by Tom Watson
My quest for knowledge led me to the work of another campaigning author. The highly respected American academic, Dr Marion Nestle, had spent a lifetime researching nutritional science and public health in order to understand the impact of diet upon us all. In her book, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), Dr Nestle (a confusing surname for an intrepid opponent of Big Sugar, I’ll grant you) detailed how companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo presented two faces to the world. They spent billions marketing directly to children and young people, to normalise the consumption of their highly dangerous, industrialised products. At the same time, they generously gifted money to charities and bodies that were tasked with tackling childhood obesity, a problem for which they were at least partially responsible, and which they and their products exacerbated every day.
Dr Nestle outlined how these companies had poured money into anti-regulation lobbying, estimating that Coca-Cola alone had sanctioned a global spend of $100 million in order to oppose sugar legislation. Her findings certainly ruffled some feathers. In fact, the octogenarian was considered so dangerous to American corporate interests (despite having once worked for President Reagan) that she was mentioned in the Wikileaks dump of diplomatic cables in 2016.
I was truly privileged to meet Dr Nestle in person in July 2019, when she and I got together in my Westminster office, where the bookshelves contained a number of her titles. Indeed, having read so many of her studies, I felt like I was meeting a hero. We discussed the huge global network of lobby interests, stacked against those who were raising increasing concerns about the balance of refined sugar in our daily diets.
‘Good luck in your battles to come, Tom,’ she said at the end of our conversation, with great understatement.
‘I won’t let you down,’ I replied.
Although Michael Mudd’s plan for the rehabilitation and redemption of his industry was largely rebuffed by his peers, they did adopt one of his recommendations: the promotion of exercise. While some people lauded the food corporations for putting so much effort (and so much money) into encouraging fitness and activity, others were far more cynical, viewing it as a conniving, albeit clever move. No sane or responsible person was going to stand up and declare that kids should exercise less, that inactivity was a good thing, or that sitting in front of the telly all day was a healthy alternative to a kickabout in the park.
Exercise, of course, played a massive role in my own recovery. Aged 50, I’d struggled to get up a flight of stairs to reach my office, yet aged 52, I was lifting weights and riding a bike. I have never dismissed the importance of keeping yourself fit, active and mobile, but the truth of the matter is that exercise alone cannot solve the obesity crisis. The adage that you can ‘eat what you like, so long as you exercise’ is a pernicious lie.
What we now know is that, while preaching active lifestyles as the answer to the problem, these companies are manufacturing food that is so drenched in sugar and additives that it makes it harder – psychologically and physiologically – to get into a routine of regular exercise. And that’s before we even get to the fact that, in order to burn off the calories found in one can of Coca-Cola, you’d have to walk five miles (eight kilometres) or run for fifty minutes. In 2016, the average UK teenager was drinking 234 cans of fizzy pop a year. That would take 1,170 miles (1,883 kilometres) of walking to burn off, or more than three miles (five kilometres) per day; all that just to neutralise the impact of one product on our kids’ lives. When you factor in the sugar and calorie impact of the whole gamut of processed foodstuffs that our children are consuming on a daily basis, you’d need to chain your offspring to a treadmill if you seriously believed that exercise could be the whole answer.
That is why we need to break the links that these ‘Big Sugar’ brands have built with sports teams and bodies in the UK. When Coca-Cola sponsors the Premier League or Müller funds British Athletics, they aren’t just innocently laundering their profits through a good cause. They are associating their products with exercise, effectively teaching young people that, after a runaround, it’s safe and healthy to ‘treat’ yourself to a can of fizzy pop or a sugar-laden yoghurt. It isn’t. I think one of the key culprits in this enormous rise in obesity and diabetes is the sugar industry and, in the same way that we don’t allow tobacco companies to sponsor sports, we need to get on with banning Big Sugar from promoting itself via brand relationships. Frankly, the Premier League (which can certainly afford to take the financial hit) should be taking action itself rather than waiting for government to force its hand.
‘What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola?’ I asked in a speech in early 2019.
‘Do you think about young healthy people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, will not make you athletic; rather it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes.
‘Yet, for decades, Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports, and billions of humans believe in this linkage.’
Not only is it ridiculous to allow a fizzy pop manufacturer to associate itself with the beautiful game, it is also dangerous.
It is a sobering statistic that children in the UK aged four to ten are now estimated to consume 5,500 cubes of sugar per year; that’s about 3.5 stone (22 kilos) worth of the sweet stuff, or the weight of an average three-year-old. Little wonder, then, that we have the worst childhood obesity rates in Western Europe, and that more children than ever are being admitted to hospital with rotten teeth. And it was against this backdrop that, in 2019, I lent my support to the ‘Fizz Free February’ initiative. Established by Southwark Council the previous year, it encouraged local residents to give up fizzy drinks for a whole month. Designed to address health concerns, Fizz Free February also fought back against corporations that profited from excessive sugar consumption. It attracted some significant endorsements along the way, too.
