Children across the UK are getting shorter, fatter and sicker amid an epidemic of poor nutrition, food insecurity and poverty, according to a report that warns millions of people are facing a ‘time bomb’ of preventable health problems.
The average height of five-year-olds is declining, obesity has increased by almost a third and the number of young people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has risen by more than a fifth, the Food Foundation report said.
Aggressive marketing of cheap ultra-processed foods, diets lacking essential nutrition and high levels of poverty and deprivation are driving the “significant decline” in children’s health, researchers have found.
Failure to reverse the alarming trajectory will result in a generation burdened with diet-related illness and the mental health consequences of living with an illness throughout their lives – followed by premature death, the report concludes.
Health experts, politicians and food campaigners warned that without immediate action to reverse the damage, the crisis would overwhelm the NHS and weaken the economy for decades, with much of the population too sick to work.
“The decline in children’s health clearly shown in this report is a shocking and deeply sad consequence of the failure of Britain’s food system,” said Henry Dimbleby, the government’s former food tsar and author of the National Food Strategy.
“We need the next administration to take decisive action to make healthy and sustainable food affordable, stop the constant flow of junk food and realize that investing in children’s health is an investment in the country’s future.”
The report comes after The Guardian revealed ministers were told they would be putting children at lifelong risk of ill health after suspending policies to tackle obesity and junk food until 2025.
Michael Marmot, director of UCL’s Institute for Health Equity, said the new report highlighted a dramatic deterioration in children’s health over the past decade.
“We used to view the combination of undernutrition and obesity as a characteristic of low- and middle-income countries. We now see it in Britain in 2024.”
“More than a century of history has led us to expect continued improvements in health. That has changed in the past twelve years. Healthy life expectancy has fallen. Quite simply, people’s basic human needs are not being met.”
The Food Foundation report, which included a new analysis of data from government and health sources, highlighted the rapidly deteriorating health status of children.
The height of five-year-olds in Britain has been falling since 2013 and children are also shorter than those in almost all other comparable countries, the report said.
Obesity levels among 10 and 11-year-olds in England have increased by 30% since 2006, with one in five children officially obese by the time they leave primary school, researchers have found.
The number of cases of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity, has risen by 22% among people under the age of 25 in England and Wales in the past five years, the study found.
According to the report, babies born in Britain today will also be a year less healthy than babies born ten years ago.
Baroness Anne Jenkin, a Conservative peer, said children’s health had “never been worse” but warned that hardly anyone was talking about it. “This is a time bomb waiting to explode if no action is taken.”
Gordon Brown, the former Labor Prime Minister, said: “If the height of five-year-olds has been falling since 2013, and we learn that babies born today will have a year less good health than babies born ten years ago, Mother and Father in the country will be concerned and shocked at what is happening to children due to lack of nutrition as they endure the hungry 2020s at food bank Britain.”
The report states that children’s nutritional health is “not taken sufficiently seriously” and that “policies in this area have been lackluster and wholly inadequate to address the severity of the problem”.
The “aggressive promotion of cheap junk food” and food insecurity caused by poverty and deprivation mean children live in an environment that makes feeding them healthy an “almost impossibly difficult challenge”, it added.
Anna Taylor, the executive director of The Food Foundation, said the health problems caused by poor diet were “completely preventable”.
“Politicians across the political spectrum must prioritize policies that give all children access to the nutrition they need to grow up healthily, which should be their right.”
Chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver said: “Decades of government neglect have led to children suffering from more obesity-related diseases, reducing average height and leading shorter lives – they are not being given the chance to be happy, healthy to be people. .
“We must reverse this trend if we want to have the healthiest generation of children, and to do that we must take a serious look at the food that nourishes us. And right now it’s not pretty.”