'Crazy' relationship with food is killing us, says FSA

British people eat the worst food in Europe, the head of a Government watchdog warns today.

In an interview with The Independent, Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, placed the UK at the bottom of European countries on nutrition and warned that all parts of society were eating badly.

She said a "troubled" relationship with food caused mass obesity in the general population and made young girls consider going on diets. "It's crazy," she said.

Yesterday the Government revealed Britain to be the fattest nation in Europe, with two-thirds of men and 60 per cent of women overweight or obese. Ministers said obesity would be the priority in public health and promised to launch a new strategy next year.

In an interview marking her first year in office, Dame Deirdre - who is locked in a battle with the food industry over processed food labelling - said: "I think the evidence to me suggests that the UK has really quite poor nutritional status.

"And although it is particularly prevalent in the lower socio-economic groups, actually the higher socio-economic groups cannot kid themselves it is the only place where it happens.

"So it is a broad society problem and the interesting thing is you can look at children as young as six or seven and see that they have a very strange relationship with food."

The multinational food giants and Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, are boycotting the FSA's "traffic light" labelling scheme in favour of daily percentages for salt, fat and sugar, even though independent surveys suggest the agency's system is the easiest to understand.

"The most obvious symptom of our nutritional status is obesity," explained Dame Deirdre.

"It's not the only thing - there are equal problems of under nourishment in some areas - but the most obvious problem is obesity coupled with things like high salt in the diet. And the rate of increase appears to be exponential - rather like it is in the US.

"Although other countries in Europe are catching us up or at least showing a trend growing the same way, we nonetheless remain right at the bottom in terms of poor nutrition and obesity."

She said the country's difficult relationship with food extended to children. "You have got really young girls worried about being overweight - children as young as seven saying they want to put themselves on a diet. It's crazy."

Campaigners estimate that bad diet kills as many as 60,000 Britons each year - not far off the 80,000 deaths from cancer and 15 times the number killed on the roads.

Launching the Government's Health Profile of England yesterday, Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, said: "The rapid increase in child and adult obesity over the past decade is storing up very serious health problems for the future." Although surveys in the past year suggest that Britons are improving their diet, the last official research in 2001 found that most people eat 2.8 of the recommended five daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day.

Only half the household surveyed by the FSA in 2005 were cooking with fresh or raw ingredients every day. About six million people never or almost never cook fresh food.

Joanna Blythman, author of Bad Food Britain, welcomed Dame Deirdre's comments because the agency had previously been "pussyfooting around".

"The only place in the world with worse food than Britain is the US," said Mrs Blythman. "In Europe, we stand out as a strange country where we have never understood food and exist on a diet of junk.

"We eat as much junk food as the rest of Europe put together - half of all of Europe's ready meals. And we are now looking like the fatties of Europe."