The politics of health: is food the new tobacco?

Monday April 28, 2008

The same tactics that have been used to tackle smoking are now being used to target our eating habits, says Simon Clark

More than 30,000 lives are being lost each year because of weight-related diseases … children as young as three are showing signs of obesity which will condemn them to a life of ill health … researchers claim that Britain is ‘heading for an epidemic of obesity’ because of poor diets and sedentary lifestyles … it has been estimated the cost of obesity to the National Health Service at £500 million a year.

Sound familiar? It should do. For years we have been told that 120,000 Brits die each year from ‘smoking-related diseases’; in England alone, 1,000 people a day are admitted to hospital with a smoking-related disease; smoking costs the NHS £1.75 billion a year; smokers should ‘quit or die’, blah, blah, blah.

Few would deny there are health risks associated with smoking. However, to suggest that smoking automatically leads to an early grave is absurd. It’s just one reason why the health police appear increasingly foolish on this and other issues.

Nevertheless, the same exaggerated tactics that have been used to tackle smoking are now being used to target our eating habits. Incredibly, we are told that one fifth of Britain’s population will be clinically obese within the next ten to 15 years and by 2040 half the population will be ‘superfat’ and in danger of dying early.

Censorship

The problem with these outlandish claims is that they are being used as an excuse for restricting freedom of choice through social engineering and censorship.

Demos, a New Labour think-tank, has argued that a tax on “fatty, highly processed and fast foods” will encourage people to eat more healthily. A similar argument has been used in the smoking debate. Increase tobacco taxation and people will be forced to change their lifestyle. The result? Under successive governments tobacco taxation has soared to record levels with the elderly and the low paid being the hardest hit.

Another tactic is to restrict then ban product advertising. In 2002 the advertising and promotion of all tobacco products was outlawed in the UK, although there is little evidence to suggest that it encouraged people to start smoking. Now some MPs and campaigners want to make it an offence to promote “less healthy” foodstuffs to children.

Politicians like to stress that health campaigns and associated legislation are designed to help us give up (whatever it is they don’t like us doing). Far from helping, it creates a culture that actively encourages discrimination.

Discovered

A few years ago Forest discovered that some companies were advertising for “non-smokers only”. We subsequently reported that a man had been sacked after one day in his new job, not because he defied the company’s no-smoking policy but because his employer discovered that he smoked, in his own time, in his own home.

In 2002 a report by the Association for the Study of Obesity found that excessively fat students are 65 per cent less likely to get a place at the university of their choice than thinner applicants. They are also less likely to get a job and less likely to be promoted at work. Obese women are said to be paid, on average, five per cent less than their slimmer colleagues.

Truth is another casualty of today’s health wars. One anti-smoking campaign famously featured cigarettes oozing globules of fat from a blocked artery. According to Private Eye (no fan of Big Tobacco), “Some experts are worried that although the condition highlighted, atherosclerosis, is linked to smoking, the mechanism by which the one causes the other is still debated. We all get fatty deposits in our arteries as we get older … Worse, the scene in which we cut to a pair of latex-clad hands squeezing goo from an artery in to a petri dish, like toothpaste from a tube, is highly exaggerated.”

Threat

If food is the new tobacco, as many people fear, we can no doubt look forward to similar campaigns aimed at fat people. The trick is getting the balance right between tackling health scares and preserving freedom of choice. In recent years this balance has come under serious threat.

When beef on the bone was temporarily outlawed in the Nineties one hotelier was successfully prosecuted for serving it to his customers who knew about the tiny health risk but still demanded that he keep it on the menu. A listeria scare in cheese provoked a similar knee-jerk reaction from government, which temporarily banned unpasteurised cheeses until it was discovered that the listeria was present in pasteurised cheeses as well!

In Scotland the Food Standards Agency threatened to ban the use of sheep’s intestine in the production of haggis because of a similar (ie minute) health risk. The-then first minister Jack McConnell subsequently announced that changing the eating habits of the Scottish nation was to be his personal political crusade!

The very idea that politicians, or even health professionals, should dictate our individual tastes and preferences is preposterous. Sadly, far from encouraging a tolerant, civilised society that celebrates freedom of choice and cultural diversity, the politics of health is leading us in the opposite direction.

Excessive

In America, while some companies breathalyse staff to see if they’ve had a cigarette en route to work, others monitor what their employees eat in the staff canteen. This may seem excessive and remote, but what happens in America often influences policy in the UK.

Yes, people should be informed about the health risks of smoking or eating fatty foods, or drinking too much alcohol, or climbing a mountain, or indulging in promiscuous sex, but if you choose to ignore the risks that’s your concern, as long as you don’t harm other people.

Antony Worrall Thompson, restaurateur, TV chef and patron of Forest, says, “Everything in moderation and a little bit in excess. The nanny state is completely wrong. I am who I am and it will be my choice when to give up smoking and when to lose weight.”

Fellow TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright agrees. She says, “Nobody tells me what to eat. Freedom is a simple choice, it is quite straightforward. All you have to do is say no.”

I’ll drink to that.

Simon Clark is director of the smokers’ lobby group Forest