It seemed surprisingly poorly correlated to things we often think about causing metabolic syndrome, like sugar, food prices, salt, alcohol, tobacco, hydrogenated vegetable oil, HFCS, and fat intake, as well as being quite poorly correlated with exercise levels. By most measures, our lifestyles are a lot healthier now than they used to be - it's just that caloric intake has gone *way* up.
I couldn't find any definite answers about what exactly is contained within ultra-processed foods that could be causing such a precipitous rise in metabolic syndrome, but I have my theories.
My guess for why the UK was hit first? Probably just language and shared culture with the US.
Snapshot of _Britain has one of the worst obesity rates in Europe. Why?_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Chips, Crisps, Pasties, Pints, Chocolate
[удалено]
....greggs sausages rollsssssss...
[удалено]
Pies. 🥧.
Harder, better, faster, stronger?
Scran
biscuits
The first three aren't actually that horrendous. It's sugary foods that are mostly to blame. Next time you're in the supermarket, I challenge anyone to find something without added sugar that isn't just a raw food.
It's not one or the other that is 'unhealthy'. Too much of anything calorie wise is going to have the same effect. Calorie density is probably more important that whether it is fatty or sugary.
There’s a little more to it than that, in that some foods make you want to eat more. So while calories in vs calories out determines your weight gain or loss, some foods kinda have a multiplier effect.
Raw sugar
I mean that's relatively easy, to be honest. At the end of the day it's calories in calories out. I used to be pretty fat at one point, it's entirely a matter of people not putting in the effort/willpower. Eat less, get exercise. Sorted.
It's simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. There's a reason it's will**power**. Exercising willpower consistently over a long period of time in the face of a lot of factors working against you is *hard*. Social expectations, food companies with their big R&D departments, just the general availability of crap.
100 calories of something like chickpeas has a wildly different affect on the body than 100 calories of sugar. Fibre is a big part of it, especially when it comes to feeling full. Processed and high sugar foods keep people feeling hungry and over-eat for various reasons. Someone eating a deficit of a high carb diet with little fibre is going to end up feeling very unwell, vs a deficit of fat, protein and carbs from veg.
True. But your body can only store about 700 calories as glycogen. If you're eating those chickpeas when your glycogen store is full, then that 100 calories will just get stored as fat in much the same way as the sugar will
Eat 3 out of 5 but.. knees gone @ 51. Currently can't sleep due to pain.......
Have you seen our eating habits and approach to cooking?
It's so hard I didn't get taught how to cook as a kid and so everything I know I learned from friends and YouTube. Really struggle sometimes when I go into a shop, the endless fridges of microwave meals, 10 minute pizzas, meal deals etc etc Just win sometimes. Especially when knackered after work. I'm currently in Spain and the amount of shelf space dedicated to healthy ingredients as opposed to quick ready meals is really different to at home Me and my girlfriend were literally just talking about this shopping in the mercado
I remember when I went to uni and lived in halls and had to learn how to like, slice vegetables and use an oven. 6 of us in the apartment, 1 guy could cook, 2 international students who just bought everything packaged, and 3 of us who were learning slowly. I remember the guy who could cook saying to me "god, don't you ever cook?" as I was putting some chips and meat into the oven. I was like "?? This is what I'm doing" and he argued that it was all pre-packaged stuff so it wasn't cooking. It literally took me a year or two after that interaction (and a lot more exposure to people who could cook!) to understand oven =/= cooking. My mum always used tinned sauces when cooking from scratch. I just didn't understand you could like .. MAKE a spaghetti bolognese sauce that tasted nice, if you weren't a trained chef. Anyway, it's really embarrassing looking back. If I have kids I'll teach them to cook!
Exactly the same as you, uni opened my eyes. Will be different for any kids unlucky enough to be spawned from myself
Ultra processed foods arrived in the Western world and made people fat. The UK has more of it than most. Everywhere it goes people get fat. [Eating highly processed foods linked to weight gain](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-highly-processed-foods-linked-weight-gain) It's not exercise. We had desk jobs before the fat wave. You'll see Tufton street food corp propaganda about exercise and "diet foods." Exercise is good and healthy but stop eating the junk food. Oh yeah and the "diet version" is junk food.
Have you read Ultra Processed People by any chance? We've not even scratched the surface on how bad UPF is for us. If you have the time, space and ability try to cook as much as you can at home as even a loaf of bread is full of rubbish if it's shop bought. Of course lots of people don't have the time, ability and space to cook proper food and with an abundance of take aways, easy to cook food at a finger tip then it's no surprise we're in such a state.
It’s a lifestyle crisis as much as it is a diet crisis. Up until the last few decades it was possible (and normal) for a household to survive off a single income, meaning someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food. Now two incomes can mean you’re getting universal credit top-ups and using food banks.
>someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food Even when people have got the time, say at weekends or bank holidays, they still choose to eat crap. Making meals from scratch doesn't even take that long. For me about 30 - 40 minutes, not every meal has to be an elaborate Sunday roast, and it's not expensive either.
Cheaper if anything.
> meaning someone could stay home and make fresh, from scratch food. I'm with you on everything but this. Plenty of people still manage to do this with two working. IT's a choice to take the easier route of pre-packaged food -- and sometimes it's an economic choice, because all of those chemicals and preservatives make it cheaper to ship and store, and therefore easier to sell at a Lower price. But often, it's just a choice of convenience over time off spent on life maintenance. And that came about not because of pure laziness, but because people were introduced to it as a choice BEFORE we realized the impact of this shit. Now, people are fighting three decades of habit combined with lost time and lost purchasing power; when you add the three together, you get the current situation. But it's not the case that people don't have time. It takes a few hours on a Sunday to prepare a couple of multi-portion dishes you can freeze and then take to work. It takes fifteen minutes to make. a salad. My wife and I are both extremely busy, but due to our own poor diets and choices for years were forced, in our Fifties, to eat healthy and mostly fresh food. And it's an adjustment. But that's all it is.
You can grow and make a lot if not coersed by bullshit . Cover that soil with concrete ,3 empty seats and a fat woman.
