Thursday, 6 November 2025

Chris van Tulleken and the slippery slope

 

I suspect that if more people saw what goes on in Select Committee meetings there would be an armed insurrection. I've watched two recently, one from Canada where some insufferable politicians want to put cancer warnings on alcohol, and one in Britain where the Health and Social Care Select Committee is holding an inquiry into "food and weight management". 
 
This is how political pygmies distract themselves from the real business of government. Outside, prisoners are released by accident, the national debt is approaching three trillion pounds and the NHS consumes record funding to no great effect. Inside, politicians talk to idiotic nanny statists about "ultra-processed food".
 
Economic growth has been essentially non-existent for years and the price of food has risen by 37% since 2020. And yet the Select Committee wants to tax food and ban advertising. To an outsider, this seems like a form of madness or a conspiracy against the public. It only starts to make sense when you realise that they all read the same things and listen to the same people. The Health Select Committee has had two days of hearings. Every single person who "gave evidence" is a zealot or a professional activist. There were three people from Jamie Oliver's front group Bite Back, two who used to work at the tiny pressure group Action on Sugar, two from the devious Food Foundation and one of the clowns from Nesta. None of the food industry's millions of satisfied customers appear to have been invited.
 
 
I didn't recognise any of the MPs and it was impossible tell which parties they represented because they all hold the same statist views. So did the witnesses, of course. This all gives the politicians the illusion of consensus which will only be shattered when their policies are implemented and the public becomes aware of them (look at the backlash against the ban on drink refills, for example, which is a far more modest measure than anything discussed by this committee).
 
The star turn was Chris van Tulleken. Several MPs said how impressed they were by his ridiculous, error strewn book. One of the few positive things that can be said about van Tulleken is that he is upfront about what he wants. He brought along a pack of cigarettes, some wholegrain bread and a can of baked beans, products which he admits are "not entirely equivalent" but equivalent enough for him to want to do to food everything that has been done to tobacco.  
 
 
He also made the important admission that health warnings are not really about giving people useful information but about demonising certain products so that more regulation and taxes can be applied to them. Again, the model is - quite explicitly and despite decades of slippery slope denial - tobacco. What will it take for the food industry to wake from its slumber?
 
 
When asked if there are any food brands that would be allowed to advertise under his regime, van Tulleken struggled to think of any. He even claimed that "very credible nutrition academics" think that all food advertising should be prohibited. 
 

Opinion differs on what drives van Tulleken's increasingly demented campaign against brown bread. Some say he is a grifter trying to sell copies of his book. Others say he is an attention seeker. My view has always been that he has an unhealthy relationship with food and suffers from orthorexia nervosa. He casually mentions in his book that he has been known to make himself vomit so he can eat more food, i.e. he has (or has had) bulimia, but seems to think ti

Giving evidence, he admits that he has the self-control of a six year old when it comes to ice cream. The video below is telling in several ways, not least in that he assumes that his experience is universal and that it is the fault of Big Food for making food too delicious. He reckons that ice cream, which has been around for centuries, is tasty because it is "engineered using brain scanners".
 
 
Even if he were less wrong about the science and policy, this is not someone MPs should be listening to.




Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 12:22 pm

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)