'Give supermarkets that sell a lot of healthy food a reward and supermarkets that sell a lot of unhealthy food a fine,' advises the Raad voor de Volksgezondheid in a new opinion. APH researcher Joreintje Mackenbach, epidemiologist at Amsterdam UMC, thinks companies should be forced with rules to limit the health damage they cause. “There is far too much focus on individual responsibility.”
Health problems stem from our economic system, Mackenbach says in De Telegraaf. “The system has brought us a lot. The living environment is a lot better now than it was a hundred years ago. Healthcare has improved tremendously, prosperity has grown. More people have enough to eat, food has become more affordable because it is produced on a much larger scale. But the system has fallen through. It mainly pays to produce long-lasting food with tasty sweet and salty flavors, so we are now stuck in a system with overproduction and overconsumption of unhealthy food and that leads to disease.”
“We are trying to teach people how to guard against an unhealthy environment, instead of doing something about that unhealthy environment,” Mackenbach says with indignation in her voice. In the supermarket, 80 percent of the offerings are unhealthy, she knows. “Then as a consumer you have almost no choice to choose healthy food.”
Mackenbach's plea is now getting support from the Raad voor Volksgezondheid, which issued an advisory on Monday, making an urgent appeal to the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport: give supermarket groups a financial incentive to sell more healthy food. When supermarkets give healthy products a prominent place on their shelves, they encourage consumers to choose healthier products and manufacturers to market healthier products, is the thought of the council.
This article is translated and shortened from De Telegraaf.
Read the original article from De Telegraaf via Nexis Newdesk (in Dutch).