Crazy Relationship With Food is Killing us, Says FSA

Dame Deirdre Hutton said children develop a 'strange relationship' with food from a young age. The head of a Government watchdog today warned British people have the worst diets in Europe.

Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, said the UK was in the "crazy situation" in which all parts of society were eating badly. In an interview to mark her first year in office, Dame Deirdre said Britain faced mass obesity in the adult population and young girls considering extreme diets.

Dame Deirdre told The Independent: "I think the evidence to me suggests that the UK has really quite poor nutritional status. It is a broad society problem and the interesting thing is you can look at children as young as six or seven and see that they have a very strange relationship with food."

Yesterday it was revealed that Britain is the fattest nation in Europe, with two-thirds of men and 60 per cent of women overweight or obese.

Dame Deirdre is currently battling with the food industry over the labelling of processed foods. Multinational food giants and Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, are boycotting the FSA's "traffic light" labelling scheme in favour of daily percentages for salt, fat and sugar, even though independent surveys suggest the agency's system is the easiest to understand.

Dame Deirdre said: "The most obvious symptom of our nutritional status is obesity. It's not the only thing, but the most obvious problem is obesity coupled with things like high salt in the diet. Although other countries in Europe are catching us up or at least showing a trend growing the same way, we nonetheless remain right at the bottom in terms of poor nutrition and obesity."

Only half the households surveyed by the FSA in 2005 were cooking with fresh or raw ingredients each day.
The Daily Mail 11th October 2006