It's never really about the children

Public Health England are pushing on with their mad idea to take arbitrary percentages of sugar, fat, salt and calories out of Britain's food supply. It is a idea worthy of Caligula. The last few weeks have seen various food companies announce that their products will be getting smaller. Some have attempted to blame this on Brexit, but inflation is no reason to reduce the size (the normal thing to do would be to increase the price). It's all being done under pressure from this unelected quango with the minimum of public debate.

Health by stealth, they call it, and rightly so. If people were well informed about what was going on, there would be bedlam. Although every reformulation and shrinkage unleashes hell from consumers (see the recent Irn-Bru announcement, for example), you'd never guess there was any opposition to PHE's totalitarian scheme if you read today's coverage.

The BBC's report was typical. It contains a quote from PHE's Alison Tedstone, who obviously supports the policy, plus a quote from Action on Sugar's Graham MacGregor. I'm no psychiatrist but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that MacGregor is at least half mad. He naturally supports state control of the food supply as well. Someone from the British Dietetic Association is also quoted. She not only supports the PHE plan but wants a watershed ban on so-called junk food advertising. The article closes with some bloody 'public health nutritionist' who 'said PHE was doing the right thing'.

The BBC perpetuates the lie that this is all being done 'in a bid to make UK children more healthy.' As ever in the 'public health' racket, the welfare of children is being used as an excuse to kick adult consumers. Let's just remind ourselves about the spiralling epidemic of childhood obesity that supposedly requires the wholesale desecration of the food supply.

Let's also remember that childhood obesity figures are not really measures of childhood obesity. The BMI measure doesn't work with children because hardly any of them have a BMI of more than 25, so it was arbitrarily decided in the 1990s that all children above the 95th percentile were obese for the purposes of data collection.

But childhood obesity is a smokescreen, just as Brexit is a cover story for the corporatist rip off of smaller portions for the same price. As the 'public health nutritionist' says

"This is an excellent approach... Not only are these foods commonly consumed by children - but also by the whole family."

There is no opt out unless you are prepared to do your shopping in another country. The foods that we know and love are, in effect, being prohibited.