The government must curb its appetite for junk policy

Most people recognise that fad diets can be really bad for your health. They may not have realised just how damaging Governments’ unscientific and nonsensical restrictions on food and food advertising are proving to be.

At the end of 2025 the Government introduced the “junk food advertising ban” based on legislation brought in by its predecessor.

 These rules were intended to combat obesity and are part of a broader paternalistic move in public health policy seeking to force people to live healthier lives. This is despite Policy Exchange polling in  A Portrait of Modern Britain showing very few people wanting the health service to make “helping people to live healthy lives” a priority.

The Advertising Standards Authority has recently started to rule on the application of the ban — and there are some pretty peculiar results in terms of what is determined to be junk food and what is permitted. For example, an advert for a supermarket’s cheese pretzel has been banned because other bakery products also appeared which are banned, yet another advert for an airport lounge featuring a chocolate doughnut (banned) was allowed. Similarly, an advert for a kebab shop which focussed on two of its compliant products was allowed.

 These baffling distinctions are down to the “Nutrient Profiling” of the foods concerned — that is the criteria on which the food recipes are measured to determine whether the Government considers food and drink to be healthy or unhealthy. They also come down to the regulator’s assessment of what the intention of the advert was, the prominence of the less healthy food within it and whether it is intended to encourage people to buy the less healthy food. There’s uncertainty and interpretation involved in all of this — and if it sounds like a complicated mess that’s because it is.

Adverts which reach the stage of being ruled on by the regulator will already have cost a fortune to produce — yet parts of the industry feel like they have to take punts like this because they have no way of knowing for sure what rulings will be until they are made.

Other advertisers will have incurred significant extra costs in second-guessing the rules and potentially ruling-out good and effective adverts which might have been permitted.

All of this despite growing scientific evidence that advertising bans don’t even work. A recent review by Professor Charles Taylor which looked at hundreds of studies finds that advertising restrictions have limited or no impact on reducing obesity.

Some companies responded to the bans in good faith by doing what the Government would regard as “the right thing” — spending huge sums of money changing their recipes and reducing their use of ingredients which would see them fall foul of the ban, even at the risk of putting off their customers. Crisp companies introduced “mild” and “baked” variants, cereal companies worked enough quinoa and millet into their ingredients to shift the balance away from frowned upon ingredients, and chocolate makers introduced nut paste.

Yet on 25 March, only a few months after the ad ban came into effect, the Government launched a consultation on an entirely new Nutrient Profiling Model setting out massive changes in a move which came as a complete surprise to the sector.

Changes to the requirements mean that all those efforts to add fibre to cereals will count for nothing and that a far wider range of soft drinks and yoghurts suddenly find themselves at risk of being on the wrong side of the rules. This means that those companies would have to spend yet more money coming up with new recipes, without knowing when the Government might choose to change its mind again.

There’s no reason why advertisers should have confidence in assurances from government here – they’ve had them before. They can’t even have confidence in the science because if policy was being determined by that then the ban would not have been introduced in the first place.

It is not just the application of the ban which is indigestible, it is the whole governing logic and approach to health policy — the same absurd, ineffective and patronising approach which resulted in another recent set of rules restricting apple crumble and sausages in school dinners and taking apple juice away from primary school children.

It is not just junk food which is bad for us — junk science and junk policy can do just as much harm

It is not just British waistlines which are badly out of shape right now — the NHS itself is far from being a lean and agile model of efficiency. Yet rather than taking the tough policy decisions needed to get the NHS into shape, improving productivity, patient choice and patient care, it is far easier for politicians to find distractions and displacement activity by telling people what they can eat and businesses who they can promote and sell their products to.

We could all do with eating more healthily, but it is not just junk food which is bad for us — junk science and junk policy can do just as much harm.