Visit Nesta’s blueprint for halving obesity to explore the most effective policies to turn the tide on obesity and help more people live longer, healthier lives.

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 2023 study estimated the annual cost of adult obesity and overweight to the UK at around £98 billion, while the NHS spends around £12 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. However, they have not been successful and obesity rates are now double those in 1990. At Nesta we want to halve the prevalence of obesity by 2030, bringing us back to rates last seen in the 1990s. Achieving such a reduction is an ambitious goal and 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 almost 700 policy recommendations designed to tackle obesity. What was not clear was which solutions would have the greatest impact and how much they would cost to implement. This made it difficult to know where to focus efforts and how to budget appropriately.

There has been some progress in identifying more ambitious policies aimed at tackling obesity, for example Obesity Health Alliance’s Turning the Tide on Obesity report and The National Food Strategy. The next step was to prioritise these policies to identify which should be implemented first to meaningfully shift the dial on levels of ill-health caused by obesity. Any successful policy package needs to incentivise food businesses to sell healthier products – through tax or regulation – and provide treatment for those who need it most. Focussing on information, education and voluntary action will not work.

We developed an online toolkit with academic experts that clearly evaluates the cost and impact of a wide range of different obesity policies. By identifying the most effective high-impact, low-cost policies, the toolkit will help to show that halving obesity by 2030 is manageable without radically reimagining society – by making a number of small, iterative changes. To do so would require public investment of £3 billion over five years, and generate benefits worth £30 billion a year to society.

Throughout this project, we engaged scientific experts and policymakers to calculate the relative impact of different interventions to reduce obesity. We worked 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 consulted with civil servants working across central, devolved and local governments to test the usability of the toolkit.

We wanted policymakers to feel confident that they could consider all of the best evidence when making decisions. Nesta’s project delivered a toolkit 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.