This article is written by Jonathan Bone. This article was first published by Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. Read the original article here.

Obesity in the UK has been steadily rising for three decades — despite the introduction of at least a dozen separate policy initiatives to tackle the issue.

Back in 2008, for example, a wide-ranging report from Gordon Brown’s administration vowed to improve diets, increase exercise and make this the first major nation to reverse the trend. Yet today the figures are as damning as ever: the Government-commissioned National Food Strategy, out this month, reports that two-thirds of UK adults aged 45-74 are now classed as either overweight or obese. In England, 68 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women aged 16 and over fall into one of those categories.

The matter is urgent, because excess weight increases our risk of a range of life-threatening diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer — and now causes more deaths per year than smoking. So what’s been going wrong, and how can we fix it?

At Nesta we believe the problem is one of emphasis.

Successive governments have placed far too much weight on providing people with dietary advice — when research tells us that obesity is not caused by lack of willpower.

Policymakers have relied on persuading people to make lifestyle changes to trim their weight, but the evidence suggests this is simplistic. All our good intentions are no match for the so-called ‘food environments’ around us. Everything from the products in our supermarkets to the deals in our pizza-shop windows is pushing us toward buying and eating fattening food, and while there are signs that policy is inching in the right direction — such as the forthcoming ban on TV junk food ads before 9pm — we need to act more strongly and swiftly. Just last year the Department of Health and Social Care promised to invest £100 million on weight management apps, coaches and clinical support: at Nesta we think that money would be better spent on a holistic approach, creating better food environments that make it easier for everyone to eat healthily.

Research tells us that obesity is caused not by a lack of self-discipline but by a complex web of factors, including genetics, responses to stress from childhood and (importantly) a lack of healthy food options. Worse still, interventions which urge behavioural change shift the blame onto people living with obesity, perpetuating false stereotypes that they are lazy or weak-willed. This not only has devastating effects on mental health, it can actually lead people to consume more calories and feel less in control of their eating. One study found that women who perceived themselves to be overweight consumed about 80 calories more after reading a news article that stigmatised obesity.

So what of efforts to encourage more physical activity? The science suggests that while excellent for your health in other ways, the time and effort it takes to achieve real weight loss from exercise is just not possible for most people — lowering consumption is really the answer.

All this goes to explain why Nesta is approaching its Healthy Life mission very differently. We firmly believe that by training our focus on food environments we can halve the prevalence of obesity among adults by 2030, which in turn would increase healthy life expectancy by an average of two years for around 10 million people nationwide. So what are food environments, and how can we fix them?

Food environments: unpacked

Our food environment can be defined as the physical features of our neighbourhood and how they interact with our personal circumstances — the money we can spend on food, for example, or the time we have to prepare it. Taken together they shape the availability, accessibility, affordability and advertising of food, and in the UK they are stacked heavily against us. They also help explain why obesity levels are 80 per cent higher in the most deprived areas — the prevailing food environments there simply make eating healthily much more difficult. For a full break down of these factors — and for discussion of some of Nesta’s ideas for improving them — please see the original article.

A clarion call

This blog has outlined just some of many possible interventions that could radically improve UK food environments and advance Nesta’s goal to halve the incidence of obesity in the UK by 2030. We know that the hearts and minds of policymakers and the public still need to be won — our recent research with BIT found that 82 per cent of people believe ‘maintaining a healthy weight is a person’s own individual responsibility’. But the fact this contention is widely held does not make it true — obesity is largely caused not by a lack of willpower, but by the UK’s polluting food environments. Put bluntly, we need to stop blaming individuals and take a more holistic approach.

Nesta will continue to work hard to change the narrative, and we take inspiration from the environmental movement, which has gathered widespread public disapproval for the ways industry normalises a society hooked on over-consumption of goods of all kinds. Policies once seen as the epitome of the ‘nanny state’, such as using the tax system to make environmentally damaging behaviours more expensive, are now widely supported by the public.

In the field of public health, it is producers and retailers who are promoting the over-consumption of unhealthy foods. As Nesta’s chief executive Ravi Gurumurthy put it when responding to the new National Food Strategy: “Obesity is where carbon and climate change were 20 years ago. Over that time, we’ve forced companies to pay carbon taxes, disclose their carbon footprint and be accountable to investors for their environmental performance.

“In the next decade we need the same degree of radicalism in how we deal with food, or we’ll see millions of people suffer from avoidable disease and premature death, particularly those on low incomes.” — Jonathan Bone

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