Transforming our food environment: a spotlight on promotions

Summary

We should all be able to access affordable, healthy food, no matter where we live. To make this vision a reality in Scotland, and to achieve our ambition of becoming a Good Food Nation, we must take collective action to transform our food environment. In this briefing paper, we place a spotlight on the promotion of foods high in fat, sugar or salt, describe the impact of promotions on our behaviours and health, and advocate for more ambitious action to curtail the promotion of unhealthy food.

Our food environment must change to help and support our population’s health. It is not reasonable to expect individuals alone to change in order to solve our dietary challenges, nor is it realistic. Evidence from England1 also suggests that the focus on individual responsibility within diet policy is likely to have contributed to the lack of improvement in levels of healthy weight or related health inequalities over the past 30 years. This aligns with what we see in Scotland, where levels of poor diet and excess weight have remained high.

Policies which work to rebalance the food industry’s persistent marketing, promotion and advertising of unhealthy food, which can be damaging to our health, are a necessary step towards transforming our food system4 and ensuring that eating well is the easiest thing to do – not the hardest.