Let's Discuss The New NHS 10-Year Plan

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1:01How strong are alligators' bites? Looking for a podcast your whole family will enjoy? Wild Critters USA is a series on the hit kids podcast, Orbit, science for kids on the move. Produced with our friends at the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and PBS Nature. How do both eagles hunt? Perfect for road trips or quiet afternoons at home. Follow Orbit, available on Spotify or wherever your family listens to podcasts. Bye, Orbit. I love the podcast. At Boar's Head, we've been going back to school for over 115 years. And this year, every school lunch is reason to celebrate with the flavors your kids love and the exceptional quality you expect.

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2:07Five good and five bad things about the new NHS 10-year plan. Let's break it down and get into the good and the bad of what's going on here. because our friends in Westminster have been busy writing a 168-page report on the future of the NHS. Now, one thing's clear. We all love the NHS. Free healthcare should be a right for everyone, and it's an amazing service that we all get. But it's under pressure. We've all seen waiting times get longer, and it's not that easy to navigate always between different departments and everything else. So to fix it, we need to reduce the burden on the NHS. Because if you look at something like obesity, it costs the NHS 6.5 billion a year just to manage conditions like obesity and all the related illnesses that come from it.

2:59So that is a problem. That is an expense we're all paying. There's no such thing as a free lunch. So if you think you're getting the NHS for free, you're wrong. We're paying for it in our taxes. So we should take this report really seriously and consider how we can all help the NHS and its future. because I think it's something every British person knows very well and loves. But let's start with the five good. Number one thing I've got on my list is it actually takes prevention seriously. Typically, the model of the NHS has been sick care. When you have a problem, it will deal with it and it will solve things.

3:35But that doesn't stem the flow of the inbound patients. And this is the crux of the main problem. The health of the UK is in such a terrible state that more and more of us need to go to the NHS and therefore the pressure and the cost of managing and running the NHS is ever, ever increasing. So the fact that the report takes this really seriously, tries to shift and look at predictions and how to prevent illnesses from coming to the NHS in the first race is a fundamental brilliant idea from the guys in Westminster. So number two, it does push the food industry to also tackle healthy food, which if you're talking about prevention, the number one thing I believe we can do is address what we put in our bodies.

4:24So making the food industry focus on healthy food and actually self-report how much healthy food they are selling is a great metric. So that's one of the things they're doing. They're also looking to double down on the soft drinks tax and the sugar tax that they, I can't remember when they invented it, but they did. And that will push more companies out of sugar and into better for you alternatives, which is a good thing. And then they also look at compulsory measures like salt, sugar, and fat targets. Now, don't necessarily agree with all of them because there's nuance in that conversation around salt and fat and the quality of it usually dictates whether it's good or bad for you.

5:06Some fats are very healthy for you. So that's a bit of a blunt measure I don't necessarily agree with. But the premise of looking at healthy food and making the industry accountable for it is really important. Then number three, free school meals for more kids. Anyone on universal credit will get free school meals for their children. This is fundamental because we know poor quality of diet and obesity is more rife in deprived areas. So the fact that more kids will get free meals will be healthier. Now we all know Jamie's school dinners campaign and we know the state and the quality of the food that goes into those schools is not always perfect.

5:45But first and foremost, a child needs a proper meal and needs to be fed. And hopefully then Jamie and others can do more work to make that meal healthier. So I think that is a good thing. Then the report, number four on the list, reframes obesity as not just health, but an economic challenge. We know, as I said earlier, that 6.5 billion direct costs to the NHS every year, but there are also indirect costs. That forecast says it will be 10 billion by 2050 on direct costs, but the indirect costs to the economy will be almost 50 billion. So that's lost days of work, lost days of productivity, where people have been ill and they're at home, they're bedridden, they can't provide economic value to the economy.

6:31So reframing it as an economic problem will help incentivize more and more people to actually address this, which I think is a really good thing of the report. And then finally, number five, it starts a really important conversation we need to have about how health of our own bodies and what we put in them is intrinsically linked to the health of the NHS. That is the fundamental crux of what I'm trying to address in the industry. help more people understand healthier swaps and healthier ways to look after their body and fuel it because that will be the number one thing we can do to drive prevention, make everyone live their life to the fullest, feel better and without needing to go to the NHS.

7:15And that will then help in turn save the NHS. So they're my top five good things about the report. But of course, we're the good, the bad and the healthy. So let's get into the bad. How strong are alligators' bikes? Looking for a podcast your whole family will enjoy? Wild Critters USA is a series on the hit kids podcast, Orbit, science for kids on the move. Produced with our friends at the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and PBS Nature. How do both eagles hunt? Perfect for road trips or quiet afternoons at home. Follow Orbit, available on Spotify or wherever your family listens to podcasts.

