Free choice cannot come at the expense of children’s health as obesity weighs on the NHS - Andy Brown

On the face of it there should be little doubt about what causes the problem. Any individual who eats more calories than they burn off in hard work or exercise is going to put on weight. It is therefore tempting to lay the blame on the individual or simply to argue that it is a matter of personal choice what you eat and we should leave people to make their own decisions in full knowledge of the consequences.

The problem with that argument is that the odds are being heavily stacked against fostering healthy eating because there is a lot of money to be made by marketing products that contain cheap sugar and fat. We seem to be setting our children up to fail instead of helping them to understand where their food comes from, how to prepare it healthily at reasonable prices and how to enjoy choices which have a better impact on their bodies and their minds.

Despite all our advances in technology the people of our country seem to eat worse diets with every passing year. Walk down any street of shops where rents are cheap, and it won’t be long before you pass a fast-food outlet. Washing down a kebab or a deep-fried chicken with a sugary drink has changed from being a rare treat to a routine part of the diet. Increasingly what is on offer at the local supermarket is a wide range of ready meals containing significant quantities of sugar that are replacing meals cooked at home using raw ingredients that contain more vitamins.

We don’t seem to be equipping our children with either the knowledge of how to cook or the experience of enjoying a home cooked diet and each year more people seem to pop more plastic trays of pre-cooked food into the microwave.

There are schools that do wonderful work in providing our children with a balanced diet. That isn’t easy when the average cost is only £2.40 a day and there is labour and power to pay for as well as ingredients. There are other schools where the child leaves with little practical understanding of how food grows and no educational experience of cooking something healthy and enjoyable.

Some schools even provide vending machines for sugary drinks in a desperate bid to enhance increasingly stretched school budgets. Incredibly, many leisure centres do the same. What hope is there for our children’s health if even when they are doing the right thing and enjoying a bit of exercise they are faced with the temptation of stuffing their faces with sugar and salt?

The most obvious way to change the trend towards more reliance on unhealthy foods is to use the tax system to discourage unhealthy choices and use the money raised to subsidise healthier lifestyles. Yet every time this is attempted there are cries that we don’t want the nanny state interfering with the free choice of individuals about what they eat.

Sometimes a bit of being looked after is no bad thing. If it means avoiding a lifetime of ill health and restricted mobility, then taxing sugar and using the money to support our farmers to supply us with good quality fruit and vegetables at reasonable prices is a price worth paying.

Few people advocate an outright ban on eating fast food or on buying a sports drink packed with sugar and caffeine. There is, however, surely a case for making it easier and cheaper to select a healthy option and putting a bit more money into enabling schools to start our kids off on a good diet whilst making it more expensive to live off diets high in sugar, fat and salt.

During the Second World War this country was desperately short of food. Yet we managed to emerge from it with a population that was relatively well fed and with a high level of knowledge about how to put a cheap and nutritious meal on the table.

The government then had no fear of launching public information campaigns and taking its share of responsibility for ensuring the public ate well.

We seem to have allowed our obsession with free markets and free choice to have drifted into allowing routine exploitation of our weaknesses by advertisers and suppliers in ways that are costing the individual years of healthy life and costing the NHS an epidemic of obesity related illnesses.

In such circumstances the government needs to act instead of shrugging its shoulders. There is a strong moral argument for free choice.

There is also a strong moral argument for society looking after its young people. We seem to have got the balance wrong. It is time for a sugar tax and controls on irresponsible advertising.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.