Fatty and sugary food should be sold in plain paper wrappers to stop people overeating, a leading scientist said. Cigarettes can only be sold in plain packaging without branding, under laws that come into full effect this year.
But with obesity a rising health problem, foods such as chocolate and crisps should be given same treatment, it has been suggested.
Professor Wolfram Schultz, professor of Neuroscience at Cambridge University, called for the ban as he accepted the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for brain research with two colleagues.
The £860,000 Brain Prize was awarded for studying the brain’s reward system – which makes us feel good when we eat, drink or gamble, with two colleagues.
Asked his views on how to reduce obesity, he told a news conference, “We should not advertise, propagate or encourage the unnecessary ingestion of calories. There should be some way of regulating the desire to get more calories. We don’t need these calories.”
He added, “Colourful wrapping of high energy foods of course makes you buy more of that stuff and once you have it in your fridge, it’s in front of you every time you open the fridge and ultimately you’re going to eat it and eat too much.” He said that it was important to cut the levels of temptation down in our environment “as we cannot do anything against the brain’s signal that makes us happy when we eat more”.
Professor Schultz, won the prize alongside Professor Peter Dayan of University College London and Ray Dolan, director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing. He began studying the factors that give us a feeling of reward 30 years ago at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
His research found that a hormone called dopamine is at the centre of making us feel good.
He said, “This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work,” he said.
“Every time we get the reward, our dopamine neurons affect our behaviour. They are like little devils in our brain that drive us towards more rewards.”
Research by the scientists has led to a better understanding of diseases such as Parkinson’s. Sufferers of the disease receive drugs to boost their dopamine levels.
Sometimes as a side effect, they can become addicted to gambling or shopping.
The scientists will be presented with the prize on May 4 in Copenhagen by Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. Dayan and Dolan said they have yet to decide what to do with their share of the prize money, but Schultz said he planned to take holidays that had previously been beyond his means.
The call to sell high energy food in plain packets was greeted by some public health campaigners – while critics said it was an example of ‘nanny statism’.
Duncan Stephenson, Director of External Affairs, at the Royal Society for Public Health said yesterday: ‘It is plain for all to see that we live in an environment where unhealthy choices and unhealthy foods are pushed far more aggressively at consumers than healthier alternatives, be it through junk food marketing on TV, buy one get one free offers or flashy packaging.
“Any initiatives that can help redress this balance and make the healthy choice the easy choice are worth exploring. While introducing plain packaging for foods high in fat, salt or sugar may be more complex than for tobacco, we certainly believe this is worth piloting to better understand what impact it has on consumer perceptions of these foods and ultimately on people’s buying behaviour.”
Dr Giles Yeo, Principal Research Associate at Cambridge University’s department of Clinical Biochemistry said, “I do agree with Wolfram that we have to fix the environment to fix the obesity problem, and in this regard, plain packaging may have its role to play. However, as with any intervention of this nature, it will probably only work for some people. It won’t for others because it is not going to stop them feeling hungry, so they will continue to eat. The 64 million dollar challenge is for us to try and identify people who will respond well to one treatment/intervention over another, which we still can’t do.”
However, Christopher Snowdon, head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs said, “This is the slippery slope in action. It was inevitable that there would be demands for food and alcohol to be put in plain packaging once the government capitulated to the nanny statists on tobacco. Sensible people warned that this would happen. We were ignored, but we are being proved right.”