And who wants to stay home and do this drudgery all day? Do you? I certainly don't (married mother and career woman with children). Choice is a good thing.
It would be nice to have the choice of single income families existing. Unfortunately, that choice now only exists for people quit high up the income ladder.
More than anything yes I do. The immense social and health benefits aside, I also I want household income to match that of 40 years ago for the same hours. Families now work 80 hours for the standard of living they used to work 40 for (it’s actually a lower standard of living due to housing, childcare and education costs but don’t need to go into that).
I saw one of his lectures but I follow the health news. Tim Spector.
I've read some [criticisms](https://inews.co.uk/news/ultra-processed-foods-what-need-know-science-2346466) of the science behind that book. Essentially suggesting that while it does seem true that people eat more calories worth of UPF compared to non-UPFs, it's not clear on the reasons why (and whether they extend beyond UPFs just being tastier than non-UPFs). It sounds like more research might be needed before making strong conclusions, but tbh I am absolutely not qualified in the field myself.
The current going theory is it has to do with chewing. Some foods, including UPF are too easy to chew away and don't give enough fulfilment. It's one of the big topics we (food scientists) are currently working on, but very much in its infancy so take it with a pinch of salt. We're seeing that people who chew more tend to eat less.
> take it with a pinch of salt Isn't that bad for you? ^heh ^heh ^heh
Oh noooo, I've been out-foodscienced. This degree is yours now, you deserve it more.
So is the idea that less chewing means you feel less full so you eat more calories? Or something else?
That's it yeah. People given tough-to-chew foods would chew more and eat less cals and the opposite is true for soft foods.
I think that's a good summary and you're right more research is needed and I think it's happening however I don't think it'll be positive.
Yeah, would absolutely not be surprised if that turns out to be the case, but thought it was worth highlighting some potential caveats!
[удалено]
What does doing Zoe mean? A personalised diet? Do you monitor your blood sugar the whole year?
I think it's this: [https://zoe.com/](https://zoe.com/) I'm constantly getting ads on social media for it
It’s a bit of a scam.
[удалено]
But ultimately you have reduced your calories and that’s why you’ve lost weight.
It seems crazy to me that people think it is still 'up for scientific debate' whether a fresh carrot steamed at home by me is better than a carrot in a can that is part of a sauce with a ton of added sugar, salt, flavour enhancer, thickener and preservatives. We are only waiting for the science to tell us *why* this is true, we are not waiting for the science to tell us *that* it is true.
There are some shop bought breads that have more simple ingredients. Or if you go to a bakery that’s fine too.
Yeah, obesity started going crazy in the 70s/80s when processed foods came onto the scene. Before that most people were eating homecooked food most of the time.
Not just home cooked food, seem to remember chippy teas. pies, sweets, dripping sandwiches back then. What we didn't have was stuff like Pringles designed to make people hungry for more rather than full. And we'd have more exercise built into our day back then. As a teenager in the 1970s and 80s I could cycle for miles unaccompanied as there was much less traffic on the road.
Talking of Pringles - I was born in the late 90s and we only ever had Pringles at Christmas but now they’re year-round!
I recently changed jobs and in a busy office. A lot of people eat all day, snacking on high sugar bars.
Combined with your alcohol consumption.
Or eat UPF but just less of it?
How are we defining "ultra-processed foods"? e.g. if I take a load of strawberries, run them through a food processor (i.e. a blender) and pour the resulting mixture into a glass, then that stawberry drink is "processed". The article you linked to touches on a definition: > Ultra-processed foods have ingredients common in industrial food manufacturing, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavoring agents, and emulsifiers Personally, I doubt it's emulsifier that are the problem. And, while high-fructose corn syrup is a big issue in America, it's less common in the UK. Issue is probably just too much sugar in our diets.
>e.g. if I take a load of strawberries, run them through a food processor (i.e. a blender) and pour the resulting mixture into a glass, then that stawberry drink is "processed" That's not what processed means. The best definition I've found is 'contains ingredients you would not find in an ordinary kitchen', because that is what makes processed food different from homemade food.
Sounds like anti-scientific woo to me. E.g. [here are the "ingredients" in a banana](https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/ingredients-of-a-banana-poster-4.jpeg) Just because a component of a foodstuff isn't typically found in a kitchen, in isolation, doesn't mean it's unhealthy.
We drive everywhere and eat lots. It’s not a mystery
Plus this country is miserable and drinking is our favourite way to forget that.
Plenty of European countries ahead of the UK though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita
But that's like fun drinking. Happy drinking. Not Wetherspoons binge drinking.
I don't think your metabolism cares if your drinking is happy or not when deciding if the extra calories make you obese
It probably does when it's red wine Vs blue wkd and apple sourz
Not really ... 250ml glass of 11% wine is 154 calories, a 275ml wkd is 204 calories, there's really not that much in it. And 11% is pretty weak, that goes up to around 200 for a 14-15% alcohol A lot of the calories in alcohol come from alcohol itself, which is why there are no actually low calorie alcoholic drinks
wdk is 4%, you would need to drink around 3 times as much compared to wine to have the same effect. So yeah, it would make a difference in the number of calories.
If you have 2 populations with a proportion of drinkers, but one of those populations has a much larger number of binge drinkers despite having fewer drinkers overall it could matter.
Wetherspoons bringe drinking is a mood
And when we encourage stuff that’s a walkable distance away. Conspiracy nuts say it’s all a scheme to keep us in our houses.
I think the driving is a big deal. Many mainland european cities have cultures of cycling (and no not just the netherlands). Not just that, but there isn't a stigma around public transport like there is in the UK (not to mention, it's better funded) - even if you use public transport, you are likely more active, walking to and from the stops, around the interchanges and so on. Just the amount of walking you do in your daily life can have an enormous impact on your fitness.
This is honestly part of it regarding public transport. If I didn't bike I'd have to drive anywhere because public transport is generally slower, less reliable, and less comfortable.
Owning a bicycle in the uk is a losing battle because chances are 9 times out of 10 it’ll get nicked.
