The UK government has been warned against relying on weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to tackle the obesity crisis by National Food Strategy author Henry Dimbleby, The Grocer reported.
Delivering a keynote speech to the Rowett Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland on 6 November, Dimbleby was quoted as saying he feared the new Labour government was failing to take action such as introducing new HFSS (high in fat, sugar or salt) health taxes as it hoped the new drugs would solve the problem.
Dimbleby said he worried millions of British people would end up medicated by the appetite-suppressing drugs, which would burden the National Health Service (NHS) with extra costs and could have unforeseen side effects, the 7 November report said.
In Dimbleby’s speech, he urged UK health secretary Wes Streeting and Chancellor Rachel Reeves to listen to calls from campaigners and the recent House of Lords report to bring in new taxes on unhealthy food, which could be used to increase access to healthy food.
Dimbleby’s 2021 report had recommended a range of taxes on salt and sugar, which he claimed should replace the soft drinks sugar tax to encourage a massive shift to reformulation, The Grocer wrote.
Dimbleby, who quit his role with the last government in protest at its lack of action on health, had warned ministers that drugs like Ozempic risked becoming the “obesity version of Prozac”, the report said.
“There is a whole array of these drugs coming down the pipeline,” he said. “This is going to completely change the nature of our society and I wouldn’t be surprised if in 15 years we didn’t have a situation like we have now with millions of people on anti-depressants.
According to Dimbleby, the UK was being left behind by other countries, including the USA, which was taking localised action to tackle obesity and health inequalities.
“We have evidence in the National Food Strategy of programmes in Washington where insurers have been going in to provide discounted fruit and vegetables to people living in poverty,” he said.
“They are finding this is a more effective way to deal with the problem than drugs. If you just rely on drugs it won’t work and there will be a huge cost to the NHS for something which is a policy failure.”
Meanwhile, influential think tank Nesta had urged the government to use a two-pronged policy of weight loss drugs and mandatory targets on supermarkets, which it claimed could halve obesity rates by the end of the decade, The Grocer wrote.
Nesta’s advice followed a two-year assessment of policies available to ministers, which looked at evidence from 3,000 different studies, with the think tank recommending a blueprint of “treatment and prevention”. It also includes a call for a compulsory front-of-pack health score system, further measures to crack down on junk food advertisements and a ban on promotions for HFSS-laden takeaways.
