Junk food, junk statistics

A shock report in the Guardian highlights claims of the immense cost to the British economy of health problems resulting from poor diets.

The UK’s growing addiction to unhealthy food costs £268bn a year, far outstripping the budget for the whole NHS, the first research into the subject has found. The increased consumption of foods high in fat, salt and sugar or which have been highly processed is having a “devastating” impact on human health and Britain’s finances.

“Far from keeping us well, our current food system, with its undue deference to what is known colloquially as ‘big food’, is making us sick. The costs of trying to manage that sickness are rapidly becoming unpayable,” the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) report says.

The £268bn figure has emerged from the first academic research looking at the cost of Britain’s increasing consumption of food that, according to the government’s system of assessing nutritional quality, is deemed unhealthy.

However, such an astronomical figure immediately raises suspicion that it might be a tad exaggerated, and indeed needs to be taken with a substantial pinch of salt (which of course is bad for you). It also seems to have been subject to considerable inflation, having risen from a claimed £27 billion in 2017 through £98 billion in 2021 to £268 billion now. It also seems a suspiciously exact figure. Why not quote it as £270 billion?

Any figure of costs such as this cannot be taken in isolation, but needs to be compared with something else. The alternative is not doing nothing, but doing something different. In a similar way, figures are often bandied about for the costs to society of using fossil fuels, but fail to consider what the actual result would be from not doing so.

It also commits the frequent sin of public health messaging of failing to acknowledge that people can gain any enjoyment from activities they disapprove of. The fact that people actually enjoy eating burgers and crisps in preference to grilled locusts and steamed kale needs to be considered as a benefit and weighed in the equation.

Christopher Snowdon has looked into this in more depth and reached the unsurprising conclusion that these figures have indeed been plucked out of the air by people with an axe to grind. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission is not some kind of official body, but a private pressure group run by an individual called Tim Jackson who has a clear anti-capitalist agenda.

In the absence of any firm evidence, Jackson simply assumes that 33% of all long term health conditions in Britain are caused by poor diet because that’s what one study attributed to “metabolic risk”. Metabolic dysfunction is extremely common among the elderly — Jackson says that “70% of adults over 65 suffer from one or more metabolic condition” — and while it is linked to obesity and diet, it is also linked to medication, genes, stress, physical inactivity and other lifestyle factors, as well as old age itself. Jackson ignores the other risk factors and for the purposes of his cost estimate blames every case on “the current food system”.

This makes the maths nice and simple. He takes 70 per cent of what the UK spends on healthcare, social care and disability benefit welfare and divides it by three. This gives him a total of £92 billion in direct costs to the government. He then adds less tangible costs, including “human costs” and lost productivity. “Human costs” depend entirely on whatever arbitrary figure you put on a year of life and are the Get Out of Jail Free card of health economists who want to make it look like personal choices impose a burden on society. Jackson simply nicks the figure of £60 billion from the report commissioned by Tony Blair’s think tank (and paid for by Novo Nordisk) last year.

So, in fact, the figure is entirely made up, and does not deserve to be given any credence. I’m not denying that poor diets do impose some costs on society and the health service, but the real figure is likely to be several orders of magnitude smaller. It is also questionable to what extent this can be addressed through the usual public health playbook of taxes, restrictions and bans. But no doubt it will be gleefully used in future as a stick to beat us with.

And it seems that we are regressing to a medieval worldview where illnesses are blamed on people’s moral failings rather than being attributed to disease and infection.