Policy

Activity Equivalent Calorie Labelling

With two-thirds of the UK population now being overweight or obese, there is a desperate need for new and innovative initiatives to tackle the issue. In January 2016, we published our policy paper exploring the introduction of activity equivalent calorie information for food and drink labels. The aims of this policy initiative are to encourage people to be more mindful of the calories they consume, how these calories relate to their everyday lives, and ultimately to encourage the public to be more physically active.

At present, there is little evidence that current front of pack information, such as traffic light labels, is actually having a positive impact on people’s behaviour. Emerging evidence suggests that activity equivalent labelling may offer a novel solution to influencing positive behaviour change at population level.

The January release received widespread media attention in the United Kingdom and prompted responses from nutritionists, policy makers and the food and drink industries. This was followed by an opinion piece from RSPH Chief Executive, Shirley Cramer, in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in April. Given the BMJ’s worldwide reputation, the piece attracted global attention. The campaign was the fourth top story on NBC Nightly News – one of America’s largest national news shows – and it also sparked debate from Australia to Canada and almost everywhere in between. Interviews with RSPH spokespeople including Shirley Cramer, Dr Raheelah Ahmad, Dr Nigel Carter, Duncan Stephenson and Ed Morrow were featured on numerous UK media channels, including BBC Radio 4, ITV News, Channel 5 News and BBC News, to name but a few. In addition, the global reach of the activity equivalent labelling campaign has been our most extensive to date.

Waking up to The Health Benefits of Sleep

At the beginning of April, we published a joint report from RSPH and the University of Oxford. The report explored sleep as a public health issue and offered a comprehensive analysis of the processes and functions of sleep, why it is so important for health and wellbeing to get enough good quality sleep, and what government, society and individuals can do to improve health through sleep.

The report highlighted that many Britons may be under-sleeping by almost an hour every night, which, when accumulated, accounts for an entire night’s worth of sleep lost every single week.

To combat the United Kingdom’s poor sleeping problems, we called for greater accessibility and utilisation of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in treating the 10%–15% of the UK population who live with chronic insomnia. We also called on the UK Government to produce a national sleep strategy and for a minister to be responsible for promoting sleep, giving it parity with other important public health issues such as physical activity and sexual health.

The report was hugely well received in the media, public health community and general public. The report was a topic story on release day and featured on Sky News, BBC 2’s Newsnight (which rebadged itself as ‘Snoozenight’) BBC 1’s Victoria Derbyshire Show, the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, ITV Good Morning Britain and BBC Breakfast, amongst others. We are excited to take the recommendations in this report forward and hope to be meeting with stakeholders and policy makers in the near future to discuss the importance of the public’s sleep.

The Role of Pharmacy in Supporting the Public’s Health

July sees the launch of a pharmacy report, published jointly by RSPH and Public Health England, looking at how community pharmacies are promoting the public’s health and areas in which they can be further utilised to achieve this goal.

Looking Forward

As we look forward to the rest of 2016, we have some exciting projects that we will be working on with new and existing partners. This includes a partnership with the Health Foundation to ‘reframe the debate’ around health and healthcare to move towards prioritising the promotion of wellbeing rather than the treatment of sickness. As part of our efforts to promote and support the wider public health workforce, we are working with the Professional Standards Authority to better understand the role of the Accredited Registered workforce in championing the public’s health. In its second year now, our partnership with ITN productions aims to draw attention to new and innovative projects across the United Kingdom aimed at improving and protecting the public’s health.

Following the successful publication of two policy papers in 2014–2015, RSPH is now taking forward some of these recommendations in national campaigns. Our campaign to support the introduction of calorie information for alcohol builds on our initial policy paper first published in October 2014. Towards the end of the year, we will publish research which identifies the most effective way to convey alcohol calorie information to consumers and which will have the most positive impact to moderate people’s drinking.

We will also be building on current work around extending smoking exclusion zones in our efforts to denormalise a habit that kills half of the people who take it up. We will be publishing some exciting new research over the summer.

New campaigns exploring issues including food safety, commuter health and childhood obesity will advance RSPH’s already wide-ranging array of policy areas.

As always, we are keen to hear from and work with our members on our campaigns. If you feel you have specialist knowledge in any of our planned areas of work or have ideas you think would make for a good public health campaign, then please do get in touch at mkeracher@rsph.org.uk.