Having cake in the office is 'like passive smoking', top food regulator warns

18 January 2023, 06:27 | Updated: 18 January 2023, 12:36

Colleagues bringing cake into the office is akin to passive smoking, the head of the UK's food regulator has warned.

Professor Susan Jebb, chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, also claimed that the advertising of junk food is "undermining people's free will".

Prof Jebb, who said she made the comments in a personal capacity, not as the FSA head, added that while it is a choice to eat sweets, people can help each other by providing a "supportive environment".

“We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment,” she told the Times.

“If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

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With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

The paper reported that Prof Jebb said restrictions on advertising junk food were "not about the nanny state" but would instead tackle what she described as a "complete market failure" where sweet goods take precedence over vegetables.

She told the paper: "The businesses with the most money have the biggest influence on people's behaviour. That's not fair...we've ended up with a complete market failure, because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower."

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Successive governments have failed to introduce a long-promised ban on pre-watershed TV advertising for junk food, with Rishi Sunak's new administration announcing in December that the anti-obesity measure will not come into force until 2025.

Nearly two thirds of adults are overweight, and more than a quarter are obese. Obesity is bad for people's health, increasing the risk of many conditions, including severe illness from Covid-19.

Prof Jebb said tackling the obesity crisis was key to the nation's health, and that medics should be doing more to help people lose weight.

“If a doctor comes across somebody with high blood pressure, they would feel, culturally, by training, by guidelines, by practice, that they must offer this patient treatment for their high blood pressure and explain to them why it was important,” she said.

“At the moment, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it ... The status in medicine comes from treating rare diseases with very expensive medicine and technology, and obesity isn’t either of those.”

Prof Jebb called for a change in "culture in which people, health professionals, doctors, and particularly the sort of powerbrokers in the system, are pretty reluctant to go there”.

She said: “We can change that. We’ve changed it with smoking. It took a very long time.”

Professor Jebb later said in a statement released by the FSA that she was making the comments in a personal capacity.

She added that her comments "are not those of the FSA Board nor do they reflect current or planned FSA policy in any way whatsoever.

Prof Jebb went on: "I made the comments in a personal capacity and any representation of them as the current position or policy of the FSA is misleading and inaccurate”.