Dr. Norah Campbell:

We need to go back and question that partnership model. Over the past 20 years of two decade-long obesity plans, has it worked? What are the indications that this paradigm works? I have done a lot of work on food reformulation and its history. It is an example of policy substitution. There is no such thing as healthy reformulated food. You can reformulate to take out nutrients of concern but you are not making that food healthy. What happens is that there is industry-leading food reformulation and, at the same time, norm-setting - if you have foods that are low in salt, sugar and fat, you should be grateful as a population. We know that reformulated food has a displacing effect. You eat fewer wholefoods when you eat autoprocessed foods. We congratulate ourselves on the targets we may or may not meet on reformulated foods without looking at the history and asking how we ended up in a conversation about making foods nominally or minimally less harmful than they are now. We need to look at things like policy substitution, regulatory chill and where we are disempowered in policy-making. That is everywhere in all of these industries - they have captured policy-making.