IT WAS a tempting offer enjoyed by millions of people: as many cut-price restaurant meals as you could eat every Monday to Wednesday for a month.
While the UK’s recent “eat out to help out” scheme may have saved jobs and boosted the hospitality industry after the coronavirus lockdown, it is unlikely to have done much for the country’s obesity crisis. The government’s own figures show meals from restaurants are on average twice as calorific as the equivalent dish prepared at home.
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For many years, the UK has laboured under the burden of having one of Europe’s fattest populations. Earlier this year, prime minister Boris Johnson – who blamed his brush with severe covid-19 on being overweight – swallowed his opposition to “nanny state” schemes and announced a national obesity strategy.
“In the UK we just get reheated scraps of earlier anti-obesity plans rather than following the latest science of nutrition”
It is likely to feature more calorie labelling, restrictions on junk food advertising and on BOGOF (buy-one, get-one-free) deals, along with nudge-style interventions to stop impulse purchases of calorific foods.
None of these will do any harm, but as an anti-obesity strategy they fall well short of the latest science. As we report (see “Why there is no such thing as a healthy diet that works for everyone”), nutrition research is undergoing a much-needed revolution. It turns out that the way we respond to food varies so much from person to person that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all healthy diet.
That may explain why science has failed to tackle the obesity epidemic. Consider a recent test of the efficacy of low-fat versus low-carb diets for weight loss. The DIETFITS study put more than 600 overweight people on one of the diets for a year. At the end, the average weight loss was the same in both groups, about 5.5 kilograms, but there was huge individual variation, ranging from much larger losses to significant weight gain.
This fits the conclusion of cutting-edge nutrition research: that a customised diet based on an individual’s metabolism and microbiome is required. Devising such diets isn’t beyond us and should be at the forefront of anti-obesity strategies. The US has already committed to this. But in the UK, we get reheated scraps of earlier anti-obesity plans. Ironically, to tackle this issue, we must think bigger.
