Devi Sridhar

So actually, I kind of come down in the book on, you know, on diet saying there's so many complex diet rules, so many different fads, you know, veganism, not veganism, you know, dairy free, eat fish.

And I'm like, actually, let's simplify it.

If I could say one thing, it's just reduce your ultra processed foods.

But you're saying that's a knowledge.

But if you look at like school meals,

Here in Scotland, all kids who go to public school, it's called state school, get free school meals until the age of 10.

The idea being that children get a meal.

About 70 to 80% of those calories are ultra-processed.

So you're feeding children, but actually what you're feeding them is actually we're learning in 10 to 20 years, is it going to lead to early onset cancer?

And increasingly convinced by what they call what is the birth cohort effect with cancer, which is every generation seems to have higher rates of digestive link cancers.

So it used to be it was something over 60, now it's over 50.

And they're saying, is this linked to something in the diet?

And one big factor is the rise of ultra processed foods in our diet.

So

governments are reluctant here as lobbies, very difficult to get anything in.

And there is a sense of fatalism, which is like, it's cheap, it's there in stores, it has long shelf life.

And so I don't think any place has figured out how to manage it beyond, I give the positive examples of like Denmark, Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, places that are kind of reversing childhood obesity, which is the, like the outliers compared to the rest of the world.

And there they seem to be focusing on children and saying, actually, if you can prevent the first 10 years obesity and get diet in place for then, it seems to maintain itself.

But if children become obese by the age of 5 or 10, it's very, very difficult to reverse that.

And that's tied into kind of the diet as well and the diet environment.