Food is the new tobacco

As reported by the Sun and a few of other newspapers, Public Health England is going ahead with its insane plan to withdraw a fifth of calories from the food supply. Not quite the whole food supply, as the quango has admitted that it can't take energy out of vegetables, but the targets apply to the following:

Egg products, potato products, meat products, processed meats, poultry, fish, meat alternatives, pies, pastries, sausages, burgers, pasta, rice, noodles, savoury biscuits, crackers, bread with additions (e.g. ciabatta with olives), cooking sauces, table sauces, dressings, crisps, savoury snacks, ready meals, takeaways, dips, hummus, coleslaw, pizza, ‘food-to-go’, sandwiches, composite salads and soups.

Biscuits, chocolate bars, confectionery etc. have already been covered by the sugar reduction plan and so are not included.

So much for only reformulating 'food that contributes most to intakes of children up to the age of 18 years', as PHE originally claimed when the 'childhood obesity' plan was devised. PHE bureaucrat Alison Tedstone now admits that everything is fair game:

“Our children don’t eat special children’s food,” she said. “We buy the same food for our entire family.”

As usual in 'public health', it's not really about children. It's about treating adults like children.

But PHE chief executive Duncan Selbie said the steps were as much about influencing the diets of adults.

"Britain needs to go on a diet."

But Britain doesn't need to go on a diet. Some people need to go on a diet, but 74 per cent of us are not obese and a fair proportion of 26 per cent do not want to go on a diet. Some of us need to eat more. And for the many millions of people who consume roughly the right number of calories, cutting energy content in food by 20 per cent is the equivalent of raising the price by 25 per cent. 

Meanwhile, PHE are sticking to their bizarre 400-600-600 rule; 400 calories for breakfast and 600 calories each for lunch and tea. This obviously adds up to 1,600, well below the 2,500 calories the agency maintains are needed by men every day, and so they advise us to consume an extra 900 calories in snacks, soft drinks and alcohol. Even nanny statist Susan Jebb raised her eyebrows at this:

While she welcomed raising calorie-awareness, she [Jebb] noted that the recommendation to eat a total of 1,600 calories for main meals was well below daily levels and assumed people were snacking. “Maybe it is better to have a slightly bigger meal and not to snack,” she said.

In December I wrote...

This seems to be a case of PHE deliberately giving people false information with the intention of tricking them into eating less, based on the assumption that we underestimate how much we eat, even to ourselves. The idea is that if you tell people to eat 1,600 calories, perhaps they will eat 2,300 calories.

...PHE are no longer pretending to be a source of accurate advice. They are in the business of nudging, manipulation and deliberate deceit.

This has now been confirmed by Alison Tedstone who told the Times...

She says people should stick to 1,600 calories a day for meals, leaving room for drinks and snacks. “This is not official calorie guidance; it’s a handy rule of thumb,” she said. Men are still advised to eat 2,500 calories a day and women 2,000 but after seeing that people did not admit to a third of what they ate Dr Tedstone said that the advice would help them to keep to the targets.

Woe betide anybody foolish enough to take the country's leading 'public health' agency at its word.

These people are dangerous idiots, but the food industry will have to go along with them because it has been none-too-subtly threatened with advertising bans, taxes and mandatory limits if it doesn't acquiesce.

As for consumers, the best we can hope for are smaller portions and a higher cost of living.

I have written about this for Spectator Health.

It is difficult to find the words to describe how demented this policy is. Imagine a Soviet commissar, drunk on power and vodka, who had been driven mad after contracting syphilis. Even he would not issue an edict like this. It is off the scale of anything the ‘public health’ lobby has tried before. It represents the final severing of the thread that once connected Public Health England to the real world.

Do have a read.