The food organizer says cake in the office should be seen as secondhand smoke

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Britain’s top food watchdog has said bringing cake into the office should be seen as harmful to your colleagues in the same way as passive smoking.

Professor Susan Jebb, chair of the Food Standards Agency, also expressed frustration with ministers’ decision to delay announcing fast food, which she said had led to a “complete market failure” that led to a cutback in healthy products.

She urged doctors to be more willing to discuss patients’ weight and offer help with diet, saying it was bad for the nation’s health that doctors “mostly ignore”.

Gibb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford and a member of the Times Health Committee, said it was not enough to rely on the “extraordinary efforts” of personal willpower needed to avoid overeating in a society that constantly lures people in with food.

Speaking in a personal capacity, she said, “We all like to think that we are rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices all the time and underestimate the impact of the environment,” she said. “If nobody brings donuts to the office, I don’t eat donuts in the daytime, but because people bring donuts, I eat them. Now, well, I made the choice, but people were choosing to go to a smoky pub.”

And while Gibb said the two issues are not identical, he said that secondhand smoke does harm to others, “and the exact same is true of food.”

She said, “With smoking, after a very long time, we’ve come to a place where we understand that people have to put in some effort but we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel that about food.”

• How can we fix the NHS crisis? Three solutions

The Times Health Commission is a year-long investigation into the NHS and social care in England, which was launched this week.

In its first meeting on Monday night, the Lord Rose of Monoden, chair of Asda and former head of Marks & Spencer, suggested workplaces should do more for people’s health. Rose, who did the NHS review for David Cameron, said companies should already be reporting on efforts around equity, diversity and pay, asking: “Why don’t we push to also say that in this process as employers we have a legal obligation to do something about the health of our employees?”

Two-thirds of adults are overweight, including a quarter who are obese, a proportion that has doubled in the past three decades. By the time they start school, a fifth of children are already overweight, with most people in Britain now being very heavy by the age of 25.

A series of prime ministers have repeatedly backed away from anti-obesity measures due to the apparent difficulty of reconciling the need to improve the nation’s health and reduce pressure on the NHS with the Tories’ hostility to ‘nanny-state’ measures.

Boris Johnson initially derided such policies, but announced an anti-obesity campaign in 2020 after accepting that being “overweight” had contributed to his near-death experience with Covid. He made plans to ban junk food ads on TV before 9 p.m., and to end “buy one, get one free” (Bogof) deals on unhealthy products.

However, last month Steve Barclay, the health secretary, kicked the ad ban into the long grass, pushing the implementation date back to 2025, after the next election.

Barkley, who is said to be resisting the ban and wants “more positive ways to promote healthy living,” must now consider whether to move forward with Bogov’s ban, which is set to go into effect in October. Labor said it should not proceed during the cost of living crisis.

Gibb told The Times that junk food advertising “undermines people’s free will” and insisted the restrictions were “not about the nanny state”.

She said: “Advertising means that the companies with the most money have the most influence over people’s behaviour. It’s about chocolate, not broccoli.”

She said the health service has been so busy fighting A&E crises, ambulances and waiting lists that “we never really get into the root causes,” adding, “We’re so busy getting the excess off the bottom that’s overflowing, we never get around to turning off the tap.”

Jebb urged the medical profession to warn patients when they need to lose weight and provide them with assistance.

“If a clinician comes across someone with high blood pressure, they will feel culturally, through training, through guidance, through practice, that they should offer that patient treatment for hypertension and explain to them why it’s important,” he said. “Right now, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it… Medicine’s prestige comes from treating rare diseases with expensive drugs and technology, and obesity is not.”

However, Jebb insisted that obesity can be treated, citing “very cheap interventions [that] It pays huge dividends”, such as the NHS weight management programs that have put type 2 diabetes patients in remission.

The problem, she said, is changing “the culture in which people, health professionals, doctors, and especially those with power in the system, are reluctant to go there”. She added, “We can change that. We changed it by smoking. It took a very long time.”

The Times investigates the crisis facing England’s health and social care system. Find out more about The Times Health Commission

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