The lackadaisical official attitude to the definitive and meticulous research published today showing how artificial food colours and other additives generate an overactive and impulsive response in children says it all. Instead of banning food additives that clearly undermine educational performance and stimulate anti-social behaviour, the so-called Food Standards Agency weaseled their way out by passing the buck to parents – by merely advising them to check for additives by scrutinising labels – and to the European Food Safety Authority (another misnomer) to review the safety of all food colours.
Unfortunately, this is typical. The real lesson of today’s news is that the regulatory bodies, ostensibly appointed to protect children’s health, all too often collude with the food industry to put children’s health second to safeguarding the industry’s profits. There have been many examples of this in recent years.
Three years ago the Government asked Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, to curb advertisements of unhealthy foods to children. After two years of delays, Ofcom, having been lobbied on 29 occasions by the food and advertising industry, decided it would be too costly to ban junk food and drink advertising before the 9pm watershed, because the broadcasters would lose £240m a year in revenue. So much for the regulators’ concern for child health.
Earlier this year the Government sought to guide families towards healthier eating by bringing in a traffic light labelling scheme. The food industry however tried to derail it by introducing an alternative nutrition labelling scheme which was widely condemned for making its products look healthier than they really were and which independent experts said was fundamentally flawed. Did the Food Standards Agency try to stop them? You must be joking.
Recently also the sugar industry undermined the independence of a UN review of the nutritional value of carbohydrates by paying large sums of sponsorship money to get access to key meetings at the World Health Organisation’s Geneva headquarters. Sugar is of course not only the cause of tooth decay, but also a major cause of obesity and heart disease.
In the UK recently leaked documents reveal the scale of the food industry’s efforts to convince Ministers that only voluntary, industry-controlled measures should be taken on public health. To protect their commercial interests and fight action on health at every turn, the Food and Drink Federation recently had over 2,000 contacts with Ministers, MPs and others in government in a single year.
Earlier this year when the outbreak of the H5N1 virus hit the Bernard Matthew turkey plant in Suffolk, Defra officials concealed at first the information that a consignment of 38 tonnes of contaminated chicken breasts from the Bernard Matthew plant in Hungary might well be source of the outbreak. To have disclosed this would have drawn attention away from the hypothesis going the rounds about a wild bird flying in and spreading disease and instead pointed the finger at the poultry food trade. The protection of Britain’s poultry industry took precedence over the risk to human health.
And there are many other such examples.
The lesson of all this is that the regulatory bodies have far too cosy a relationship with the industries they are supposed to control. Nor is this at all surprising. Appointments to these regulatory and advisory committees come overwhelmingly from civil servants who at senior levels in Whitehall have a close working relationship with top industrialists. The inter-play between them is another example of the revolving door syndrome which is currently so widespread.
So how do we stop the regulators siding with those they are supposed to be protecting the public from? By requiring all Whitehall appointments to key regulatory bodies to be subject to ratification (or rejection) by the appropriate parliamentary select committee, and by laying down an unwavering rule enforced by Parliament that nobody should be appointed to an official regulatory position who has current or recent commercial interests in that field. Only then will the essential requirements of regulation – independence, integrity and objectivity – be given the full weight they deserve.
Animation: Food Commission Research Charity / Chew On This / Susie Wilkinson / Kath Dalmeny

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