To think that as big food industry cause a huge chunk of the NHS bill that they need to be taxed an NHS surcharge? Whats more galling is that many large food companies are US owned and the medication is US supplied.

Just make people pay for their healthcare

No-one thinks about price per calorie though

Some people do. My partner used that exact phrase before we moved in togther and he was a bit 🤔 at the thought of an increased food bill (and fewer calories!) for better food.

Teach primary school children about nutrition.

It's already on the primary curriculum from EYFS onwards.

But schools and primary aged children have very little control over what parents choose to feed them at home. Schools can teach the theory but the practice is taught elsewhere.

No-one thinks about price per calorie though, I don't think it's as relevant here as the price per unit of alcohol scheme in Scotland. It's far more complex with food. I agree about shops though.

I think the way to tackle this isn't in the supermarkets, it's far too late in habit formation. It's a fact that obesity and poor health goes hand in hand with poverty. A quick look at the PHOF data will tell you that https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/public-health-outcomes-framework

Bring back all the Sure Start centres, support and educate parents when their children are tiny. Teach primary school children about nutrition. Teach them more at secondary school. When I was at school we learned about balanced diets and the nutritional needs of different ages/sexes, cooking on a budget etc. Most importantly we learned how to cook. Our DC did 'food tech' and it was laughably awful.

For adults the government should fund initiatives like Jamie Oliver's, teaching then to cook from scratch, quick and nutritious food.

I would love to hear from NHS chief execs as to how the appalling food in some hospitals comes about.
I have been in 2 hospitals, York and Scarborough. In the former after I had a baby they were giving me leaflets about the importance of a high fibre diet after childbirth and no options other than cheese sandwich on white bread. In the latter there was freshly made vegetable soup at the start of each meal. Same NHS trust.

The “but it’s cheaper per calorie so that’s why we can’t stop buying it” argument is really nonsense.

For starters, it’s not just poor people who buy UPFs and high sugar products. Plenty of the middle class do too.
Secondly, water is always cheaper than soft drinks yet supermarket aisles are filled with them.
Thirdly, we are extremely overweight as a nation (even and especially among low income families) so it’s not like people are desperately needing cheap calories. Less calories is fine, actually.

The UPF’s are generally popular because they taste good, they’re affordable and they are quick/easy/convenient. We live in a world now where there are more single parent households, where there are significantly less SAHP’s than there were a few decades ago - without someone at home all day, it’s a lot harder to find the time and energy to produce a fully home cooked meal every day. So people rely on products to help them.

I'll be honest, I don't think they taste good. Some of them leave a really unpleasant aftertaste.

But I also.wanted to say that I see this a lot in relation to food - the idea that people don't know how to cook or it's related to poverty (both financial and time).

I was a single parent when my children were young and worked full time. So I didnt have a lot of time or money. I couldn't cook when my eldest was born.

So I learnt. And I prioritised cooking healthy food from scratch because it was important to me that my children ate healthy food. So I prioritised how I spent my time and money around food based on that.

Some of the biggest consumsers of UPFs that I personally know are families that are financially well off enough to have a parent stay home/work part time (even though our children are now university age) who choose UPFs because they can afford to and like to have plenty of snacks and 'treats' available.

I remember having it drummed into me as a child that 'you are what you eat'. We've always known it was important to eat a healthy, well balanced diet but some people don't prioritise it and some people just can't be arsed.

Not everyone who eats a poor diet is limited on time, funds or has a child with SEND.

The nhs knows all this. They contract it all themselves. No one forces them to buy certain things, THEY procure every single item themselves from the toilet roll to furnishings to drugs. Everything is decided from the top tier and that’s where the money is being wasted. Clinical
Governance doesnt exist when it comes to
spending money in the nhs.

Most of the quinoa available in Europe is shipped from South America, so at a food miles level is a shocking choice to make. Growing it for export also contributes to deforestation. So it'd be better for the planet to stick to oats and barley grown in the UK ;)

(Sorry not picking on op but using as an example. )

This perception is part of the issue. Food is expensive- Yes.
A lot of food that is sold to us as healthy is expensive- Yes
Cheap food that is readily available and healthy is demonised. - think about the humble potato.

On top of that, People luck basic cooking skills. They are afraid/ unable to cook something with a few basic ingredients.

I learnt to cook when I had DC and took it further when I was made redundant and subsequently stayed at home until youngest was around 6yo. Thats when I discovered that cooking non UPF i& veggie is a hell of a lot cheaper. Cheap enough to discover that I can afford organic quality meat once or twice a week. It's also cheaper because you eat less volume, as not pupmed full of air and water.. It has been a long journey and it wasn't always easy but we as a family feel so much more healthy and better for it.

My concern would be having to rely on prescriptions.

Do the manufacturers of weight loss drugs, also make the additives that make upf food so desirable? You pay us to make you fat, then you can pay us to be thin again.

I would say kids with arfid should have prescription access to ufp's in the same way you used to be able to get help with gluten free foods for coeliac disease, because it is a medical need.

Im very sorry your son has arfid, a friend's son has this also and its so difficult to get help and so worrying.

There are also medical conditions to consider like AFRID where you could find children starving if their parents can no long afford to buy their only “safe” foods.

Yep. If I'm priced out of these foods, my son would end up in hospital with a feeding tube.

Unless medical exceptions are made, it's a no from me because I want to be able to afford for my son to eat.

