The urgent need to support British families to eat healthily was drawn into sharp focus earlier this year when The World Obesity Atlas 2026 reported that we have about twice the number of overweight and obese children as France and Italy, with a record rate of 3.8 million children with a high BMI.
In a timely move, Tesco brought together a panel of leading health charities, nutritionists and food suppliers for a roundtable to discuss how to make a difference to families.
“We have a responsibility to fill people’s shopping baskets in the right way,” says Tamara Rajah, group managing director of healthcare at Tesco. “We have already increased fibre in our own brand products by 14%. We are removing sugar and not replacing it with sweeteners. We are reducing additives in children’s yoghurts.” As a result of such initiatives, by the end of last year, Tesco had hit its ambitious target of 65% of its food sales being classed as healthy, up from 58% in 2019.
The obesity crisis
No one shied away from the reason for this conversation: the current picture is bleak: “Obesity is normal and it’s becoming part of our genetic code, meaning that poor health is being built into future generations,” warned Colette Marshall of Diabetes UK. “Children as young as seven are developing type 2 diabetes, which once only occurred in retirement. These children go on to have aggressive health issues very quickly.”
Nutritionist and children’s health campaigner Rhiannon Lambert set the scene further, citing findings from the Food Foundation’s 2026 report that it’s twice as expensive to eat healthily. “In the UK, we eat one of the highest percentages of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) in Europe,” she added. “Our children aren’t hitting their fibre intake, and everywhere you turn, you’re saturated with UPF marketing.”
John Maingay of the British Heart Foundation noted changes in disease patterns as a result. “We are seeing 170,000 additional deaths from weight-related cardiovascular disease,” he said. “Clinicians are having to cope with more complex heart problems that occur much earlier. And people are dropping out of work so it affects the economy.”
“We’re also storing up longer-term problems,” said Dr Ian Walker of Cancer Research UK. “There’s a wave of cancer coming. And this is a more complex issue than the journey we went on with tobacco because obesity is multifaceted and complex. We can say: ‘Don’t smoke,’ but we can’t say: ‘Don’t eat.’”
Maingay raised the cost of eating healthily. “For some families to follow the nutritional guidelines, it would cost 85% of their disposable income. It’s uncomfortable putting out guidelines we know people can’t afford.”
Indeed, behind the statistics are real families who want to feed their children well, in a world where eating healthily is both confusing and expensive. Paediatric dietitian and feeding therapist Lucy Upton sees these efforts day in, day out: “There isn’t a single family I can recall who doesn’t want the best for their kids,” she said. “But the friction is palpable. Parents think they’re making the right decision and confusing labelling means it turns out not to be. Parents feel lost. We need to empower them to make healthy choices, with guidelines that are unambiguous, achievable and don’t finger-point.”
The challenge lies in exactly how we do that. “There are so many guidelines for children under three, but over three, parents are left in an unregulated mess,” explained Jess Mackenzie of the Kids’ Food & Drink Collective. “We can’t expect parents to cook everything from scratch, it needs to be convenient. But the industry has created a situation where UPF products masquerade as healthy, and children start to feel suspicious of anything different.”
Louis Bedwell, an independent food consultant, argued that we need to make nutritious wholefoods as appealing as the brightly packaged less healthy foods that kids are used to. “We have to make it exciting,” he said, highlighting examples like Tesco wrapping a lettuce up as a football during the World Cup. “Big businesses need to embrace the responsibility and the challenge of pushing healthier foods.”
How the government and food industry can promote better diets
Georgina Pattison of Hero, the umbrella firm of brands such as Organix and Deliciously Ella, said real change is not going to come from one company or charity. It will require structural changes in how food is categorised in store. “Parents have to go through the aisles to find healthier options because our system is not set up for healthy children’s food,” she explained.
Elaine Hindal from the British Nutrition Foundation agreed. “We need a clear, evidence-based mission for the new government,” she said. “We’re at a point where there’s a government cost imperative.”
“How we make healthy eating inspiring and accessible to families has become an always-on conversation,” said Ashwin Prasad, Tesco’s UK CEO. The supermarket is already working to make healthy eating more affordable, he said: “Over two-thirds of products in our Aldi Price Match promotion are healthy, helping customers access everyday essentials at great value. We’ve recently extended Aldi Price Match to Express stores, alongside Fresh 5 and Fresh 3 offers on a rotating selection of fresh fruit and veg. Customers can also benefit from 8,000 weekly deals through Clubcard Prices and Everyday Low Prices.”
This year, Tesco created its own policy and guidelines to promote healthy lunch box options. By September it will be supplying 1,000 schools with free fruit and veg. Prasad added: “We must act now to protect future generations, and we know collaboration in the industry is key. Along with everyone here today, we have an opportunity to shape our ideas into something scalable.”
Richard Hall of Danone said more guidelines from the government are needed to clarify what’s healthy and incentivise brands to make healthier products. He pointed to the regulations around HFSS foods, which put less healthy foods into a category and restricted how they were marketed. “You’re either in the category or you’re out. It meant that we could set a target to get a certain number of products within the guidelines by a certain date. It gave us a guideline to work with.”
“If someone from the government were here today, what would we ask for?” said Dr Ravi Gurumurthy of innovation agency Nesta. “At Nesta, we tried to analyse all the evidence and review what works.” Following this review, he said, it was clear that despite education being a popular approach, “the evidence doesn’t suggest that will have large-scale effects”, so this is a bit of a red herring. Weight-loss drugs also had drawbacks, not least because of their cost.
“Prevention is always better than cure,” he said, pointing out how mandatory reporting could play a role in tackling obesity at source. “If you make changes right across the shopping basket, we can make a difference. We also need mandatory targets.”
Relatively small changes to diet sustained over a long period of time can make a real impact, he said. “If we want to halve obesity by 2030, we would need to reduce calories by just 216 in those with excess weight. It’s much less than what people imagine. But you’ve got to have that sustained over a couple of years. That is still possible to do through voluntary change, but it’s also an amount you could sneak out. That’s like a bag of crisps. I think there is a way of doing this and I actually think it’s viable to get it done in the next three or four years.”
Everyone agreed that the next step is to prioritise policy.
“It’s clear from today’s discussion that we all want to help families to eat healthier food – and there’s a consensus to make progress,” Prasad concludes. “Where we come together to lobby together and at scale, there is difference to be made. There’s real opportunity. As a group, we are aligned and our energies can be focused on getting to compliance, rather than distracted by disagreement. I really believe something will come out of this.”
Find out more about how Tesco can help you and your family eat more healthily at Tesco Recipes: For a little help making recipes you’ll all love
