Editorial: No easy solution to obesity

Another week, another Government-backed healthy-eating initiative. Just after Christmas, it was cut-price school meals to tempt children away from the chip shop. Now it is a celebrity-chef recipe and low-price deals on healthy ingredients at big supermarkets.

The aim is a laudable one.

Britain's soaring obesity levels are a dangerous problem, wrecking lives and costing the National Health Service some £4 billion ($7.9 billion) every year. A quarter of adults are dangerously overweight and the number is expected to double by 2050.

Clearly, there is much to be done.

But once again, the Government is tiptoeing around the problem when it should be tackling it head on.

Mass obesity is by no means easy to solve, not least because there are so many contributory factors, from individual psychology to modern lifestyles.

But perhaps the most obvious, and arguably one of the easiest to address, is the ubiquity of poor-quality, highly fattening food.

It is impossible to walk down a British high street without passing fast-food outlets. Our supermarkets are stuffed with cheap foods packed with salt and fat, with checkout displays carefully designed to encourage impulse buys of sweets. Meanwhile, junk food companies target adverts at children. And "healthy" branding can be added to packaging on the most tenuous of bases. Is it any wonder that Britain has a weight problem?

Granted, extra regulation is a tricky area for the Government.

Radical campaigners' calls for taxes on high-sugar or high-fat products, for example, inevitably suggest to some a nanny state. But there are halfway measures that would make a real difference: Such as the proposed mandatory traffic-light labelling so resisted by the food industry. The Health Secretary will need to be brave.

But relying on a few, voluntary schemes and the charisma of famous chefs will simply not be enough.