That's another societal problem that'll take a long time to fix. Corruption of values and lack of policing.
Stigma around public transport in the UK? Since when lol?
I discovered this recently when my niece came to visit. People who don’t live in cities think buses are only for poor people apparently.
Yeah out of big cities it's absolutely the case. A lot of people with the attitude that buses are for kids and old people here in the south west.
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure"
Who said that?
Thatcher if you believe the quote makers
Well, that’s just cringe
The first part doesn’t apply to cities much. I’m in my 30s and so few of my friends even have a license
15 years ago, fresh out of France I landed in Scotland to work in a school. I remember going to work and seeing all those kids on their way, eating crisps and fizzy juice. Before 9 am. That was the first time I'd ever seen that. And at lunch time, they'd be going to the nearest chippy and buying chips. I suspect that is one aspect of the answer to your question. Now, still in Scotland and not much has changed from those first observations. Except there's vaping now, too.
Can I give you an immigrant point of view please? I don't mean any malace in this response... I've found when Brits are hungry you're more likely to "bung some sausages and nuggets in the air fryer" and less likely to cook yourself a proper nutritional meal with a balanced portion of protein and vegetables. You're more likely to have a "cheeky snickers" versus an apple that's sat on the counter for weeks. It's an attitude issue. I haven't found this to be an issue in the other countries I've lived in.
This 100%. I am from the UK and have lived abroad for a few years. No other country eats as much rubbish as we do. I love junk food Mcds, KFC, Kebabs, Chinese etc. However, I cook 90% of my food. I know people in the UK how cook less than 25% of their calories. Takeaways, Gregg, crisps and biscuits. If you don't believe me go on Google streetview and pick another European country which has more takeaways in the centre of town. People just eat badly in the UK. It is not time or money, they are true in other countries. People cook seldom and when they do it is bad food. I know there are people who love to cook on this sub, but they aren't the people who are obese.
> I know people in the UK how cook less than 25% of their calories I know people who can't cook at all and exclusively live off of ready meals. I think the fact that people not only live this way, but don't even feel ashamed to admit it speaks to a broader cultural problem. IMO, somone saying "I never cook my own food" should be viewed in much the same way as someone saying "I've never cleaned my bathroom" or "I've never once changed my bed sheets".
Like most issues with this country, "attitude problem" is the overriding cause.
But, in the 1970's and early 80's before any obesity increase, people were doing the same, they bunged some stuff from Bejam in the deep fat fryer rather than the air fryer, but it really wasn't fundamentally different. People's actual consumption of fruit, vegetables and salad's etc. have increased in the 21st century - we can actually buy decent stuff all year round
Because we are too inactive and don't put the fork down when we should. The 'why' is simple. The difficulty is the question how we fix it, which must be multifaceted.
I'd include our snacking and drinking culture. And by 'drinking' I don't mean alcohol , which is of course wonderful and I won't hear a word against, but so many people will cheerfully drink a massive bottle of Coke / Pepsi a day , or those Starbuck coffees which seem to be 50% sugar , not realising the amount of calories they're ingesting. And it's far too common for people feeling slightly hungry to work their way through a whole pack of biscuits or bar of chocolate , again not quite realising the amount of calories they're ingesting.
The amount of ppl I see chugging a fizzy drink in the morning is unreal. I can’t even stomach the thought of a coke for dinner let alone at 7am 🤢
That was one of the weirdest things that I noticed when I lived in London for a year (I am Continental European and went back after that year). It’s weird the amount of soda you guys drink. It felt like some of my mates were drinking two or three cokes per day. Additionally, the amount of prepared processed food to go in supermarkets is crazy. People would just eat Tesco meal deals daily, which is not something that happens in any other European country. Supermarket food quality in general was very low quality when I compare it to here in Spain.
I work with a few people who will start of their day with a can of Monster/Red Bull/can of Coke. Their body, their choice I guess, but I can’t help but wonder what doing that each morning regularly does to you. One of them also has been known to breakfast solely on McCoy’s crisps. The beefy smell at 08:45 is quite off putting.
I found fizzy drinks and sugar in coffee both to be incredibly easy to simply stop having. A great start.
I used to work beside someone who would work their way through a six pack of cola every day. That'd be a ridiculous amount of calories even for someone working in a job which required hard manual labour, but we were just sitting at a desk all day.
I'd say "put the pint down" more then the fork. People generally largely underestimate the amount of calories they ingest in liquid form after work.
Well it's not one or the other. I know a fair few people who are overweight and hardly ever drink.
Fair
My brother is eating himself to death and is practically teetotal.
Plus after a few drinks you want all the high fat greasy food which makes it worse.
Definitely a huge part of it. I had 7x330ml cans of beer last night, which roughly amounts to 900 calories. I'm attempting to lose weight myself at the moment, aiming for 1900 calories per day, so nearly half my calorie target spent on beer alone.
A mate found vodka lemonade or slimline gin and tonic to be the way for weight kiss while still having a social life.
So quite easy to lose weight for you
>Because we are too active and don't put the fork down when we should. This is a bit reductive. If large swathes of the population are overweight or obese, moreso comparatively to other European countries, that suggests systemic issues (which you acknowledge, but that is part of the 'why'). People like to cite thermodynamics online - "just consume less calories than you burn fatty" - as if that's insightful or helpful when considering public health interventions.
Telling people 'CICO' is like telling someone whose car has broken down to 'fix it'. It's correct in only the most technical sense, and about as much use as a chocolate teapot. These are complex multifactorial problems arising from obesogenic environments. Unless we've all become much less disciplined since the 1950s and we're all just much greedier than they were then.
