It's Official: McDonald's Is Helping Define UK's Health Policy

Newspeak lives in government policy to "nudge" people towards health with "responsibility deal networks" composed of junk food and alcohol manufacturers.

by Heidi Stevenson

15 November 2010

In the UK, obesity has tripled in the last 20 years. Alcohol misuse costs the health service £2.7 and lack of exercise £1.8 billion a year. In response, the government has brought in McDonald's, PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Mars, Diageo (an alcohol consortium), and Unilever to help define food and health policies.

That's right. McDonald's, Pepsi, and Mars are being tasked with helping resolve the UK's obesity epidemic.

The Guardian reports that health secretary Andrew Lansley has handed over responsibility for defining answers to the obesity and couch potato epidemics to a newspeak consortium of groups called "responsibility deal networks" to develop health policies for the UK.

As always, when there's no sense behind policy, newspeak is called upon to sell insanity. People are now to be "nudged" towards health by "responsibility deal networks". These nonsense terms are used in an officious manner to cow people into nodding their agreement, rather than admitting that they don't understand the non-understandable.

We now have the purveyors of Big Mac, high-fructose drinks, candy, vodka, and margarine deciding what's good for us.

Prime Minister David Cameron's Big Society is revealed for what it is: Big Business. The health of a nation is to be molded by corporations that are, in part at least, responsible for much of the obesity and chronic disease endemic of modern society. As the Guardian reported, chief of the food campaign group Sustain, Jeanette Longfield, stated:

This is the equivalent of putting the tobacco industry in charge of smoke-free spaces. We know this 'let's all get round the table approach' doesn't work, because we've all tried it before, including the last Conservative government. This isn't 'big society', it's big business.

Other Players

Working with these corporations are public interest health and consulting groups, all with an image of being for the public benefit, but many with deep ties to the corporations involved. These include Cancer Research UK, which helps funnel guinea pigs into Big Pharma's research, UK Faculty of Health, which draws its "expertise" from modern medicine's treat-not-prevent methods, and Which? - an organization that promotes mercury-filled fluorescent lightbulbs.

Major supermarkets are involved. Fitness is not only represented, but is chaired by the Fitness Industry Association, a lobby group for private gyms and personal trainers.

Health Department Abdicates

The Health Department has abdicated any leading role in determining what constitutes healthy practices. These "responsibility deal networks" are not tasked primarily with advocating healthy practices. Rather, they are tasked with identifying priorities and barriers that they want removed. Before even starting, using pricing of food and alcohol as means of modifying consumption was eliminated.

The Faculty of Public Health says, "...we're keeping an open mind until we see what comes out of the meetings, but we do think that there is still a role for regulation." The regulation they're focused on is reducing salt (more than a little questionable, as seen here) and reducing transfats, which is certainly a highly admirable goal. Of course, nary a word was stated about chemical ingredients, organic foods, or avoiding junk.

According to the Guardian, even the board that oversees the five "responsibility deal networks" is "dominated by the food, alcohol, advertising and retail industries".

The Mind Reels

The Department of Health needs to change its name to the Department of Disease. A spokesman stated

Our aim is to give people the help and advice they need to adopt a healthy lifestyle, and the latest academic evidence suggests new ways of supporting individuals in doing this. We have therefore set up a Behaviour Change Network which brings together experts in behavioural science with those from businesses and non-governmental organisations to look at these new ideas.

In other words, if we can't make real sense, then toss out newspeak gobbledygook. Two plus two equals five, doesn't it?

Whether one agrees with governmental involvement in health issues, there can be no honest disagreement that industries that benefit from ill health or profit from products that cause chronic disease cannot possibly be tasked with developing health policies, unless the goal is to create a society so ill that the ability to comprehend this insanity is destroyed.

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