7:51Bye, Orbit. I love the podcast. At Boar's Head, we've been going back to school for over 115 years. And this year, every school lunch is reason to celebrate with the flavors your kids love and the exceptional quality you expect. Helping you make school lunch fresh, easy, and delicious. Ring the bell. The deli is open. orzat committed to craft since 1905 and there are some things this report definitely doesn't address where i think the guys in westminster could do a much better job of looking at some of these really big problems so number one main thing missing from this entire 168 page report is that it doesn't actually address the price of healthy food.

8:49Studies have found that 1 ,000 calories of healthy food costs£8.80 compared to 1 ,000 calories of unhealthy food only coming in at£4.30. So there is a really big price difference in healthy versus unhealthy. Now, where does that typically come from? There's lots of interdependent factors that are causing this, but one of the main reasons is subsidies in farming have traditionally focused on crops and wheat and corn and other things which make those crops artificially cheap. Now if we look to reframe subsidies in a better way to support farming but to support farming on healthier food, meat and vegetables I think we could address some of that balance.

9:34I don't know how much, I haven't done the study myself but I think we need to start looking at that, where our government funding is going to switch investment in a farming level to healthier foods. Because essentially we produce tons and tons of monocrop wheat, and then of course it's the cheapest ingredient to put in everything, so it's in all our foods. And nutritionally speaking, it's not really that nutrient dense and doesn't really help people on their health journey. And if you look at the price conversation, as I said, one in three overweight kids are in deprived areas where you compare that to in the general population, it's only one in five kids are overweight or obese.

10:16So we clearly see there's a financial issue here where people can't afford healthy food and therefore they buy junk food. And that definitely needs to be addressed because we should live in a fair society where we all get a fair chance to eat healthy food. Number two, the report does rely on companies to self-report without any actual targets or measures set, without any financial or economic incentives. So what that means is a big supermarket or a big food company will report on how much food they fundamentally, or healthy food they fundamentally sell, but it doesn't mean anything. We're just starting to track it.

10:57We've got no targets against it. And the industry has to come up with their own. And historically, that hasn't always led to the best outcomes. There needs to be an economics incentive on the big food industry to drive healthier food. So that's lacking from the report. Then number three, it really doesn't address the real problems in ultra processed food at all. When you look at the report, it highlights a big factor being if over 2 million adults in the UK drank one less soda per day, reducing 50 calories, obesity would be halved in the UK. Big headline, sounds amazing, but it's only looking at calories as a one-dimensional metric of health.

11:43We need to look at health holistically. We need to cut out the ultra-processed foods, And there are so many more factors in play here that we need to address that this report just doesn't even look at. So if you take point number four, in 168 pages, you can imagine how many words are in that report. It only mentions sugar 10 times. It mentions ultra processed foods zero times. So fundamentally, my view is that report has been fairly green or whitewashed in whatever way by industry lobbyists to not really focus on the big issues. I would say ultra processed foods should be a central topic in that report, and it definitely is not.

12:33and then the last point number five is betting on genomics testing for obesity is fundamentally flawed so the NHS is going to invest a lot of money on testing people's genetics to understand their predisposition and risk of obesity in later life now that ignores all the psychological issues at play why people become obese. It ignores all the environmental issues at play, the economic issues at play, and it puts all the focus and weight on genetics, which fundamentally I don't believe to be true. I don't think we have data that says obesity is 20 % genetics, 80 % environment. We don't have that data, but my guess it would be probably somewhere in the region of 90 % environment and 10 % genetics.

13:24So I think this is fundamentally just going down the wrong path and wasting money on something that isn't going to drive real benefits and results. Far better money could be spent in investing in subsidies for healthy food. So we could all just access it much more easily. That would be the way to look at this. So fundamentally, in summary, I think the report is a great start. It brings the right conversation to the table that we all need to be having but at the same time there are some fundamental flaws in the report that don't address some of the main issues and why our nation is not healthy that's why i will continue to keep pushing this conversation forward and keep trying to evolve the narrative and get the industry to do better for all our health and you guys our community of the good the bad and the healthy and tonic health on instagram are the ones that can vote with your wallet and really make an impact and a difference on your health, but also the NHS's.

14:22So thanks for listening.

14:34At Boar's Head, we've been going back to school for over 115 years. And this year, every school lunch is reason to celebrate with the flavors your kids love and the exceptional quality you expect. helping you make school lunch fresh, easy, and delicious. Ring the bell. The deli is open. Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905. Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance.

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