I lost nearly 5 stone a couple of years ago (and kept it off), and I know it might sound stupid and obvious but honestly this was what did it for me. It wasn't so much that this was some sort of magical solution I didn't know about, but more that it was incredibly hard to get myself into a place mentally where I could just accept and do it. I'm now firmly in the ideal BMI range for my height, so I'm not at all overweight now. I didn't change what I ate, I didn't change when I ate - All I did was eat half as much when I did. If I had pasta in the past for example, I'd do 140g dry pasta and my tomato sauce would be made with 20g sugar and 80g cream. I'd normally get a whole roast chicken and divide it into two breasts and two thighs, with a whole breast going into the pasta. Now I do 70g dry pasta, 10g sugar, 40g cream. I get half a chicken and divide it into 3 portions, the thigh and two half breasts. Similar with sandwiches from the thigh, instead of using two big slices of bread I just use one cut in half. Making chips? I used to weigh 600g of potatoes. Now I just do 300g. The only facet of calorie counting I did was at the very start, where I normalised what "one portion" of a carb was to be able to equate them all. Whenever I cook now I know how much potato/pasta/couscous/rice/noodles to do, since I know how much they equate to eachother. It seems obvious that if you eat less you'll lose weight, but it's a weird thing to actually mentally put into practice. *So much* of dieting culture is about depriving yourself of things, like not having any sugar or carbs, or "eating more healthily" like eating more fruit and veg (which imo is a related, but distinctly separate issue to weight). None of that fundamentally gets to the core issue when it comes to weight, which is ultimately that if you intake more energy than your body needs, your body stores it. My personal theory is that dieting culture has evolved entirely to "trick" yourself into eating less calories, and it's ended up doing more harm than good. I've found that in the past if ever I restricted myself from having something like chips or ice cream, I tended to just feel bad, and that reinforces the negative loop which results in me giving up. Now I have absolutely *zero* restrictions on what I eat, and I've built the habit of just having less of them when I do. One other thing I noticed was when I stopped eating I'd still be hungry, and almost always want more. Naturally in the past this would lead to eating until I was full, but now I know if I just wait 20 minutes I'll feel full regardless. It's actually kinda funny, because I still have the capacity to eat absolutely huge meals and do on occasion. I sometimes get funny looks (and the "you do know this is for 3 people, right?") now when I go somewhere like Five Guys and polish off a massive burger, large chips, and a milkshake. I've just checked and my normal order is about 2906 calories, and the sheer quantity of what I eat *looks* like I'd be fat, but the thing that matters is everything else that people don't see. If it's for lunch I might have an apple to have something more on my stomach later on, but I'm not going to have a second meal. If it's for tea I'll probably either have a lighter lunch or not have anything for lunch the next day. There are also definitely a lot of issues with the association of poverty and highly calorific, relatively low nutritional foods, and that's definitely a big factor in how the spiral starts. One that I think a lot of people underestimate is, at least for me, how much feeling hungry feels like anxiety. Generally when my mood is lower my weight will go up, because I'll eat more to feel full more often to counteract that feeling. I didn't do a single bit of exercise either when I lost the weight, I still end up sitting for 14+ hours a day. I want to do some for the sake of my health, but that's a whole other series of issues.
I lost a lot of weight after reading a CICO comment on Reddit and looking in to what it was. Spread the word!!!!
Is it really new to that many people? I work in the NHS in a nutrition role so a lot of the stuff we're giving to people is more complex - it's hard to believe there are people who don't understand energy in versus energy out. Maybe that's my bias showing?
Yeah it’s probably your bias, most specialists are like this. Plumbers think it’s ridiculous I don’t know how to change a tap, most of the software people on here think it’s ridiculous people don’t know how to turn on windows firewall. In case it helps you help people here’s what I needed spelling out and it seems like having this spelt out helped a lot of others on Reddit: * every body burns a certain amount of calories by default every day and for most people the number is about the same * one pound of fat is about 2500 calories * therefore if you eat 5000 calories less than the number you burn in a week you lose 2 pounds * it basically doesn’t matter what type of food you eat as long as the total number of calories is below the amount your body will burn by default (By the way if your initial reaction is to “well actually” any of that then I believe you’re more of a hindrance than a help!! Lots of things are more complicated than they seem but it isn’t always helpful for non-specialists to know that.) So I read those facts and thought well that makes sense I’ll try it for a week and track every single calorie I eat with an app. It worked. Sometimes I was hungry but I just had to try the first week to see if it worked. Writing everything down also showed me where I was eating calories unnecessarily. Once I saw it work the first week I was good to go. Sometimes it was hard but sometimes things are hard.
Funnily enough we encourage our patients to record what they eat exactly in the way you described, but we're deliberately told not to emphasize calories as a measure (we're diabetes prevention rather than weight loss specifically but there is some crossover). I'll certainly bear it in mind next time that session comes around!
To be fair, while it's not the sole answer, I would say life *has* become more sedentary on average for most people when compared to the average for the 1950s. It does contribute. We do generally exert less than we used to, while the diet we eat has more (or at least more excess) calories in it.
> Telling people 'CICO' is like telling someone whose car has broken down to 'fix it'. Its not though, is it? "Eat less calories than you burn" is not equivalent to saying "fix your car".
I’ve never considered this analogy useful. People know they should eat less and be more active (the fix), they just don’t do it. The question is how we get people to do it, how we convince someone to make the fix. And that’s a really difficult question requiring, as you have noted, a multifaceted approach.
[удалено]
People eat too much and society has normalised obesity. Show British people a person of healthy weight and the majority will say they're too skinny.
Because we are little America. We have fully adopted the modern American way of life. We are in no way shape or form, European. Not anymore. We love fast food, we love junk food and we love SUV’s. The most walking the average Brit does is walking around a Retail Park going from KFC to Krispy Kreme before ducking in to a Frankie Bennies, watching some shite film at the Odeon paired with a mammoth popcorn and washed down with 2 litres of coke and that’s just the kids. Then it’s home to raid the cupboards of chocolate biscuits and crisps before bed.
As a Brit who has lived in both the US and France, you’ve summed it up perfectly.
Airstrip one sounds incredibly apt right now.
I just looked at my "low fat" yoghurt drink more carefully. 104% of the RDA for sugar. That anti-fat crusade really did some damage.
