Rising rates of obesity in the UK are a major public health concern. Obesity is linked with significant negative health effects including type 2 diabetes, several types of cancer, heart disease and stroke. A 2022 study estimated the annual cost of adult obesity to UK society at around £98 billion, while the NHS spends around £6.5 billion a year on treating obesity-related ill health. 

Over recent decades, efforts to promote healthier lives have tended to focus on encouraging exercise, personal willpower and providing people with dietary information. Interventions that focus on willpower, exercise and information have not been successful and obesity rates are now double those in 1990.  At Nesta we want to contribute to the ambitious goal of halving obesity rates, bringing us back to rates last seen in 1990. Achieving such a reduction sounds like an ambitious goal and it will take concerted effort from multiple actors across the food, health and education system. But if we take the right action at the right scale it can be achieved.

In recent years successive governments and external advisors have produced detailed reports, containing a range of policy recommendations designed to tackle obesity. 

What is still not clear is which solutions would have the greatest impact and how much they would cost to implement. This makes it difficult to know where to focus efforts and how to budget appropriately.

Until now, there has been progress in identifying more ambitious policies aimed at tackling obesity, for example Obesity Health Alliances: Turning the Tide on Obesity Report and The National Food Strategy. The next step is to prioritise these policies to identify which should be implemented first to meaningfully shift the dial on levels of ill health caused by obesity.

At Nesta, we want to make clear how best we can tackle rising rates of obesity. We are developing an online toolkit that makes plain the cost and impact of a wide range of different obesity policies. The toolkit helps to show that halving obesity is manageable without radically reimagining society – by making a number of small, iterative changes.

Throughout this project, we are engaging scientific experts and policymakers to calculate the relative impact of different interventions to reduce obesity.  We will work with a panel of experts to synthesise peer-reviewed evidence and reach a consensus about the relative impact and cost of these interventions. Finally, we will work across government, at the national and local level, to co-create the toolkit and design a digital product that meets the needs of policymakers across central and devolved governments. 

We want policymakers to feel confident that they are considering all of the best evidence when making decisions. Nesta’s project will deliver a tool that presents this much-needed information in an accessible way.

If your work is connected to improving dietary health, and you would like to know more about our Blueprint project, please reach out to Kate Tudor.