Britain is no longer dying earlier. We are living worse for longer. New analysis from the Health Foundation shows that the number of years we spend in good health has fallen over the past decade, even as it has risen across much of the developed world. The years are still there. What has changed is what happens inside them. You can look for explanations in hospitals and GP waiting rooms, and in the strain on the NHS. But part of the answer sits in what we now call food. There is more extraordinary food in Britain now than ever before but the problem is not the ceiling, but the floor.
The Decline of Everyday Eating
What people eat in a good restaurant, with time and money, has little to do with what they habitually eat when tired and stressed on a Tuesday night. It is that second category that shapes a nation's health. And in Britain, the floor has dropped from under us. Having worked in kitchens across Europe, I know this is not inevitable. In France, Spain and Italy, what stands out is the baseline. Everyday meals consist of ingredients rather than products, and meals are assembled, however simply, with some embedded knowledge. Even convenience foods retain a link to something recognisable.
Britain today feels different. A day's worth of calories can be assembled without encountering an ingredient. The language around this issue can quickly slide into soapbox moralising but this is not a failure of willpower. It is the result of a food system that makes certain choices frictionless and others difficult.
The Rise of Ultra-Processed Food
Ultra-processed food is cheap, convenient, heavily marketed and built for the time-poor conditions in which most of us live. It fits modern life, and modern life has adjusted to it. You even see it in the soft texture of the food itself. Calories are delivered without resistance. And once that becomes the baseline, everything else follows. The rise in obesity that the Health Foundation points to is not a mystery, nor is that of diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers – all linked to diet. Even mental health, increasingly understood to be entangled with what and how we eat, begins to look less like a separate crisis and more like part of the same system.
None of this distributes itself evenly. Britain's health inequalities are as stark as anything in the developed world. In some parts of the country, people can expect nearly two decades more of healthy life than in others. Yet the same patterns extend far up the income scale, through ready meals that signal a certain aspirational quality, snacks that present as healthy while remaining criminally overengineered, and a general drift away from cooking as a basic daily practice.
Economic Incentives and Policy
Layered over this is a set of economic incentives that rarely get discussed outside policy circles. The raw ingredients of processed food are often heavily subsidised, directly or indirectly. The transformation of those ingredients into shelf-stable, highly palatable products is where value is added. The result is a system in which nutrition, in any meaningful sense, becomes something you have to work for. This is not a uniquely British problem but the UK seems to have embraced it with particular enthusiasm. We are now one of the most obese countries in Western Europe. Our healthy life expectancy is falling behind. The gap between how long we live and how long we live well is widening.
The Generational Impact
The people currently moving into older age did not grow up on this diet. They have experienced less abundance, less variety, yes – but, crucially, also far less processing. What happens when a generation raised almost entirely within the modern food system reaches the same point? The difference between us and the likes of France and Spain is that, there, the easier option is often the better one. The thing you reach for without thinking is, more often than not, something that resembles food in a traditional sense. In Britain, the opposite can feel true. The uncomfortable conclusion is that the solution lies outside the healthcare system altogether. It lies, I believe, in how food is produced, priced, marketed, and consumed. In the incentives that shape those processes and in the small, daily habits that accumulate into something much larger.
We know from a new study presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul that eating fruit and drinking a cup of coffee a day may halve the risk of cells ageing unhealthily. So start with the food. Britain is not uniquely incapable of eating well. The evidence for that is in its pockets of excellence. The question is whether those pockets can be expanded, or whether they will remain a kind of parallel system, a higher tier that sits above a much lower, much broader base.
A Call to Action
If that continues, then the findings from the Health Foundation will not look like an aberration but the early stages of a longer trend. Then, the conversation about Britain's health needs to move beyond hospitals and waiting lists and into the more ordinary, more pervasive question of what we eat. Because that, more than anything else, is where the future of our health is being decided.
