Obesity

(asked on 21st March 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of trends in the level of obesity; and what steps her Department is taking to help tackle obesity.


Answered by
Andrea Leadsom Portrait
Andrea Leadsom
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 27th March 2024

The Government is delivering a wide range of measures to reduce the numbers of both adults and children who are overweight, or living with obesity. To date this includes legislative measures to limit the advertising, and location and price promotion, of less healthy products, and to ensure calorie levels are provided on menus when eating out of the home. Impact assessments for the legislated measures suggest there will be substantial health benefits, as well as savings to the National Health Service, accrued.

We have seen important successes through the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL), which between 2015 and 2020 has seen sugar levels reduced by 46% in, and over 46,000 tonnes of sugar removed from, products in scope of the levy. Data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey from 2019 shows that sugar intakes have fallen for some age groups. In older children and adolescents, this appears to be partly driven by soft drinks contributing less to sugar intakes, likely as a result of the changes made to drinks included in the SDIL. Further information from the survey is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/ndns-results-from-years-9-to-11-2016-to-2017-and-2018-to-2019

A paper on the association of obesity in primary school children and the SDIL suggests that the reduction in the sugar content of soft drinks delivered by the SDIL could have prevented up to 5,000 cases of obesity in girls in the last year of primary school. Reductions were greatest in girls who attended schools in the 40% of the most deprived areas. Further information from the paper is available at the following link:

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004160

The voluntary reformulation programme requires businesses reduce levels of sugar, salt, and calories in everyday food and drink. Levels of sugar have reduced in breakfast cereals, yogurts, and pre-packed milk-based drinks by 15%, 13.5%, and 29.7% respectively, between 2015 and 2020. Levels of salt have reduced in some products by 20%.

Reticulating Splines