Food and Weight Management

Status / emerging findings

• Only 50% of England has access to specialist weight management services; NHS tier 2 programmes achieve mean 2kg weight loss; 55,000 people access the evidence-backed Path to Remission programme despite 613,000 being eligible.
• Private sector delivers ~80% of GLP-1 treatments (1.6m patients), with only 20% meeting NICE eligibility criteria, revealing postcode lottery access and inequitable provision across NHS trusts.
• Food industry investment in healthier innovation is negligible: £180m against £148bn turnover (0.12%); supermarkets use incompatible metrics to measure 'healthy sales', preventing cross-sector accountability.
• Path to Remission achieves superior outcomes to GLP-1 (10.3kg sustained loss, 50% remission at 12 months vs GLP-1's complete weight regain within 18 months), but scaling is blocked by GP awareness and stigma.
• Unhealthy calories cost half the price of healthy calories; low-income families spend 10% of food budgets on transport to access fresh food; food insecurity affects 14% of households.

Why it matters

The UK spends billions on weight management drugs while evidence-superior interventions go unfunded, food industry avoids accountability, and NHS services leave millions waiting—this inquiry determines whether policy will shift to prevention and equity or entrench private-market fragmentation.

Tone arc

Opened collaborative on lived experience (Oct 2025), became adversarial during industry testimony (Dec 2025 FDF session revealed minimal investment and regulatory capture concerns), then shifted to technical scrutiny of supermarket metrics (Jan 2026), and has settled into forensic examination of service gaps and inequitable private-sector dominance (Feb-May 2026).

Key witnesses

Professor Roy Taylor (University of Newcastle, Path to Remission developer), Colette Marshall (Diabetes UK chief executive), Professor Susan Jebb (University of Oxford, obesity epidemiologist), Professor Chris van Tulleken (UCL, ultra-processed food expert), Dr Kieran Seyan (Pharmacy2U), Claire Nevinson (Boots), Anna Taylor (Food Foundation), Evette (lived experience witness, low-income parent with type 2 diabetes)