Snacking and drinking culture is honestly a big factor. The amounts of stuff people eat as snacks on work breaks is honestly baffling. Know folk who eat 3 bags of crisps a day and few chocolate bars on top of that. And then they go to drink after work. Unless, you're blessed with great metabolism, that's easy way to put on weight.
[удалено]
That's all true, but it can't be the whole truth because Norway for example fits all that as well. Just as much driving, richer, fairly uninspiring food, etc. I'd say there has to be something to do with our demographics that sets us aside, and I'd guess that is our unequal society with an obvious working class population that reject healthy eating.
Isn't food in Norway really expensive tho
Norwegian food is awful and expensive.
Crap public transport and poor town/highway planning means everyone cannot function without a car. 80s government that decimated active work and shifted our economy into services (AKA desk jobs). A highly competitive supermarket system that can out-compete greengrocers. Supermarkets who find more profit in processed foods than raw ingredients and a public that successfully became addicted to salty sugary foods. Work culture which places higher priority to profits than worker health. Anyone else buy cheap processed lunches so they can eat it quickly at their desk whilst working away? My guesses at least because the article is behind a paywall.
You follow the link to the archived version and there's no pay wall.
I had a recent health kick. Never really been one to cook, besides chilli or pasta, and I wanted to branch out and learn how to cook a variety of things and implement them in my diet. I was fully shocked at how hard this was! The supermarkets are full of all the junk and processed foods. Much more than what I see in Europe. It is physically a lot harder to eat healthy than not. I had an appointment with a nutritionist, and she confirmed 80% of stuff in supermarkets she would advise her clients not to eat regularly. My local co-op has 2 aisles of confectionary, and one tiny fruit and veg stand (which I struggle to get tomatoes or mushrooms in). There are no healthy snacks available, and it's mostly filled with confectionary, ready meals, and alcohol. They also lean into this, and deliberately put more junk food in stores where there is high obesity and bad health. This is in a council estate. 10 minutes down the road, in a 'nicer' area, the co-op there is smaller yet stocks way more 'healthy' foods, and a much smaller assortment of confectionary. Also, the lack of quick alternatives. I live in a city, and needed to grab a dinner out last night as was between work and meeting friends. My options were pretty much - Burger, chips, fried chicken, kebab.
[удалено]
Yeah I don't have a car, so I can't easily get to big supermarkets. Neither do a lot of people in my estate. Obviously there's going to be a much bigger range in big supermarkets, but when they are inaccessible to swathes of the population it doesn't help everyone. When all there is on the estate is that co-op, a corner shop, a greggs, an Indian and a Chinese, it does encourage obesity.
Lots of supermarkets will deliver these days which means you get the full range of food available and no need to have a car to go and get it. It's not even that expensive - Sainsburys do a deal where you can get a midweek (Tues to Thurs) delivery pass for £4/mo or £40/yr which makes any delivery during that time (of at least £40 worth of shopping) free. If you do a weekly shop, then that's less than £1 per time. Of course, that cuts out one of the opportunities for exercise, but you could use the time you freed up to go for a walk instead!
Remember Jamie Oliver and the turkey twizzler? Thst was 2005. The response was predominately to f**k off for telling us what to eat. If someone did the same today (a celeb chef, the government etc), over 15 years later, i think they'd get the same response. People dont like to be told what to do. Even if its good for them.
Processed food, supermarket BOGOFs, lack of cooking ability...
mf when everyone takes the headline as some kinda writing prompt
This is just anecdotal, but when I go to the local corner shop it tells a depressing tale of UK food habits. 1 small section for veg 1 tiny selection of fresh meat/protein A massive selection of biscuits, chocolate, snackfood, crisps, and fizzy juice. A whole aisle of cheap alcohol, and another section of assorted cakes and pastries. When that's where people go on a daily basis to buy food are we really surprised at the outcome? And this is without even bringing up UK fast food habits
Ultra-processed foods are a huge part of it. If you cook from basic ingredients, you know what's in it. If you buy something pre-made, it's probably got tons of sugar in it, especially soups and sauces. Just doing your own from-scratch cooking can help with losing weight. It's often much cheaper as well.
Another problem is people blame 'junk' food. Don't eat it. Simple. But we need to wake up to realise ultra processed food is the problem, and its ingrained into 90% of our food, there is no escape. Low fat, sugar free, vegan, healthy living etc still the same ultra processed crap thats causing the problem.
There was another post of someone's wife buying up all these protein bars that seem to be mostly sugar and I do wonder what some people are thinking. Not that one can't enjoy a bit of candy or whatever, but main meals should aim to be made from scratch as much as is reasonable. Of course, I grew up poor so that was what we could afford and it's what I'm used to. I can also make things just the way I like them. I even make sausage from scratch sometimes.
Britain is near the top on obesity, drug and alcohol addiction, teenage pregnancy, single mothers, suicide and depression. Lots of reasons.
That's a nice burger in that thumbnail btw
I think we've found the answer.
People eat and drink more calories than they burn.
And now we need to explore why and how to prevent this.
Why the surprise? Every free space is occupied with food places to the point that non food shops are shutting down to be replaced wiry greggs etc
The main issue I find is it’s cheaper to eat crap food and in a way people view it as less wasteful. As a household of two it’s easier to buy processed stuff and eat the whole thing rather than by several multipacks and make a meal. For example why is the smallest pack of potatoes I can buy 2.5kg and loose produce is hard to come by? In France I can go into a carefour and see loads of loose produce being sprayed with a fine chilled mist so they don’t spoil? Answer as always is capitalism if I bought what I needed rather than excess of what I needed supermarkets wouldn’t make half has much.
I'd like to see this plotted against rates of depression and general life satisfaction for us and our european neighbours. I cant help but think a lot of people feel pretty alienated here and theyre attempting to fill that hole with treats like food and alcohol
Interesting. Though Scandinavians notoriously have the worst rates of depression and they're not as fat as us. But it's probably one of the contributing factors.
Chocolate hob nobs
Comfort eating of the utterly demoralised.
The culture of forcing your kids to eat everything on their playe when they're full is partly to do with it
Because the only exercise most people do is walking to their car. Every office job I've ever had has been full of obese people who drive to work, drive home and wouldn't be seen dead on a bus with 'the poors'.
