UK children are shorter and fatter due to poor diet and poverty, report finds

British children face a lifetime of “diet-related illnesses” due to an increase in junk food and unhealthy eating, a damning report has warned.

The Food Foundation have called for urgent action from the next Government to stem “largely preventable” illnesses caused by a poor diet.

In a report released on Wednesday, the think tank said there has been a steady rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes and undernutrition among children.

Obesity among 10-11-year olds has increased by 30 per cent since 2006, the study found, while the average height of five-year-olds has fallen year-on-year since 2013.

The “aggressive promotion of cheap junk food” and levels of food insecurity caused by poverty and deprivation mean that children are living in an environment that makes feeding them healthily an “almost impossibly difficult challenge”, the authors said.

And the cost-of-living crisis has exacerbated the problem they said, as they called for action from the next government to “reverse the current trajectory”.

The Standard has previously reported how Barking and Dagenham has the worst child obesity rate in the UK, with nearly a third (31.7 per cent) of Year 6 children classed as obese.

Obesity costs the NHS around £6.5 billion a year and significantly increases the risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases and diabetes.

Anna Taylor, executive director at The Food Foundation, said: “The health problems being suffered by the UK’s children due to poor diet are entirely preventable.

“Politicians across the political spectrum must prioritise policies that give all children access to the nutrition they need to grow up healthily, as should be their right.”

Commenting on the report, chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver said: “Decades of government neglect has meant kids are suffering from more obesity-related illnesses, leading to average heights shrinking and living shorter lives – they’re not being given the chance to be happy, healthy people. And they deserve so much more than that.

“We need to reverse this trend if we’re to have the healthiest generation of kids, and to do that we need to take a serious look at the food that fuels us. And right now, it’s not pretty.

“There’s no silver bullet to fix this, which is why we need a comprehensive approach that doesn’t just tinker around the edges but revolutionises the rules and fundamentally improves the quality of food across the board. The leader who understands this and gets serious about child health will be the person who turned the tide on obesity – and won.”

The Government’s food tsar Henry Dimbleby resigned in March 2023 after claiming that the Tories’ “ultra-free-market ideology” was preventing them from taking action to fix the obesity crisis.

Ministers have faced criticism for delaying plans to ban the promotion of buy-one-get-one-free deals on junk food until 2025.