Britain’s weight problem costs almost £100bn a year, analysis suggests, prompting calls for a government crackdown on unhealthy food and a drive to promote fresh ingredients.
The spiralling cost shows that the growing prevalence of people being overweight is “an absolute public health disaster”, said Henry Dimbleby, the government’s former adviser on food.
The cost has soared from £58bn in 2020 to £98bn, according to the Tony Blair Institute. The costs to people affected rose from £45.2bn to £63.1bn a year, and the costs to the NHS from £10.8bn to £19.2bn, according to modelling undertaken for the thinktank by Frontier Economics.
The biggest proportional jump came in costs to society as a whole. These have risen more than sevenfold, from £2.1bn to £15.6bn, mainly from lost productivity because a record 2.4 million people are now too sick to work, often as a result of being overweight or living with obesity.
Costs have risen between a previous analysis that Frontier did and the new one because the latter includes the value of health lost due to illness or weight-related disease.
Dimbleby said Rishi Sunak was not interested in trying to tackle obesity and had wrongly chosen to try to eradicate smoking rather than improving dietary health. In 2020, Dimbleby published a government-commissioned blueprint to radically overhaul Britain’s eating habits and reliance on foods that increase the risk of killer diseases.
“You’ve got a prime minister who for his own, I think, kind of personal aesthetics almost would rather try to deal with smoking, which he sees as bad even though it is now a tiny and disappearing problem, rather than food because he likes to drink Coke,” Dimbleby told a nutrition conference at the Royal Society on Monday.
Dimbleby, a co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, said food was a direct cause of three of the four main illnesses that are stopping the 2.4 million from working – type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and musculoskeletal conditions – and exacerbated the other, mental ill-health.
Calling for government intervention on diet, Dimbleby said Britons spent more on confectionery (£3.9bn a year) than fruit and vegetables (£2.2bn), and 85% of the food consumed would be deemed by the World Health Organization to be too unhealthy to be marketed to children.
In order to be healthier and break “the junk food cycle”, people needed to eat 30% more fruit and vegetables, 50% more fibre and 25% less food that is high in fat, salt or sugar, he said. He urged ministers to launch a nationwide drive to teach young people to cook while at school, to close the skills gap between those who can and cannot cook from scratch and to reduce the use of prepared food.
Two-thirds of adults are classed as overweight or obese. Dimbleby said relying on weight loss drugs to tackle type 2 diabetes was misplaced and the government would be wiser to rein in the food industry and promote uptake of fresh food. It was “dystopian” to think that as many as one in three Britons could end up being on drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, he added.
Katharine Jenner, the director of the Obesity Health Alliance, said: “The huge increase in costs to £98bn, which now takes into account the value of health lost through illness and disease, is particularly striking as it has risen during a time the government has had a plan to address obesity – and failed to enact it.
“Thirty years ago, half of us were living with overweight or obesity, and now it is two-thirds of the population. In those 30 years, our food environment has changed beyond recognition into an obesogenic environment. It is not that our genes have changed but that we are surrounded by unhealthy food at every turn – on TV, in the shops, on our high streets and in our workplaces.
“If we only attempt to treat people without changing the environment that made them ill in the first place, we will simply be spending huge amounts of extra money in the NHS for little to no long-term benefit.”
