Unhealthy food habits are costing the UK around £268bn every year, according to a report.
The Food Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) report calculated both the direct and indirect impact of diet-related ill health to come up with the annual total.
Experts say they did this by combining the cost of healthcare and social care, welfare spending, productivity losses and the human consequences of chronic disease, and identifying what proportion relates to food.
The figure is made up of £116.4bn of lost economic productivity, £67.5bn in healthcare, £14.3bn in social care, £10.1bn in welfare and £60bn that can be linked to the chronic disease attributable to the current food ecosystem.
Professor Tim Jackson, the director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at Surrey University, who carried out the analysis, said: “The connection between diet and health is often discussed, but the economics of that link are staggering.
“When we factor in the health impacts, we discover that the true cost of an unhealthy diet is more than three times what we think we’re paying for our food.
“Some of these hidden costs, like lost economic productivity, can be hard to see.”
The FFCC said ultra-processed foods make up over half of the UK adult diet and almost two thirds of the adolescent diet and the market, having seen a rapid increase in the past two decades.
It says this trend is likely to worsen in the coming year.
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The report calls for the right to healthy food to be enshrined in law, saying there should be regulation of the food environment to prevent harm and money could be redirected towards a healthier, greener, fairer and more resilient new food economy.
FFCC chief executive Sue Pritchard said: “The state of the nation’s health is not simply the result of under-investment in the NHS. It represents the longstanding failure to take seriously the critical relationship between food and farming, health and inequalities.
“As things are, big food companies are profiting from developing, making and marketing unhealthy food, leaving people with too many unhealthy options – while farmers struggle to make ends meet.”
The report comes days after the Food Foundation charity said the products advertised to consumers, restaurant menus and the promotions offered in supermarkets are shaping diets negatively and “setting us up to fail”.
Its annual State of the Nation’s Food Industry report claimed the UK food system is “relentlessly” pushing consumers to make unhealthy choices.
It cited research from 2022 by the University of Liverpool which found just five companies – Haribo, Mars, Mondelez, PepsiCo and Kellogg’s – were responsible for more than 80% of TV ads for snacks and confectionery aired before 9pm.
That will change from 1 October next year, when a ban on junk food adverts being shown on TV before 9pm will come into force, adding to already-established restrictions that prohibit such ads from appearing on children’s channels or around children’s programmes.