UK children shorter, fatter and sicker…
Grim reading in a Food Foundation report (below), rearticulating the oft stated problem that children’s health is declining as a result of a poor diet, poverty and other markers.
In the NHS, prevention and deprivation are high on the agenda, but for the youngest the report suggests actions so far have been unsuccessful. At a time of crises in healthcare services we spend a lot of time focusing on areas such as structure, waiting lists and funding, all a necessary part of day-to-day firefighting. But these efforts seem pyrrhic if the next generation is fated to enjoy worst healthcare outcomes because their diet and other life factors are deficient.
What to do about it?
Good advice and intentions on the subject are in abundant supply, but there seems to be no solution that is palatable to the public (or politicians). Why might it be that it is so difficult to change people’s behaviour?
Perhaps it is because people exercise choice, and for many of us this often equates to the ‘nicest’ option, not the ‘healthiest’. It’s a classic of evolutionary biology that many of the things we now regard as vices were once of paramount importance. Happy examples include energy conservation (e.g., laziness), energy acquisition (e.g., eating more than we need to survive), and avoidance of risk (e.g., watching people do sport rather than doing it ourselves). If this is true, then advocates of a ‘healthy lifestyle’ face a tireless opponent. Persuading people to get out in the evening to run or cycle, less so to watch Goggle Box, is the real challenge.
This is not to decry attempts to improve health, but to state the simple truths that stand in the way of any wholesale restructuring of diet and activity away from what has become the contented norm.
The official advice on the subject is also contradictory – regular exercise is a DHSC recommendation when it comes to weight reduction, but the cross-departmental national food strategy concluded that exercise can be thwarted by our natural tendency to conserve energy (apparently, active women in rural Nigeria have similar calorie expenditure to women in Chicago). ‘National food strategy for England’ published in July 2020 (‘You can’t outrun a bad diet’).
The problem is very well articulated by the Food Foundation report. However, in the absence of a significant lifestyle or dietary change, we are still in a situation where we are treating the symptoms of the problem, rather than preventing it.
We like to talk about radical change, but as we learn from the strategies and attempts to change behaviour so far, it is very difficult to achieve this in practice without compulsion (and how far are people willing to be compelled?).
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