“Addiction to junk food costs the UK £268 billion” was the improbable claim on the front of The Guardian at the weekend. A few days earlier, The Times had reported that “obesity-linked benefits” were costing the average taxpayer £270 a year. With the Tony Blair Institute for Regime Change claiming last year that overweight people are costing the UK £98 billion a year, the arms race to persuade us that fatties are picking our pockets has heated up and the makers of the effective but expensive weight loss drug Wegovy have been particularly keen to fund research in this area.

The claim that “addiction” to “junk food” costs society £268 billion did not come from Big Pharma but from a charity/pressure group that rejoices under the official-sounding title of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. Their report was written by Tim Jackson, the author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, who describes himself as an ecological economist and radio dramatist. He begins by having a pop at “Big Food” (who are “systematically degrading the quality of food that reaches our table”) and taking a swipe at weight loss drugs (“unpleasant and potentially lethal side effects”) before ploughing on with The Science.

Jackson does not discuss “junk food”, let alone “addiction”. His aim is to identify the costs of what he vaguely describes as “the UK’s unhealthy food system”. In practice, this means working out how many health problems would be avoided if Britons had a better diet. This first step is to calculate how much the NHS spends on chronic diseases, but he acknowledges that “there’s no ready answer to this question” and so uses an estimate from a 14 year old report from the Department of Health which said that 70 per cent of health and social spending in England goes on people who have “long-term conditions”. This is plausible enough in an ageing society, but how many of these conditions — which include dementia, cancer and mental health problems — are caused by poor diets rather than, say, age?

Nobody really knows, least of all Jackson. He asked some experts, but their opinions were very mixed indeed:

Some suggested that it [diet] is responsible for around 75–80% of chronic disease. Others virtually discount the potential for reducing chronic conditions through diet – even when they accept that it plays some causative role in disease.

He then looked at the academic literature and was disappointed to find that it didn’t always support the narrative you find in books written by TV doctors. 

No association at all is indicated, for instance, between the overall category of ‘dietary risk’ and neurological disorders – despite the medical evidence of this link that we have already highlighted. And even in the case of diabetes – which is well known to be related to diets high in sugar – the proportion attributed to the entire category of ‘dietary risk’ was in the range 12.4% to 48% with a central value of only 33.1%.

In the absence of any firm evidence, Jackson simply assumes that 33% of all long term health conditions in Britain are caused by poor diet because that’s what one study attributed to “metabolic risk”. Metabolic dysfunction is extremely common among the elderly — Jackson says that “70% of adults over 65 suffer from one or more metabolic condition” — and while it is linked to obesity and diet, it is also linked to medication, genes, stress, physical inactivity and other lifestyle factors, as well as old age itself. Jackson ignores the other risk factors and for the purposes of his cost estimate blames every case on “the current food system”. 

This makes the maths nice and simple. He takes 70 per cent of what the UK spends on healthcare, social care and disability benefit welfare and divides it by three. This gives him a total of £92 billion in direct costs to the government. He then adds less tangible costs, including “human costs” and lost productivity. “Human costs” depend entirely on whatever arbitrary figure you put on a year of life and are the Get Out of Jail Free card of health economists who want to make it look like personal choices impose a burden on society. Jackson simply nicks the figure of £60 billion from the report commissioned by Tony Blair’s think tank (and paid for by Novo Nordisk) last year.

He could have borrowed the lost productivity estimate from the same report, but that was “only” £15.1 billion and Jackson has his eyes set on something bigger. He takes a figure of £116 billion from a report published this year by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which, like many UN agencies, has been captured by activists. The report is mainly devoted to pushing for state regulation of the food supply, but it gives a “hidden costs” figure of $128.7 billion for the UK which equates to £116 billion. The FAO’s figures are full of spurious accuracy (a lack of nuts and seeds supposedly costs Britain $11.3 billion, for example) and there is little explanation of the methodology, but it is quite clear that they relate to various tangible and intangible health costs, not lost productivity. 

So we have three sets of figures making up the £268 billion. The health costs are based on an assumption by the author which is essentially random and is unsupported by any evidence. The lost productivity costs are borrowed from elsewhere and have little if anything to do with productivity. The “human costs” are also borrowed from elsewhere and are not really costs at all. Although Jackson insists that his estimate is “very, very conservative”, it is preposterously liberal, and contrary to what the Guardian claims, none of it has anything to do with “junk food” or “addiction”.

The cumulative effect of this endless stream of statistical sewage is to make the public believe that whatever the real cost of obesity might be, it must be very large indeed. Those who instinctively suspect that the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission must have succumbed to exaggeration with that £268 billion might be tempted to consider the Tony Blair Institute’s estimate of £98 billion to be more respectable. Do not be fooled. Most of that £98 billion comes from lost productivity due to premature mortality which even Jackson admits is not a cost to taxpayers; it is no more of a societal cost than the lost productivity caused by the use of contraception. It also includes £23.6 billion as the cost of people being merely overweight but not obese, despite the fact that overweight people live longer than people of a “healthy” weight. And, like all studies of this kind, it ignores any financial savings to the state and ignores all the intangible benefits of people enjoying tasty food. It’s all politically-driven garbage. Don’t take any of it seriously.