Stop it.
It's this thinking that has ruined most of the drinks I would have as an occasional treat.
I'm not stupid, I can police my own diet.

They should reclassify ufp foods as non food substances, and tax them separately to food.
You could decide this based on the addition and proportions of humectants, palm oil, sweeteners, and other non-food chemicals.

Use the tax to create incentives for food industries to produce healthy food, by changing their techniques.

I think banning foods, even bad ones, will make people unhappy because they will feel coerced, but honestly labelling them as the chemical cocktail they are and taxing them to make them expensive still gives people the choice.

Education is more important than becoming a “nanny state” where the government chooses what you can and can’t eat.

There are also medical conditions to consider like AFRID where you could find children starving if their parents can no long afford to buy their only “safe” foods.

Even if companies are US owned, they still have to comply with UK laws around nutrition etc. if they are a HFSS line they’ll be subject to higher tax. Many companies have a UK specific company that operates independently as its own business and will often have different recipes made in different factories to the US products.

The UPF’s are generally popular because they taste good, they’re affordable and they are quick/easy/convenient. We live in a world now where there are more single parent households, where there are significantly less SAHP’s than there were a few decades ago - without someone at home all day, it’s a lot harder to find the time and energy to produce a fully home cooked meal every day. So people rely on products to help them.

To solve the problem of things like UPF’s, you need to understand why people are using them to start with. If you can find solutions to those problems, you can reduce the reliance of them.

And as someone else mentioned, there is no VAT on fruit and veg, so no tax to remove. Only “luxury” foods have VAT on them (hence the whole are Jaffa Cakes a cake or biscuit - I believe biscuits have VAT but cake doesn’t so makes a difference to pricing). The vast majority of every day staples are zero VAT rated.

And there are some of us who could cook with lentils and beans and simply don't want to.

My son often relies on UPF's due to his limited diet. I'd be irritated to have to pay more, it is already expensive as it is having a disabled child.

I know they are unhealthy but it's also unhealthy for my son not to eat.

True but it's not only having Italian ancestors who could live healthily on no money and were forever healthy.
If only life were that easy!

Yes but there is a massive massive correlation between chronic and premature health issues and obesity. Obesity is absolutely a huge public health issue and is caused by overeating, which is correlated with increasingly easy availability of high calorie, poor nutrition foods (ultra UPFs) everywhere. If no-one was fat, there would be a huge reduction of pressure on the NHS. I 100% agree with the OP on that. The question is how to solve it, and where I disagree with the OP is that legislation to increase the cost of certain foods would be effective.

Education- I mean everyone knows the basics. No-one thinks a pack of wotsits is a nutritious food choice. No-one thinks a can of Monster is a healthy drink. People eat and drink them because they are "small pleasures" in what can be a shitty world.

You can eat healthy and have huge heath issues. It's not that simple.

Educate people. Even the rich could benefit.

ok- so is this environmental legislation or public health legislation? Because if the latter, is there a basis for limiting the palm fat content in foods over other fats? If the former, is there consistency between treatment of palm fats and other environmentally dubious foods? This is the problem- you need to create a consistent framework. You can't just tax/ban things in isolation - you need a clear reason to do so and that reason needs to be (reasonably) consistently applied across all products that share that characteristic.

I was in hospital for a week last year and couldn't believe the utter shite they were serving as food.
I was moved from ward to ward as they were waiting to see if I needed surgery and even on the cardiac ward they were served the same UP crap.

Five courses including cans of coke and chocolate biscuits, cake, crisps and the cooked food I wouldn't serve to my dog.
There was an onsite Costa and staff were all walking around sipping huge sugar-laden drinks.

The city I live by is known for it's high levels of obesity although I remember being surprised by reading that as we never go into the city.

Everyone including the staff were absolutely huge - everyone - it was a massive shock to see. And it's the cheap shitty processed muck we are sold and served in the UK.

I read that in the 70s the tobacco companies in the US decided they weren't making enough money so they bought up the food companies, hospitals and the medicine companies so they now make us sick with the food they sell and then (as in the US) sell you the medication that doesn't even make you better. Oh and if you smoke even better.

We have diseases and illnesses that didn't really exist before then and people are all stretched out of shape with obesity.

I live near sugar beat fields owned by Tate and Lyle and they are constantly sprayed with glyphosphate that stays in the soil for 40 years. Glyphosphate is a trigger for all sorts of cancers and alzheimers. And sugar is literally in everything! It's just addictive poison.

I remember thinking that it would cost the NHS far less if they actually cooked food like shepherds pie or whatever from scratch in their kitchens rather than all the white bread processed sugar laden shit they serve.

Nobody is ‘forced’ but they are being manipulated heavily into buying and eating the shit ‘food’. It’s cheaper, it’s heavily marketed and for me the thing that makes me most angry, is that all the stores are displaying row after row of processed food and only an increasingly tiny few shelves of actual food. No surprise people think it’s the main food group! Really noticed a massive difference in other countries.

I couldn't agree more. Private companies make huge profits, while taxpayers pick up the bill.

Obesity and diabetes have the potential to bankrupt the NHS, and that's not hyperbole, but the conclusion of serious reports and research by academics and thinktanks.

It isn't cheaper to eat crap food, but it's quicker and easier for people who can't cook and have grown up eating crap, so that's what's normal for them.