Should junk food be taxed?

A LEADING public health expert has called for a tax on unhealthy foods after shock figures revealed poor eating habits were costing the country's health service £6 billion pounds a year - three times as much as smoking.

Dr Mike Rayner, a researcher with Oxford University's Department of Public Health who is also connected to charity the British Heart Foundation, said more must be done to combat unhealthy eating.

"We eat too much fat, too much sodium, too much added sugar and not enough fruit and vegetables," he said.

In a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Communiuty Health, Dr Rayner and his co-author, Peter Scarborough, calculated that the cost to the National Health Service (NHS) every year in ill-health caused by poor diet was £6 billion.

Research has shown that bad diet can cause heart disease, cancer, tooth decay and diabetes.

Dr Rayner's report puts the cost to the NHS each year of treating all these conditions at £18 billion.

Diet was not the only cause of such illnesses. But the researchers said it was well established that about a third of the diseases were related to diet - hence the £6 billion figure.

The figure of £6 billion is "over three times one commonly quoted estimate (£1.5 billion annually) for the cost of smoking to the NHS," the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health article says.

Dr Rayner told the Evening Press the Government should be paying more attention to the costs of food-related ill health. He suggested a tax on unhealthy foods, banning the advertising of junk food to children and better labelling could improve the national diet.

A tax on unhealthy foods could be based on a Food Standards Agency (FSA) "scoring" system, and could take the form of extending VAT to those foods rated as unhealthy, he said.

The proceeds of such a "junk food tax" could go towards subsidising healthy foods such as fresh fruit and vegetables, so as to help poorer families adopt a healthier diet.

He said there should be a 9pm watershed on TV advertising of foods rated "unhealthy" using the FSA scoring system - a measure designed to reduce advertising aimed at children.

Such a measure might also encourage manufacturers keen to advertise their products to make them healthier, Dr Rayner said.

He added that a "traffic light" labelling system could also be introduced to clearly distinguish foods that were healthy from those that were not.

"Marking unhealthy foods with a red symbol and healthy foods with a green symbol would make it much clearer to consumers what are healthy and unhealthy foods," he said.

No... says Vale of York Tory MP Anne McIntosh

People do need to be eating better, and taking more exercise.

If you eat the right kind of diet, you do feel so much better - and you look better. We all know that really.

The advice is five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables every day. But how do we entice people to follow this advice?

I don't think that simply taxing poor-quality food is the answer. That smacks of the nanny state to me.

Obviously, television and cinema advertisements can influence eating patterns, so I do think OFCOM should be invited to look at this aspect of advertising when it conducts its review.

As for labelling of food, our farmers and food producers have battled hard to meet the exacting and expensive new animal welfare requirements. Our home-produced food should be properly labelled as meeting these requirements, which imported foods often do not, and we should be encouraged to purchase them for that reason.

But I think it is parents who really need to be taking the lead on good diet by helping their children to form healthy eating habits. Simple things such as having a balanced diet in the home and sitting down together to eat a meal at night are an excellent start to life. Evidence suggests that eating habits start young, so parents have a crucial role to play in this regard.

Scaring people with stories about the risks of poor diet is one way of influencing their behaviour. But I think it is much better to persuade people.

National charities have a role to play and I pay tribute to the British Heart Foundation, among others, who run campaigns both for healthy eating and exercise regimes. But I think the answer to tackling the problem of poor diet has to start at home.

I think in many ways the healthy diet message comes down to common sense.

Obviously things such as crisps and sweets and high-calorie foods do not constitute a satisfactory, healthy diet. Adults should know that. Children don't, always.

We need our children to have good food at school - I think we are moving in the right direction there - and good food at home, but I think home is the key. We need to be encouraging parents to make sure their families eat meals together - meals where everybody has fresh fruit and vegetables, and plenty of fibre.

We were brought up in my day to have one hot meal a day, with two portions of fresh vegetables. It is about tempting people back into that habit of cooking fresh meals. If we can get our children into the habit of eating healthy meals at home, and seeing how their parents prepare them, then hopefully, when they grow up and go off to live on their own, they will know how to cook and will have developed good eating habits.

We shouldn't forget either about the importance of exercise. A healthy diet is very important - but so is getting enough exercise. A balanced diet together with a gentle daily or weekly exercise regime can work miracles.

Yes... says Stillington nutritionist Annie Stirk

I AM totally in agreement that more needs to be done to tackle the problem of bad diet.

The problems bad diet causes have been known about for a long time. The World Health Organisation said that more than 30 per cent of all illnesses that we succumb to are caused by bad diet.

There was a very telling moment for me from the recent Jamie Oliver programme about school meals, where one of the school staff commented that since they had been preparing meals using fresh, healthy ingredients, children were not having to use their inhalers. That comment has really stuck in my mind.

Part of the answer comes down to educating people to eat better. We do need to keep banging away at the healthy eating message, and hope that it begins to get through. But I think the food manufacturers themselves must also look at what they are producing.

We are a ready-meal culture now because a lot of people are reluctant to cook - but you've only got to look at ready-meal products to see that many of them are full of bad fats, and high in sugar and salt. They are far removed from fresh food.

It is made worse by the fact that when you go into your local supermarket a lot of high-fat, high-sugar foods - for example cakes, biscuits, crisps, bars of chocolate etc - are sold as multi-packs. This means that people are encouraged to buy more - and when they get them home, they will eat them. They are hard to resist.

Ready meals could easily be healthier than they are, but the problem is that while Tesco or Sainsbury or Marks & Spencer produce a range of "healthier" meals you do have to pay a premium price for them.

A lot of poorer families do buy on price. The cheaper foods have poorer nutritional value, and it is a self-perpetuating cycle.

There are schemes in York, such as Sure Start, where mums and dads and children from less well-off families can learn how to cook fresh foods.

The problem is whether this kind of scheme is accessible enough, or whether there is enough information about what is available.

We do need to get families eating fresh, healthy food. I think restricting TV advertising could help.

We need to get rid of these celebrity adverts - like the Gary Lineker crisp adverts - and stop children pestering their parents. That is a huge problem.

Some kind of tax on poor quality foods might also help. The danger is that it would affect poor families, because the price of food would rise. But it would recognise that this is a really serious problem that is not going to go away, and that we need to do something about. So yes, I think it could do something to help the situation.

Updated: 10:58 Wednesday, November 16, 2005