Nick Stace - Director of campaigns and communications for the Consumers' Association

Question: Can you explain the CA's views on obesity and diet related disease.

 

Nick Stace: It is widely recognised that obesity and diet related disease is Britain’s biggest killer today.

 

There have been all sorts of reports that have come out over the last few months but very few of them have focused on the actions that government and industry should take, so today we have turned up the heat on the government and industry to outline a set of demands that we are encouraging them to take up in relation to this.

 

Question: What are your three priorities for immediate action?

 

Nick Stace: There are twelve demands in all that we are asking them to take up but there are three key priorities.

 

The first of those is the establishment of Nutrition Council. A Nutrition Council is designed to do several things.

 

Firstly it should be an action council, not a further series of consultations  - this is about pulling together all the activities across government.

 

Secondly it is to ensure that the government is co-ordinated. For example the sports minister, Richard Caborn, welcomed the Cadburys get active scheme, where if you collected enough chocolate bar wrappers you got free sports equipment but this would have meant eating an awful lot of chocolate. On the other side you have Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency who is saying that this is absolutely wrong so at the government is contradicting itself – the Nutrition Council would aim to overcome that.

 

The second priority would be to place restrictions on the advertising of unhealthy food for children. The food standards agency has already shown that advertising influences children’s preferences. We have got a situation where already 15 per cent of 15 year olds are obese and it is going to get worse if we allow advertising to carry on the way it is now.

 

The third, is that I have written to the top four supermarkets asking for an urgent, immediate meeting with them to talk about how we can get an effective labelling system in place. 

 

This will enable people to tell without having to read endless amounts of ingredients how much fat is in something, so we can give them an instant idea of whether something is high in fat, medium in fat or low in fat. 

 

If you take an example like Kellogg’s Frosties Turbos  it has health claims saying they are good for your heart, good for your bones , good for your concentration yet it has five times the amount of sugar than another product for example Kellogg’s corn flakes. 

 

We are not trying to ban unhealthy products, nor push  people into a situation where they have to eat certain things we just want to free up the choice people have. In other words people can actually see that something is unhealthy and make the decision not to buy it.

 

Question: How much time are you giving for these actions to be put into place?

 

Nick Stace: For the three priorities we are giving them a month to commit to them. Clearly a month would not be enough time to form a Nutrition Council and to change advertising. But by the end of the month we want the government to give a clear indication that they are taking this issue seriously and that they will support the three priority areas.

 

Question: What are the main barriers that make it difficult for consumers to eat more healthily?

 

Nick Stace: There are a number of barriers. One of them is as I have just said Advertising. 78 per cent of parents in a consumer survey said that TV adverts were influential.

 

The marketing of unhealthy food products during children’s programmes is really effective. Wotsits interestingly have used children to pester their parents as part of their marketing strategy.

 

The other barrier is labelling. At the moment you have got examples such as Kellogg’s Frosties. Often products that claim they are low in fat often have a high amount of fat in them. The labelling is just too misleading and inaccurate.  The issue is that people do actually want to be healthy, but they are finding labelling a barrier to them having that healthy diet they are looking for.

 

Question: If the government does take forward your demands do you think it will be accused of 'nannying'?

 

Nick Stace:  No, the nannying argument we think is an argument that the industry wants you and wants the government to believe.

 

But there comes a point when you have an issue like diet related disease which is now a bigger killer than tobacco, do you follow the tobacco example and have many decades of inaction by government and by industry and wait until it is a complete crisis or do you tackle it now.

 

So no it is not nannying at all, it is responsible government that would take action now. People are perfectly entitled to eat chocolate bars, to eat unhealthy food if they want to but what they should do is be able to know exactly what they are eating and know if this product is unhealthy or not.

 

Question: Is this a new campaign and why have you launched it now?

 

Nick Stace: Interestingly we have been campaigning in the area of nutrition for the last ten years. We started with stage one where we lobby, persuade and try to get the food industry and government to change so at least you give them a chance to take on your views.

 

We then moved to stage two where we are at now, which is saying the government and industry haven’t responded in the way they should have responded and we have had enough and consumers are telling us that they have had enough so we are now issuing a public demand for them to do something.

 

If the government doesn’t respond in a positive manner then we will be going to stage three and stage three is about engaging with consumers.

 

It is about naming and shaming food manufacturers and we will go through that stage if we have to. What we are hoping is that this is an olive branch to them, and this is an opportunity for them to act, but if they don’t act the warning is there for them that we will take further action.

 

Question: You have criticised the government for being apathetic and this is a strong accusation – do you think this will offend them?

 

Nick Stace: I think that government has reasonably been characterised by a number of things.

 

There has been a lack of purpose, a lack of conviction and the desire to compromise on public health. We are going further than just calling them apathetic, I think the progress they have made is minimal.

 

Will this offend government? – Lets face it the consumers are offended by the fact the Government is not taking action in this extremely important area. Are we worried about the government being offended? Not really no. The government is just not listening across a whole range of public policy issues.

 

Question: The government appears to have taken quite a lot of action recently especially with John Reid in his attempts to tackle obesity. What would be your response to that?

 

Nick Stace:  Our response would be that the government has talked a lot, consulted a lot, and they have introduced a few half baked half hearted schemes, such as their aims to reduce the content of sugar products in school vending machines.

 

They have extended that scheme now to just 1.5 per cent of schools – this is just laughable. They toyed with the idea of subsidising gym membership. They are all small initiatives that will actually go nowhere in terms of tackling the issue of public health.  There needs to be a concerted and comprehensive approach to this.

 

Question: Over the last few months the industry has taken forward several initiatives to address unhealthy eating? What is your stance on this?

 

Nick Stace: It is not the whole industry, there are some people in the industry who have tried to address some of the issues around labelling and so on.

 

Generally speaking the industry has not gone far enough; they are still producing products with health claims that are just plain inaccurate, in effect they are almost lies. They don’t make any effort at the moment to publish information which is easily readable so at a glance consumers can tell if it is high in fat, sugar or salt.

 

Question: The food industry tells us there is no such thing as bad foods? Is this so?

 

Nick Stace:  There are foods which are obviously unhealthy, there are foods which are high in fats, sugar and salt, there are foods that if you eat too many of them they are likely to contribute to diet related disease – that is what I would call a bad food.

 

Question: So are you saying we should cut out all of these bad foods from our diet?

 

Nick Stace: Not at all, lets face it we all like chocolate, we all like foods that are sometimes not good for us.

 

It is not a matter of suddenly banning food, all it is about is not heavily marketing food to children which are high in fat when we have a growing obesity problem and it is also about providing information so people can make an informed choice.

 

Question: The food industry also claims that exercise is one of the main contributing factors to obesity, not unhealthy eating? What is your argument to this?

 

Nick Stace: I think there is some truth in it. It is not just about diet although diet is obviously very important it is also about exercise.

 

If you are not careful, what happens is the industry claims it’s nothing to do with us, it is all to do with exercise, and it is all to do with the consumer.

 

Whilst we acknowledge that it is wider that just being about the manufacturers and supermarkets ultimately the industry are only putting these issues forward because they don’t want to take the issue seriously themselves.