Michael Kelly: Unhealthy food and drink adverts are killing us

It is great to see a health advert that has some immediate practical impact. Vinnie Jones’s promotion of chest compression as a way of reviving heart attack victims combines his indifference to the patient with a tune that captures the rhythm of the procedure in an amusing and memorable way. After only a few weeks of its airing, reports are coming in of lives being saved.

While one cannot base health education on a few early unscientific reports, it does give hope that at least some of the health messages that governments spend so much money on can have beneficial effects.

Equally, it must also confirm that the much larger sums spent by the tobacco, drinks and food industries on pushing unhealthy lifestyles can be just as effective in talking people into behaviour that takes years off their lives and costs the country billions in trying to repair the damage wreaked.

That is why any rounded health policy must be expanded to include all forms of direct action against those who, for profit, want to encourage destructive behaviour. Minimum pricing for alcohol must only be the beginning of this attack on irresponsible business. If the legal and other practical hurdles can be overcome, it is hard to see how raising the price of drink will not reduce demand. That is the way the price mechanism works.

Labour in Scotland has found itself on the wrong side of this argument from the start, and for very suspect reasons. When the policy was first mooted by the minority SNP government, the opposition – not just Labour – came out against it. Jackie Baillie, Labour’s health spokeswoman, said: “The SNP has got this one badly wrong. A minimum price of 45p per unit will make no difference to the cost of problem drinks, like Buckfast, but it will punish pensioners and people on low incomes.”

Surely there are problem drinkers among the old? And given the established links between poverty, deprivation and both physical and mental ill health, it seems irrational to try to discriminate in favour of the poor’s drinking habits.

The other reason that Labour is so unhappy with this measure is so Old Labour as to be embarrassing. Higher prices will mean more profits for retailers. If that is true, it will mean higher tax revenues for corporations, which affords the opportunity to ease the burden on income tax payers, or for spending on policing the criminal effects of alcohol abuse or on health.

Let us hope that this is merely an aberration, because Labour politicians are generally in the lead when it comes to confronting business when it threatens society. From the Factory Acts to the minimum wage, business has opposed any attempts to improve social conditions.

There is overwhelming evidence that many products offered for consumption have long-term adverse effects. Yet, just as the tobacco companies continued to deny the health consequences of smoking and opposed any attempts to restrict the practice, so the alcohol and food companies are fighting tooth and nail to be allowed unfettered licence to promote products that are unsafe.

At the very least, government must force through an effective labelling system which should clearly and simply describe what is in the packet and what the dangers to health are of excessive amounts of the various ingredients. But it must not stop at merely stating on the tin exactly what these products do. The argument that drink and tobacco promotion is aimed merely at increasing the sales of a particular brand and not at expanding the market must be dismissed for the deception it is.

In food, legislation should be introduced – and it would have to be Europe-wide – banning the use or overuse of the various additives which, while making prepared products more tasty and therefore saleable, increase the risks to health. Salt is the most obvious example, but there are plenty more that health scientists list.

Against attempts to introduce this and measures to ban food advertising, especially to children, there will be the usual outcry about the perceived infringements of civil liberties. It is time to be brutally blunt about this: there is no greater denial of human rights than to shorten people’s lives by a decade or more due to irresponsible promotion of dangerous foods and drinks.

The educated and the middle classes can look after themselves. If they wish to ignore warnings, let them gin-and-tonic their way into an early grave. But what will be condemned by vested interests as draconian legislation is needed to protect the deprived who, due to the awful quality of life they are forced to lead, are driven to any comfort food or drink that they are being conned into using from an increasingly early age.

Health challenges are going to get more difficult over the next 20 years if Glasgow University expert Professor Phil Hanlon is to be believed. His latest work, The Future Public Health, warns that while previous problems such as infectious diseases were cured by investigation and research, today’s problems such as obesity and depression are driven by the very lifestyles we in the West have chosen: our “consumerised, fast, marketised society”, which he regards as unsustainable.

Although he feels things will have to get worse before the community faces up to the radical solutions required, he is optimistic that the right trigger for a policy volte-face will be found.

This view demands a huge science-based philosophic and policy discussion. Let’s dismiss the “My grannie smoked all her life and died at 91” school of thought which has caused the dismissal of so many sensible health measures from fluoridation on. We need evidence-led policies to carry the day.

Until public and political attitudes change, we can only continue to preach how important individual lifestyle changes are to health. Staying alive requires dedication.