Held Hostage

Commissioner Tim Jackson sets out his conclusions from his research for us

Back in 2024, The False Economy of Big Food posed two simple questions. First, we wanted to identify the hidden health costs of the British diet. Second, we wanted to know how much it would cost to reverse the damage – to ensure that the whole country could begin to eat well.  

The answer, of course, was in the title. The hidden costs of an unhealthy diet vastly outweigh the additional sums needed to ensure that every household in the country could afford to eat healthy and sustainable food. Big Food represents a massive ‘false economy’. That was our argument.  

Ironically, the term Big Food is itself a bit of a misnomer. The influence of a few large actors within the food industry is indisputable. Massive. No doubt about that. Wall to wall advertising. Hyperbolic presence in all our supermarkets. Access to virtually unlimited finance. Enormous lobbying power in government. There’s no disputing the size and power of it all.  

But is Big Food really selling food? The endocrinologist Dr Robert Lustig isn’t so sure. He’s spent more than four decades treating a rising tide of metabolic disorders – in ever younger kids. Food, in the biological sense, he argues, should support the energy metabolism of the human body. ‘Real Food’ must protect the liver, feed the gut and support the brain. It must contribute to metabolic function at every level of the organism.  

Big Food may start with real foods. But then processing gets to work. Saturated fats, refined starches and sugars are added in – in quantities inimical to human health. Fibre and micronutrients – vital to support the metabolism – are stripped out. Products are engineered for shelf life, convenience and a neurophysiological ‘bliss point’ rather than for nourishment or metabolic health.  

Lustig’s provocation isn’t just rhetorical. It’s a claim that ultra-processed products have been engineered in ways that frustrate the biological functions food is supposed to perform. In a very real sense, Big Food is increasingly in the business not of feeding people, but of manufacturing ‘irresistible’ products whose commercial success come at the expense of human health.  

The consequences are nothing short of catastrophic. Statistics from the US suggest that around 90% of the adult population now suffer from some form of diet-related metabolic dysfunction. We don’t have equivalent stats for the UK, but there’s little doubt we’re heading in the same direction, as an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and diet-related chronic illness attests.   

That’s a public health disaster, of course. It’s a massive failure in health policy. It’s also a failure in food policy. But our argument in the False Economy is that it’s more than that. It’s a failure in economic policy. Profits flow to the shareholders of companies. The costs are borne by society. This is capitalist extractivism at its very worst. The privatisation of benefits. The socialisation of costs. All underwritten by the taxpayer, the Treasury and the nation at large. 

Two years on from that 2024 report, we wanted to know what if anything had changed. After all, we’ve had a new health plan, a new food policy – and a new government – since the original report was released.  

Fit for the Future, published by the Starmer government in July 2025 set a shift ‘from sickness to prevention’ as one of three central reforms in a new 10-year health plan, alongside moving care from hospitals into communities. Towards a Good Food Cycle, published around the same time as the health plan, sets an explicit objective of a healthier, more affordable and sustainable food system.  

Connecting the dots has still to happen. But restrictions on advertising junk food are now in force, free school meal eligibility has expanded and the government is developing mandatory reporting – and ultimately targets – for the healthiness of food sold by large businesses. Next year will see the publication of a long-awaited report on the feasibility of a new National Care Service in which prevention will play a key role.  

All of this is surely progress in the right direction. But does any of it show up in the statistics? Sadly the answer is no. Not yet. Our 2026 Update of the False Economy confirms a shocking – and rising – disparity at the heart of the UK economy. 

The health-related costs attributable to unhealthy diets have risen to £298 billion a year at mid-2026 prices. Around £104 billion falls directly on the taxpayer through healthcare, social care and welfare budgets. A further £194 billion reflects lost productivity and diminished quality of life. These are real, economic and financial losses. Lost opportunities for the economy. Unnecessary suffering for ordinary people. And a burden on the public purse that it is rapidly becoming unpayable.

Against these costs, the additional expenditure needed to allow household food budgets to meet the cost of a healthy diet – consistent with the government’s Eatwell Guide – is around £51 billion a year, less than half of the direct taxpayer costs and a sixth of the overall cost to the economy. 

This comparison doesn’t point to easy solutions. It doesn’t mean that spending £51 billion would instantly save £298 billion. Public health is a long-term problem. Chronic disease has multiple causes. Health improvements take time. Some of the estimated losses are social rather than immediately bankable fiscal savings.  

But the scale of the imbalance is still enormous. And it’s rising. The updated evidence leaves the fundamental argument from The False Economy of Big Food unchanged. The UK spends vast sums managing chronic illness while maintaining a food economy that makes healthy eating difficult and, for many households, unaffordable. 

The long and the short of it is that Big Food is still holding us hostage, hijacking public health and undermining the public finances in the name of shareholder profit.