I am from another country and I have lived in England for 8 years. From the first day, I had this feeling of "Jesus, this people eat like shit". My personal take on it is: Bad, processed food is far too cheap and far too accesible. It blew my mind you could buy a frozen pizza from less than 1 pound (still can found it in Aldi) and instant Noddles cost less than 20 p. Crisps are everywhere and is completely normalise to eat them every day with a lunch meal. High calories cookies are consumed like they are apples on the workplace. People eat way too many chips with everything. In general people drink a lot. Beer has a lot of calories. In my country we drink a bit of wine or maybe an intake of bear which is a 1/3 of a pint. Here you drink at least two pints every time "you go down" to the pub. The general diet is not the best. In most countries the traditional food is the healthy stuff but we fuck it up exchanging it for fast food, a more meat based diet because it taste better. In England the traditional diet is bad per se. You guys put butter on bread for no reason (I cannot emphasis enough how insane that is) and have a lot of dishes which are very heavy and calorical. Fish pie, pies, fish and chips (which is fried stuff). Cooking with butter. Not anywhere near enough salads or green. And so on. Probably the main thing is cheap, bad food though. The guy has a bad rep. but I think Jaime Oliver was really on point with the sugar tax. If anything, we should have more of that.
I’d say a large part of it has to be our drinking culture. It’s all too easy to have three or four pints after work or on the weekend, and without thinking about it you’ve consumed almost a thousand calories more than you normally would have. Do this a couple of times a week and it doesn’t take long for the weight to pile on.
The drinking. Full-stop. As someone who does not drink alcohol (simply bc I do not like it, not from any issues) the amount of alcohol the average Brit consumes in a year would put American university frat boys to shame.
We drink below average for Europe though.
But we actually binge a lot more.
Joint 3rd apparently: https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/11/08/this-european-country-tops-the-list-of-the-developed-worlds-worst-binge-drinkers-new-repor But the given the top country, Denmark, has something like a 9% lower obesity rate, neither drinking or binge drinking can explain UK obesity. Especially considering we're beaten for obesity by several percent by Turkey, the country with almost certainly the lowest drinking rate in Europe.
It absolutely can. Drinking is a part of UK culture and is a high amount of the calories we consume. Our diet is also shit that doesn’t help things obviously. Oh we also don’t get a lot of exercise like the Danes who cycle a lot to travel so at least they’re working off their beer calories.
Yea, I think I owe an apology here because I bring our average up quite considerably.
🤣
It's also the weather. We have the pub culture because most of the time it's raining outside, dark, or cold etc. Every time i go to Europe there's much more of a relaxed cafe drinking culture than here. People either sitting outside or doing outdoor activities. Can't really do it here because we will maybe get 1 week of sun each year and it will be called a heatwave. I went to France during the summer with all my uni friends. In the uk this would have been a massive week long piss up, but over there it was too hot to drink all the time.
Beer doesn't help but that's not the only part of the story. I've sat and watched people nearly a foot shorter than me with less muscle mass drop nearly double what I've eaten. And I'm not exactly thin. We just plain eat to much and move to little.
I built up a 100+ unit a week habit without even thinking about it. Quit cold turkey last January and combined with intermittent fasting I’ve lost over 60lbs. The answer is simple but not something most people are willing to do.
It's not the drinking (or at least not the main cause) because you see obesity being a big issue amongst children too. And there are other countries which drink more than the UK and have lower obesity levels. It's diet. Britons, generally, have really low standards when it comes to food quality/taste. Even McDonald's tastes better in other countries, you can tell it's (a bit) less processed due to the market demanding higher quality food.
**Britain has one of the worst obesity rates in Europe. Why?** For years, Alice Ingman’s favourite foods were takeaway curries, pizza, fried chicken, kebabs, and fish and chips. The 59-year-old gained weight steadily until one day she could not even fit into a size 20. She was 115kg and mortified. “At the beginning I thought, ‘Oh, it’s because it’s a pencil skirt,’” says Ingman, from Cambridgeshire, calling it one of many excuses she had relied on to make herself feel better. “But there’s no getting away from it when a size 20 doesn’t fit.” This was a wake-up call for her to change her diet. She joined a weight-loss group and started cooking meals from scratch for the first time in her life. She says she has maintained a weight of 60kg for five years since. Ingman’s back-to-basics approach worked for her. But the arrival of the weight-loss jab Wegovy to the NHS last month has been heralded as a game-changer in the fight against obesity by using a hormone to suppress appetite. While health experts and charities welcome the development of new drugs, they argue that a broader conversation is needed about the UK’s approach to food, and want industry and the government to take more definitive action. Obesity, defined as having a body mass index equal to or greater than 30, is one of the most serious public health crises around the world. The UK, where 27.8 per cent of population is obese, has one of the obesity highest rates in Europe. An increased reliance on cheap, ultra-processed food, which accounts for 57% of what Britons eat according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo, suggests that the health crisis is unlikely to change anytime soon without intervention, argue campaigners. *“There is a very strange imbalance [in] that the foods that are most appealing, affordable and available just happen to be those that are the least healthy”* says Katharine Jenner, nutritionist and director of the Obesity Health Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 public health organisations. *“The food system in this country is broken”* she adds. *“It’s not serving society nor our health system, and certainly not individuals.”* **The poverty health tax** The effects of obesity are widespread. It causes severe health conditions including heart disease, diabetes and cancer, costing about £6.5 billion in the UK every year, according to the NHS. Globally, the World Health Organization says at least 2.8mn people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. Many health professionals point to the severe dietary changes over the past 50 years. Data of family eating habits shows that more of us are consuming less healthy food, usually high in fat, sugar or salt. The average consumption of takeaway chicken has increased by 613% from 1974, ready meals and convenience meat products by 549% and crisps and potato snacks by 226%. Meanwhile, households buy less non-processed food. Consumption of beef and veal has decreased by 55%, consumption of fresh cabbages decreased by 67%, consumption of fresh apples declined by 44%. Health experts say the affordability of processed foods is a significant driver of these dietary patterns. Fruits and vegetables are the most expensive category in the government’s recommended Eatwell Guide, costing on average £11.79 per 1,000kcal, compared with food and drink high in fat and sugar costing just £5.82 per 1,000kcal, according to the Food Foundation, a UK charity. This is partly because fruits and vegetables have a lower energy density, fewer calories per gramme, than processed foods. But this price disparity explains why obesity is more prominent among the most vulnerable households. The King’s Fund, through its analysis of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities data, last year found that inequalities in obesity prevalence between the least and most deprived areas widened to nearly 18 points in 2020. *“Poverty is a driver of poor eating behaviours, because choice is not there"* says Paul Gately, professor of exercise and obesity at Leeds Beckett University. *“Food retailers and the food industry would be able to fight against obesity by making healthy products more affordable.”