Twho types of food and drink are killing MILLIONS of people every year in Europe. A pair of types of food and drink are to blame for MILLIONS of deaths each year in Europe, according to the WHO, who jhave blamed ‘powerful industries’ for driving ill health.
Ultra-processed foods and alcohol are claiming 2.7 million lives annually, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has revealed. The WHO warned: “Regardless of the product they sell, their (industry) interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest.
“Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy.” WHO added: “While legal measures regulating alcohol and unhealthy food marketing are in existence in several countries across the WHO European region and across the world, these are often narrow in scope, focused on specific media or settings, certain population groups or on specific marketing techniques, and therefore confer insufficient protection.”
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Reflecting on the report, which included fossil fuels and smoking too, Dr Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe, stated: “Four industries kill at least 7,000 people in our region every day. The same large commercial entities block regulation that would protect the public from harmful products and marketing, and protect health policy from industry interference.
“Industry tactics include exploitation of vulnerable people through targeted marketing strategies, misleading consumers, and making false claims about the benefits of their products or their environmental credentials. These tactics threaten public health gains of the past century and prevent countries from reaching their health targets.”
Belgium’s deputy prime minister, Frank Vandenbroucke, who introduced the study, remarked: “For too long we have considered risk factors as being mostly linked to individual choices. We need to re-frame the problem as a systemic problem, where policy has to counter ‘hyper-consumption environments’, restrict marketing, and stop interference in policy making.”
Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “This is far-left political agitation masquerading as public health research. “The authors are explicitly opposed to the market economy and trade liberalisation and conclude that the solution lies in ‘rethinking capitalism’.
“They claim that ‘consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice’ and that the government should therefore make their choices for them using the full apparatus of the nanny state. “It is a sad indictment of the WHO that it has allowed this half-baked Marxism to be published in its name.”