Quality and cost of food

The link between poor diet and stroke risk is clear. The World Health Organisation recommends that food systems need to be tackled to help improve people’s diets. It estimates that around 11 million deaths are caused by unhealthy diets each year1.
Highly processed foods and products containing large amounts of sugar and fat, are very often cheap, tasty and heavily marketed. Sugared, fizzy drinks and fast-food advertising is widespread and often targeted at children, and food labelling is inconsistent. Governmental campaigns to encourage people to eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, for example, are often underfunded when compared to the marketing of the major international food and supermarket brands.
What can we do
The World Health Organization calls for price regulation to reduce the cost of fruit and vegetables and financial measures such as sugar taxes. There have been calls to introduce fast food licensing, clear food labelling, banning trans-fats, regulating the amounts of salt, sugar and fat in processed foods and a commitment to providing healthy menus in all public facilities1.
In 2018 the British Medical Association’s recommendations to improve the UK’s diet included2:
- Supporting local authorities to create healthier food environments
- Providing adequate funding for public health services so they can respond to needs
- Ensuring a health and social care system that can respond to the needs of overweight adults and children and those living with obesity.
Other initiatives include3:
- Strengthening regulations for advertising and marketing
- Improving food labelling
- Encouraging healthier eating through subsidies and promotions of healthy foods and taxes on unhealthy foods
- Creating consumer demand for healthy foods (nutrition education and civic engagement)
- Improving acceptability of healthy foods
- Investing in metrics, research and access to inform policy development.
References
- World Health Organization. Food systems for health: information brief 2021.https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240035263
- British Medical Association. Improving the nation’s diet: action for a healthier future. 2018. https://www.bma.org.uk/media/2071/bma-improving-the-nation-s-diet.pdf
- Ligia I. Reyes, Shilpa V. Constantinides, Shiva Bhandari, Edward A. Frongillo, Pepijn Schreinemachers, Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, Helen Walls, Michelle Holdsworth, Amos Laar, Tuan Nguyen, Christopher Turner, Kate Wellard, Christine E. Blake. Actions in global nutrition initiatives to promote sustainable healthy diets, Global Food Security, 2021. Volume 31, 100585. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2021.100585