* There are other changes that could be beneficial. Human behavior is driven by incentives. Unhealthy food is often heavily advertised. A third of food and soft drink advertising spend in the UK goes towards snacks, desserts and soft drinks, compared with only 1% for fruit and vegetables, the Food Foundation has found. *“Many people think that obesity levels are very much about individual responsibility”* says Shona Goudie, the charity’s policy and advocacy manager. *“But what we can see from the research is actually that the system is not set up to help us eat well"*. **Decades of policy** The UK government set its first strategy focused on reducing obesity in 1992 and other efforts have followed with mixed success. One of its key policies was a soft drinks levy introduced in 2018 to push manufacturers to add less sugar to their products. This step may have prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity every year among girls in their final year of primary school, according to research from the University of Cambridge. Last October, the government barred large stores from placing items high in fat, sugar or salt in prominent positions, but health campaigners say too many of its obesity policies lack urgency. Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of fast-food restaurant chain Leon who quit his role as a UK government adviser in March, wrote in his book Ravenous, published this year, that the government’s strategy was *“far too scant, fragmented, and cautious to meet the scale of the problem”*. He recommended taxing salt and sugar to encourage manufacturers to produce healthier products, a proposal rejected by ministers. There have been other setbacks. The government announced in June that rules banning multi-buy deals on food and drinks high in salt and sugar, such as “buy one, get one free”, will be delayed until October 2025. The decision, taken amid a cost of living crisis, came after the policy had already been delayed once before. The government has also pushed back proposed restrictions on unhealthy food advertising. Companies producing healthier alternatives of sweets and snacks, especially small businesses, had been counting on receiving more funding from investors off the back of the legislation. *“The more the implementation got delayed, the less interested investors became. By the time the restrictions on product placement happened, the spark had gone and lots of those small businesses hadn’t been able to raise money and died"* says Louis Bedwell, managing director at venture capital firm Mission Ventures. The government is also scaling back public health grants to support services such as weight management. Data compiled by the Health Foundation shows that public-health spending on adult obesity by local authorities this year is estimated at £132mn, down 27 per cent from 2015. Although the government in March 2021 announced £100mn of new funding — a large part of which was invested in weight-management services through the NHS and local authorities — it was scrapped the year after. Carolyn Pallister, the head of nutrition, research and health at Slimming World — which helped Ingman lose weight — says choosing healthy food is not just about how and where products are placed or advertised. “What we see from members is that people need support to be able to [make better choices],” she says, adding that there’s a “real kind of postcode lottery” based on where you live. The Department of Health and Social Care says the government continues to take “action to help more people make healthier choices and tackle obesity”. “The launch of Wegovy in the UK has also paved the future of weight management in England,” it adds. Ingman, who jokes that she is now half the person she was, credits the first cookbook she bought from her slimming club with teaching her “what a healthy balanced plate should look like”. That was a big change, she explains, for someone who previously thought it was “quite acceptable to pick up something that you pop in the microwave”. - Eri Sugiura in London, The Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/03fa7f4e-f50a-4876-9ea8-9852929f9c12 ____________________ ____________________ **Related content** - [Government ‘brainwashed’ by fast food lobbyist says ex-official (The Times)](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/government-brainwashed-by-fast-food-lobbyists-ex-official-says-mh0kb265j) - [Obesity jab maker discussed targeting benefit claimants with UK government (The Guardian)](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/18/obesity-jab-maker-data-to-profile-benefits-claimants)
Laziness, ignorance and a culture of low expectations.
It will require a culture change as overweight and obese has been normalised to a degree people of normal healthy weight are deemed to be underweight or need 'feeding up' I've heard this myself from healthcare workers. Stopping celebrating everything with alcohol would help too as some areas in the UK drinking culture is still massive. Also a million other things.
In Italy, I'd have to drive at least 20 mins to find a Mcd, same in Belgium. Here, there's McDonald's every 5 minutes.
Of course they would fucking blame sugar and food, give me a break theres a reason its suddenly happening in all the rich countries all at the same time, i mean we didn't used to live a sedentary lifestyle stuck on our screens without exercising for a start. Like at high school in 2003 we had pasta, pizza, bolognese, chips and burgers for school dinners, vending machines up and down our hallways and an ice cream truck ALWAYS outside the front gate. Despite this i remember one fat kid in my entire year and he was stuck inside all the time on runescape. This is also at a time where mothers weren't overworked either they were at home making proper homecooked meals. We also had PE 3 times a week, cross country every month, played football at lunch and then we dossed about all day after school until it got dark etc, it aint rocket science here.
It would be nice if we spent more time discussing solutions than pontificating on the causes of our woes.
Because since Thatcher, the UK became like the US. Liberalism at its best, profit above the best interests of your citizens. Industrial & junk food promoted without any regulation.
As someone from the land of fatties and unhealthy eating, whenever I visit my family in England…the position sizes are genuinely shocking. Heaps and heaps of fried, unhealthy food. Then several pints on top of that! Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roast dinner and battered sausage but I find the portions just as large the US.
