The Inequality Issue with Boris Johnson’s Obesity Strategy
The UK’s new obesity strategy tackles the desirability of fast food, but it’s hard for low-income groups to make the choices needed for its success.
To support Kitchio’s work in this area, visit our Crowdfunder.
My chicken tikka masala bubbled gently in the microwave, its plastic warping in the heat as I watched it rotate in its softly lit enclave. Above the low hum I heard statistics in my head from reports I’d been studying, calling out my hypocrisy.
- Families who rely on ready meals and takeaways spend an extra £2,100 per year on food.
- More than ¾ of food products manufactured in the UK in 2018 were rated ‘unhealthy’ by the FSA.
- 1 in 4 children in disadvantaged urban areas is obese.
Developing Kitchio, a healthy meal box for low-income families, has meant I’ve been buried in this research for months. Yet I was falling into the same patterns myself. It was a long day, I hadn’t planned ahead, the fridge was empty. I grabbed a ready meal on the way home and popped it in the microwave. Easy.
I knew I could buy and make the meal from scratch for half the money and fat, but I just couldn’t be bothered.
I worry the government’s obesity strategy overlooks one key driver in many food decisions: time. For those on low incomes, physical poverty can create time poverty as people scramble to make ends meet. When this happens, you’re likely to make unhealthy food decisions, through no real fault of your own. Relying on people to change their own behaviour widens inequality, as only those who have time to address the underlying issues can afford to make the changes.
Admittedly, Boris Johnson’s recommendations target the subliminal seduction of unhealthy food well.
As Henry Dimbleby put in this week’s National Food Strategy, the single most important thing that shapes our food environment is the free market. Slashing fast food advertising on TV is wise, and should certainly benefit lower income groups. One study showed that people briefly exposed to food advertising while remembering a number — simulating the stress of living under financial strain — ate significantly more calories than those who haven’t seen the advert or been given the memory task.
But the majority of the new measures rely on personal behaviour change: adding calorie counts to restaurant menus, consulting on traffic-light labels, ‘calling to action’ those who are overweight. Empowering people to make healthy decisions is a noble aim, but it takes more than knowledge of the problem to change your own behaviour. My tikka masala is a perfect case in point.
The new strategy sadly plays on the popular view that overweight people, particularly those in deprived areas, need to motivate themselves to eat less and move more.
Anecdotal evidence may tell you this works. Obesity comes from a lack of willpower, right?
In fact, recent research has shown that living under financial pressure produces a form of cognitive strain that makes daily tasks and decisions more difficult. Every other life decision has to be mentally juggled at the same time. As obesity develops from many independent decisions, from deciding what to buy to being tempted in the supermarket, evidence suggests that high cognitive strain, rather than lack of willpower, leads to unhealthy food decisions.
Added to this, eating healthily is expensive. One group of Oxford academics calculated that it costs £5.99 per day to eat the Eatwell Plate — the Government’s template for a balanced diet. That’s over twice the average daily spend for those in the lowest income decile. While it’s possible to construct healthy meals on a budget from supermarket vegetables and frozen food, the initial investment is high.
Put simply, food poverty is just poverty. Expensive single portions and the abundance of fast food in deprived areas just make societal inequalities even worse. As one paper said, the fact we need to encourage people to make behavioural changes means we haven’t helped them stay healthy by default. We’re asking those with the lowest incomes to make the greatest changes to their lifestyles. Perhaps we should instead be asking how we can create an environment where healthy choices are the easiest ones.
We should be asking how we tackle the inequalities of obesity.
As with all complex systemic issues, the answer is not simple. But one step is fairly intuitive. Three big motivators behind food decisions are convenience, flavour and price. Yet beyond home-cooked food, the UK market offers little that ranks highly on all three. One answer is to produce and promote healthy options that are quick, tasty and cheap.
The stories of food poverty inspired the development of Kitchio.
At Kitchio we want to be the most reliable source of quick, tasty, cheap meals with good nutritional balance. Instead of requiring families to plan, portion and shop themselves, we offer Hello Fresh-style recipe boxes at £1–2 per portion, containing healthy meals that take under 20 minutes each.
We are crowdfunding right now in order to establish a distribution hub to pilot in one London borough.
If you can give any money or corporate support, we would greatly appreciate it.
The state of the nation’s diet is a challenge we have to meet. The government’s obesity strategy goes some way to help, but it puts too much pressure on individuals to change their own behaviour, which disproportionately hits low-income groups. If we can focus our attention on healthy alternatives that are quick, tasty and cheap, we can begin to fight the inequalities of obesity.
