The Role of Local Authorities in Bringing Healthy Food Choices Closer to Home
Social circumstances can be powerful drivers of our health behaviours, and in turn, our health. This is not to say individual decisions and willpower don’t matter for your health. Of course, they do. The point is our environments are not designed to help us preserve our health, and some environments can actively encourage poor health decisions.
Healthy eating provides a great example. It’s easy to class healthy eating as purely about “individual”. However, let’s dig into the circumstances in which someone might make decisions about their diet.
Imagine always seeing adverts for unhealthy foods on your phone and TV. The food industry typically spends 22% of advertising on high sugar-based products compared to 1.2% on advertising vegetables and healthy food alternatives, so we’re likely seeing a lot more ads for unhealthy food.
Working long hours, being strapped for cash leaves you feeling stressed. Planning healthy meals and buying healthy ingredients costs time and money. Three times as much money in fact!
If you live in a low-income neighbourhoods, the local area is likely densely populated with fast food outlets (five times as many), often with limited or no options for fresh food. Opting for affordable fruit and veg, means spending an hour or more taking multiples buses to get to those stores. All these challenges exist before you even consider your emotional health.
The long term consequences of weight gain are heart disease, cancer, other related diseases and even higher level of hospital admissions. So, if your environment is making it harder to eat well, that’s a real problem.
However the good news is that small changes are being made in areas across the UK which will hopefully have a positive impact on our future generations.
Gateshead Council understood the importance of supporting people earlier on their lives to make better food choices. Food habits we have as children can be powerful drives for later.
They introduced a planning document with meant that any application for a hot food takeaway will be declined if it is in an area where more than 10% of children in year 6 are obese; if it is within 400m of secondary schools and other community amenities, or if the number of hot food takeaways in the area is equal to or greater than the UK national average.
As Councillor Bernadette Oliphant, Cabinet member for Health and Wellbeing said;
''Limiting the number of takeaways in Gateshead isn't going to cure obesity but it is one small - and effective - action within a wider effort to tackle obesity levels..''
Want to know how well it worked? Check out the latest evaluation here.