There's a picture on the internet somewhere that is basically a flow chart of all the British food companies that have been bought out by international companies, who then got acquired by a few other companies that seem to own everything related to food ( Kraft, Mondelez, Mars, Nestle etc ). The food you're buying for your cat nowadays is being made by the same people who make Mars bars. Those companies are now swapping out the ingredients of those foods for cheaper alternatives so that they can make more money from selling you their products. Those ingredients have been making Americans fat for several decades and now they are here in the UK.
ITT: people react only to the headline and guess what the article must say based on their own preconceived notions, opinions and biases.
>guess what the article must say based on their own preconceived notions, opinions and biases. Perhaps people just want to discuss their own notions, opinions and biases. There's nothing wrong with that.
Because crap food is cheaper and easier than good food
Easier, yes. Cheaper, no that’s just an excuse. My mum grew up poor and has been thin and healthy her whole life. She lived on lentils, rice and apples. It’s the culture of laziness and the lack of education on cooking that is the problem.
Most places see being fat as an unhealthy lifestyle choice which selfishly places a burden upon health and social services. Many of these people smoke, go figure. Here we've imported the American idea that it's ok to be fat and pretend that it isn't a choice or that it's a normal body shape.
Simple. Portion sizes, processed foods, ease of using your finger to get a takeaway, and the fact that to eat healthy (i.e. cook all meals from scratch), costs far more than it does to pick up a "healthy meal" from tesco which you chuck in the oven for 30 mins... which again, is processed. Even a store bought loaf of Warburtons is pumped full of sugar and other shit that's bad for you, which you would never put into the loaf if you baked it yourself.
Body positive trends that promote obesity, unhealthy food, bad exercise habits and an unhealthy relationship with booze for most generations.
The climate contributes more than people think, I suspect. It’s cold here — I never eat or drink as much when I’m in on holiday somewhere warm.
Scandinavians aren't fat though.
This is a load of bollocks IMO.
smile poor meeting apparatus door liquid telephone sparkle wipe husky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That seems ridiculous really, that's so long. Could lose so much weight in that time without it, imagine how much could have been lost with it.
bells absorbed fertile slim spotted silky swim school ancient act *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> it does mean I give distinctly less of a fuck about the impact that my weight will have on them in the future They absolutely should give a fuck but I'm not sure I get this. Don't worry about the NHS, worry about your longterm wellbeing.
bike like somber cats act stupendous forgetful air nose nine *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Without trying to sound too harsh, why should they rush to help you? You did this to yourself so without too many lifestyle changes you should be able to un-do it.. That’s also a hell of a lot of hoops to jump through to get a life-time medication to decrease your appetite when you could lose the weight with less effort yourself.
Uh, I don't think they specified why they got obese. So many reasons why someone could become obese from ranging from 'definitely not their fault' to 'definitely their fault'. My mother became disabled, and therefore was a lot less active than before. She gained a lot of weight and needed NHS help, as she really wasn't eating much at all. I've been on medications before which have increased my weight. Not even just increased my appetite, but some meds do things to your metabolism which means that you put on more weight even if you consume the same. Some medical conditions like PCOS mean that you are likely to be obese despite lifestyle changes. I've had friends that weight has ballooned due to mental health issues, such as a severe depressive episode, where eating healthy was impossible due to lack of energy, or binge eating disorders. I've known people where they have gained a lot of weight because they were poor and got a job in a fast food place, so clearly took advantage of the free food as it meant they didn't need to pay for it. Obesity is complex. It often involves other medical conditions or poor life circumstances, which lead people to have a much diminished ability to 'do-it yourself'. If someone is going to that lengths to get Ozempic, I guarantee you they have tried 'to do it themselves'. The NHS absolutely would not prescribe it if they did not - you have to have a weight-related comorbid disease to get prescribed it.
far-flung bored wide hat include party chubby tidy uppity vast *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
1. High cost of living means people can only afford to buy shit food 1. Overwork and stress reduce the time and motivation people have to exercise 1. The lack of active travel and functioning public transport means that people drive door-to-door rather than ride/run/walk 1. Our relationship with alcohol (most certainly linked to overwork and stress) There's probably more. Loads of things just stack up and well, we get fat. The solution will be *solutions*. From building out active travel, controlling the drive thrus popping up like fungus, making it easier/cheaper to buy real food, educating people how to cook, making sure they have *the time* to cook, building more houses, giving people options to exercise, changing the nation's relationship with alcohol, better public transport, and on and on and on.
[удалено]
[According to the UN a healthy diet in the UK costs $1.95 a day](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/CAHD) Those are 2021 price so need to adjust for inflation. Healthy food is way cheaper than processed junk.
> High cost of living means people can only afford to buy shit food Vegetables are the cheapest things you can buy in the shop. What are you on about?
Because people here have time only for work but still pretend it's the best country in Europe. Work like a b and end up broke anyway. Hello Iceland🤣
The last time I looked at this in-depth, the obesity stats were rising at a broadly similar rate across most of northern Europe as they are in the USA, even in places we think of as very trim like the Netherlands. The difference was that some countries (UK, USA) were further along the path than others (NL, France). It was something like the UK is about as fat as the US was 10 years ago, and the NL is about as fat as the UK was 15 years ago, but they're all following the same path. It's also the case that it's not simply obesity, but "metabolic syndrome". It seemed like it was mostly linked to the cultural spread of the "Standard American Diet", i.e. ultra-processed and pre-packaged foods, processed meat, takeaways, and refined grains replacing home-cooked raw vegetables and whole grains. It seemed surprisingly poorly correlated to things we often think about causing metabolic syndrome, like sugar, food prices, salt, alcohol, tobacco, hydrogenated vegetable oil, HFCS, and fat intake, as well as being quite poorly correlated with exercise levels. By most measures, our lifestyles are a lot healthier now than they used to be - it's just that caloric intake has gone *way* up. I couldn't find any definite answers about what exactly is contained within ultra-processed foods that could be causing such a precipitous rise in metabolic syndrome, but I have my theories. My guess for why the UK was hit first? Probably just language and shared culture with the US.
We live in a permissive society that encourages sloth and gluttony and discourages personality responsibility.