Tesco reducing the sugar in its cola is a good start – but we need a national shift

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/26/tesco-sugar-cola-health-consumers-diets

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The announcement by Tesco that it will cut the sugar content of its own-label soft drinks by 5% a year was rightly national news. Here was the purveyor of nigh on a third of the nation’s food openly promising a cut that will be barely noticed over time by consumers but will have a positive health impact. This makes public the strategy we call in policy “choice editing”, changing what the public consumes without it being too troubled. If implemented, it heralds the reduction of two teaspoons of sugar per cola can within four years, not to be sniffed at when obesity is seemingly out of control and soft drinks are such a significant factor. This is progress certainly, but not the big change needed; For that, we need industry-wide and national re-orientation involving new policies, firm regulation and tough reformulation standards plus a major cultural change in the consuming public.

The Tesco decision reminds the new government that food and health is hot politics. Government would be ill-advised to see this as the “leave it to Tesco et al” strategy working, which has for too long been the default UK food policy loved by Labour and Tories alike, bowing before market logic, and reducing health to a companies and consumer dynamic. But not even mighty Tesco can sort out obesity. That would require a re-engineering of the entire food system which works hard to over-produce food, and flood markets with ever-cheaper salty, fatty, sugary non-food foods. We’d also need to build exercise into daily living, and curtail out of town supermarkets which can only be reached by gas-guzzling obesity-inducing car culture.

Tesco is pretty certain to deliver these 5% reductions, having trumpeted such actions as key to obesity reduction, one of its three Tesco and Society corporate responsibility commitments since 2013. Its motives are pretty clear. It doesn’t want to be sued in the future for having done nothing about the annual health toll, and it certainly needs to improve its public image, and rebuild customer loyalty and trust. But it also knows this is tricky politics. Consumers are fickle; they can and do shop elsewhere. It doesn’t want to be left out on its own on the sugar front.

Those of us active in this policy area (and I declare an interest as one of the “angry professors” who launched the “enough is enough” Action on Sugar campaign in January 2014), know that the entire food market needs to be recalibrated if it is to deliver public health. Cola companies have been pushing sugar-free colas as their escape route from blame for decades, but these substitute high calorie sugar for artificial sweeteners, retaining consumers’ acceptance of sweetness as normal. The growth of cola “lites” is light policy too. The costs of poor diets are dumped onto healthcare, which is why countries and cities worldwide are experimenting with food taxes, as a paper from the UK inter-University Food Research Collaboration pointed out last week.

Tastebuds haven’t changed. The nightmare for Tesco would be if consumers simply switch brands, go to other supermarkets or even demand “bring back our sugary cokes” – hence the slow “below the radar” proposed changes. The public health case is simple: what’s needed is a population-wide shift, the gradual reduction of all sugars for everybody, and a reversal of the gradual sweetening of the world’s diet experienced over recent decades. Sugar is put into a vast range of food and drinks today, as is salt. Hence these two ingredients being targeted by public health advocates. They symbolise the world’s uptake of ever more processed, factory-made, instant satisfaction non-food foods and snacks, and the rise of the “permanently eating” culture among those populations who have access and can afford such products.

For government, the big problem is that sugar is but one strand of a UK food policy which has been fraying for years. The last Labour government received its wake-up call during the 2007-08 banking and commodity crisis, when global raw food prices doubled in months, as did oil, on which the much vaunted success of 20th century food policy depends. Oil = fertilisers + agrichemicals + petrol = labour reduction = cheaper mass food.

G8 governments were genuinely shocked by events, having seen food as a problem only for poor countries, something to be resolved by aid and patronage. This shook their complacency, and for three years afterwards there was genuine engagement from the Labour government, whose Food 2030 strategy realised that the food system might have to change fundamentally if we were to lower carbon, cut waste, preserve biodiversity, tackle diet-related diseases and yet feed 9 billion mouths equitably by 2050. The coalition shamefully stopped all such thinking overnight in 2010, and savaged Defra, cross-departmental and intra-EU thinking on such lines.

Back came our old policy friends “the market” and soft self-regulation such as the Responsibility Deals, now seen to have delivered, well, more business-as-usual, not even gradual improvement, and to have developed food banks, not health. So is the Tesco announcement just more government lite? Perhaps. But companies are nervous about being left in charge of policy. Food companies have long perspectives – governments come and go but they stay. Most big food companies are decades old and well established. Their policy departments dwarf government. The nutrition capacity of the Department of Health and Food Standards Agency is seriously weakened compared with five years ago. So we can welcome this Tesco move but what about the big cola companies? And what about government? Will it set a new framework, or leave it to Tesco? If so, troubles will continue.