‘Prevention matters to us, because we see the damage fizzy drinks do every day,’ commented Mick Armstrong, Chair of the British Dental Association, who fully backed the campaign.
‘The idea behind Fizz Free February couldn’t be simpler: simply encourage families to take a few weeks out from reaching for a can of pop,’ he added. ‘This idea may have started small over in Southwark, but we’re proud to help this campaign go national.’
I encouraged many other Labour authorities to get on board (including my own, Sandwell in the West Midlands, with great leadership from Councillor Elaine Costigan) and enlisted the help of health secretary Matt Hancock and his shadow, my colleague Jonathan Ashworth. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – the feted cook and food writer – was also happy to associate himself with the scheme. Like me, Hugh had successfully lost weight by eradicating sugar from his diet and was a long-time critic of the sugar industry, a subject he’d explored in his excellent BBC series, Britain’s Fat Fight.
A Fizz Free February information pack, which raised awareness of sugar-related obesity, was distributed to a variety of business and educational locations. I learned of one participating school that asked its students to hand in any cans of pop at registration, only allowing them to be collected at home time. The benefits of drinking water were promoted throughout the day, and pupils were given the chance to earn rewards points for bringing reusable water bottles to school.
During that particular month, I remember having a frank and honest conversation with my 11-year-old daughter about her sugary drink intake. I had always tried to encourage my kids to restrict their consumption of sweet things, although I’d stopped short of imposing an outright ban.
‘Did you know, Saoirse,’ I said, ‘that your favourite coffee chain sells a banana milkshake that contains the equivalent of thirty-nine teaspoons of sugar? That’s the equivalent of nearly fifteen KitKats in one glass.’
‘Oh, right…’ She shrugged. ‘That doesn
’t sound good.’
A few days later I took Saoirse for a bite to eat at that same coffee emporium, and asked her what she fancied to drink.
‘I’d like one of those banana milkshakes please,’ she said, with a mischievous glint in her eye.
It was a telling moment, and taught me a couple of things. Firstly, that my daughter was developing a decidedly rebellious streak and a wicked sense of humour. And secondly, when it came to the war on sugar, I’d always have a battle on my hands, whether as a parent or a politician.
The ‘active lifestyles’ line is not the only lobbying and communications tool that the food industry has deployed to shield themselves from blame. There are plenty of others. They label efforts to increase the prices of their unhealthiest products as ‘sin taxes’. They insinuate that there’s nothing wrong with people wanting to treat themselves, and that anyone denying them this pleasure is promoting a ‘nanny state’. They claim that attacks on convenience foods are the result of classist, snobbish interference in working-class lifestyles, as though it’s somehow inherent in certain cultures to gravitate toward a harmful diet.
What all of these suppositions have in common is that they place the burden of responsibility solely on the individual. It is your choice what to eat and to drink, and it is your fault if you choose poorly. But it’s not. I was a sugar addict because my supply chain of food was malfunctioning; it didn’t give me the options I needed to get well. And now that I am well, and am off sugar, I realise that people don’t often have easily digestible information at their disposal. The decisions I was forced to make were artificial, and were made within an architecture designed to suit Big Sugar.
They took place in a world that food corporations carefully re-engineered in order to push me in a particular direction.
Indeed, I remember sweating for an hour on a static bike in a Victoria gym in the mid-1990s – another of my failed fitness attempts – only to undo all the effort with a can of Coke from the reception vending machine.
These firms hide sugar in foods they call healthy. They market to you from the moment you are born to cultivate your sweet tooth. They spend billions refining their products and their packaging to keep you coming back. They reframe our choices by creating ‘healthier’ versions of their dangerous products so that you can feel somewhat virtuous when you opt for just ‘bad’ over ‘very bad’. And they tell you not to worry too much because you can always go jogging to work it all off.
Just as Truman discovered that his life was carefully constructed around him – creating the illusion of free will, and presenting an alternative to reality – we also operate under the pretence of self-will, while in truth we are engineered toward more synthesised food and less wholesome produce.
In Salt, Sugar, Fat, Michael Moss explained how the line between nutritional science and product development had been blurred and manipulated by the food industry. This was best exemplified by the ‘bliss point’ – the perfect balance of sugar, fat and salt within a product to ‘send consumers over the moon’ – for which scientists and researchers in the pay of Big Sugar were searching. They knew that the tipping point between a tasty product and an addictive one was found at this juncture, and they refined and redesigned until they manufactured it.
This was a science, yes. But it was more akin to Breaking Bad’s Walter White cooking meth in his lab than to public-spirited professionals trying to work out what was actually good for us. Moss was right to describe sugar as the ‘methamphetamine of processed food ingredients’. The food industry has been spending billions disfiguring the scientific landscape by focusing research not on how we can feed ourselves well, but on how we can make non-nutritional foods more addictive. This has been one very powerful way in which Big Sugar has re-engineered our choices.
