Cake in the office ‘as bad as passive smoking’

Taking cake to work to share with colleagues causes as much harm to health as passive smoking, the chair of the Food Standards Agency has warned.

Professor Susan Jebb told The Times that people often “undervalue” the impact that their environment has on their choices. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them,” she said.

Jebb said that the issues of unhealthy eating and passive smoking were not identical, but added that the latter inflicts harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.

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The comparison has drawn criticisms, however. Dr Helen Wall, a GP in Bolton, told the BBC that “if somebody's smoking next to you, you can't help but inhale that”. But “if someone's got a cake next to you”, Wall continued, “you don't have to eat it”.

Watchdog boss Jebb also accused the government of damaging public health, by delaying a planned 9pm watershed ban on TV and online junk food advertising. Advertising junk food is “undermining people’s free will”, she told The Times. Allowing advertising “with no health controls” had resulted in a “complete market failure”, she argued, “because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower”.

Rishi Sunak faced a “furious backlash from health experts” in December after announcing that the implementation of the ban was being pushed back from 2023 to 2025, The Guardian reported.

Chris Askew, chief executive of the charity Diabetes UK, told the paper that the “disgraceful” delay would “disproportionately impact the lowest income households, who have less access to healthy food and are targeted by a greater amount of advertising of unhealthy food”.

A ban on multibuy promotions on foods and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar was also delayed last May by Boris Johnson. Barbara Crowther of the Children’s Food Campaign accused the then prime minister of “playing politics with children’s health”.