Public health nutrition is a noble cause but its practitioners are increasingly seeing their role in terms of the left-right political divide. But in doing so have they made public health nutrition a target?
Nobody seems to disagree with the idea that improving the nutritional quality of the national diet is a good idea but getting agreement on the best way of achieving it is another thing.
In the 1980s the approach to public health nutrition was characterised by ‘intersectoral collaboration’ – fostering links and cooperation between the agriculture, food processing, nutrition research and nutrition education sectors. The Heart Foundation’s Tick program was born in this era and was based around an acknowledgement of competing interests – the health experts wanted changes to the food supply; the food industry wanted a marketing advantage for the reformulation being requested; and a means of food approval was devised to consolidate the compromise.
Now it’s war!
Fast forward to 2014 and the environment is very different – the notion of collaboration is gone. Now, it’s war! Listen to the rallying cry from none other than Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, at a health promotion conference in Finland last year:
It’s not just Big Tobacco any more. Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation … This is formidable opposition … [There] is a failure of political will to take on big business … When industry is involved in policy-making, rest assured that the most effective control measures will be downplayed or left out entirely. This, too, is well documented, and dangerous.