It is a massive public policy issue that needs to be seriously addressed. I am determined that my children should grow up in a society in which their ability to live healthy lives doesn’t depend solely on their sheer wilfulness. It is the job of government to protect people from those who would wield power over them. However, that power is often hidden, and sometimes it offends our sense of ourselves as free-thinking individuals to concede that we are being controlled. But government’s job is to step in, to step up and to push back against those who seek to manipulate us to our own detriment. That is my core philosophy. And it applies to Big Food as much as it does to unscrupulous bankers, exploitative bosses and power-hungry media barons.
So what do we have to do? We have to revolutionise our food industry so that it serves the many, not the few. And we need to start with sugar. I have been left gobsmacked by the sugar industry’s arrogance and sense of entitlement. These firms are so used to being left to their own devices, without much in the way of scrutiny or accountability, that they seem genuinely affronted by calls for greater transparency and more forceful regulation. They behave as though they have a divine right to peddle their product no matter the harm that it causes. This attitude, and this behaviour, has to change.
The truth is that these businesses profit from other people’s misery. They have a vested and direct financial interest in adding their product, in ever more inventive ways, to more and more of our food. They conspire with manufacturers and retailers to hide the sugar that they add to products, so that consumers find it harder to choose healthier alternatives. They market directly to very young children in the knowledge that developing a sweet palate at an early age predisposes children to eat more and more sugar as they get older, and makes it harder for them to live well. We aggressively tax tobacco, alcohol and petrol not just to raise revenue, but also to acknowledge the harm that these products do, and to seek to change consumer perception by nudging people toward behaviour that is better for them and for the world. We need to do the same with sugar.
In 2018 the UK introduced a small, limited levy of between 18p and 24p per litre on soft drinks that contain more than five grams of sugar per 100 millilitres. It was a modest measure, designed to rein in the makers of the fizzy pop that rots our kids’ teeth and can make them fat. To me, the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy – otherwise known as the sugar tax – was an illustration that government can and should intervene if the food and drink industry won’t do it themselves.
The industry’s response in the run-up to the levy being imposed was nothing short of hysterical. The big drinks companies fought the sugar tax tooth and nail, saying that it wouldn’t work, and that it would be impossible to alter the composition of their products. Industry representatives claimed that taxing super-sugary drinks would lead to job losses and would damage business, while their allies and lobbyists in Westminster think-tanks argued that this represented some existential assault on consumer freedom.
These days, the companies hide behind false-flag campaign groups. You only have to take a look at the @AgainstSugarTax account on Twitter. I have no idea who funds this campaign, but it instigates the trolling of propaganda that only helps Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s to defend the status quo.
Once the tax was introduced, however, almost overnight the manufacturers of Ribena – Suntory – cut the blackcurrant drink’s sugar content by half in order to avoid a levy-related price rise. Since then, more than half of all sweet beverages have been reformulated. It has been a stunning public health success. Some contrarians, however, still regard the levy as a failure because it only raised half as much cash for the exchequer as initially predicted. But accruing money was not the reason for the tax in the first place; it was introduced to change behaviour. And it did so, in a fascinating and encouraging way. It forced Big Sugar to change its approach rather than placing the burden of choice on consumers themselves. It altered the business model and it intervened upstream.
To a certain sort of politician, this development was genuinely horrifying. It was one thing to occasionally interfere with personal freedom, but the liberty of the corporation was sacrosanct. From my perspective, however, the effectiveness of the sugar tax was a
beacon of hope within our obesity crisis, as it forced a small section of the food industry to change their behaviour in the interests of public health.
Perhaps it’s now time to impose the levy on other drinks, like milkshakes – as the Department for Health has recommended – and to explore how we can also apply it to food, in order to force a change in formulation and ingredients. I should emphasise, however, that this is not about making ordinary people pay more for the food they need. It is about forcing a change, at source, so that members of the public can eat well without having hidden sugar forced down their throats. It is poorer individuals in society who are most vulnerable to obesity, and to the conditions and illnesses that this can lead to. Don’t let cynical politicians and industrialists take these people’s names in vain when opposing sensible measures like the sugar tax. You do poor people no favours when you keep the price of bad food low.
We also need to tackle the skewing of the science by corporate billions, as identified by Michael Moss and Marion Nestle. Our understanding of nutrition is lagging behind where it should be because, for decades, Big Sugar and the food industry have focused resources and attention on making food more addictive, not making it more nutritious. A new levy, requesting food companies to hand over a proportion of their research and development budget to an independent nutritional research council, should be introduced. The council would then distribute these funds – matched, maybe, by government money – in order to look into proposals on a system of merit, guided by public good. In this way we could start to rebalance the focus of food and nutrition research, giving us a more level playing field in the battle for Britain’s bellies.