Government to clamp down on pudding portion size
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- Published: Monday, 03 October 2016 08:42
- Written by News Editor
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Restaurants, cafés and pubs will be named and shamed unless they make food portions smaller or less sweet, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has said. They must play a part in tackling Britain’s obesity problem. But the BDA’s Mick Armstrong dismissed it as ‘tough talk on sugar’, which was no substitute for concerted action on ‘taxation, marketing, product reformulation and public education’.
The threat to restaurants follows Theresa May’s childhood obesity strategy, which was widely condemned as giving the food industry an easy ride. One of the few measures to survive her ‘red pencil’ was a voluntary challenge to food companies to reduce sugar in key products by 20 per cent within five years.
Public Health England (PHE) has promised this will be its priority and has revealed the target would apply to all the main sources of sugar for children apart from soft drinks, which will be subject to a sugar tax. Cereals, confectionery, yoghurts, ice cream, sweet spreads and jams, cakes, biscuits and breakfast foods such as croissants must all become less sweet or smaller, PHE said.
Mr Hunt has no legal powers to enforce the changes, but he insisted that each company’s actions would be publicly compared. The government would “shine a light” on individual companies’ performance, he said, warning the chains: “You want to be on the right side of this debate.” Precisely how companies will be compared is still being decided but will involve a website where performance against the target is measured.
In a letter to The Times, which broke the story, BDA chairman, Mick Armstrong said: “A government serious about portion sizes would not have cut down its landmark obesity strategy from a three-course meal to a rather unsatisfying canapé. This latest call to “name and shame” restaurants for big puddings looks like more of the same: tough talk on sugar, masking calls for voluntary action.
“Tooth decay is the No 1 reason for child hospital admissions. We require joined-up thinking to tackle Britain’s sweet tooth, but a sugar levy, packaged up with initiatives that seem more interested in grabbing headlines than improving health outcomes, is not it. Simply getting ministers to shout about the size of your next McFlurry is no substitute for concerted action on taxation, marketing, product reformulation and public education.”
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