A leading health and wellness coach, with a string of A-List celebrity clients, is calling on the government to go further in its reforms to save the NHS and improve the nation’s health.
Steve Bennett, a health entrepreneur and diet specialist, believes nutrition should be a prime focus to steer future generations away from obesity and associated conditions and a growing reliance on weight loss drugs. Steve, who on more than one occasion has created £100 million companies and has twice been awarded the accolade of leading the Sunday Times Fastest Growing Companies (so knows a thing or two about getting thing done quickly at scale), is offering his help for free.
He says:
We all know that the NHS is in dire trouble. It is straining every day to cope with huge, rising demands and its staff are and will always be under-resourced. It is only because of their efforts and goodwill that it keeps going.
That has to change. And radically. Reforming the NHS is the most pressing challenge society faces but it is right to call upon society to change as well. We cannot keep making ourselves ill, with bad habits and poor knowledge about the impact of our dietary and lifestyle choices.
The government is right to call for a preventative approach because, for the past 50 years, we have been spending trillions on a pharmaceutical model, attempting at best to help patients slow the decline of their illness – such as diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease, rather than helping to prevent them.
But they miss the point if they just fund a different set of drugs that mask symptoms, or at best slow the rate of decline. The issue they are avoiding is how people get ill in the first place and a lot of that is down to a lack of health education and poor knowledge about nutrition.
At the root of many conditions and the sad statistics are that 80% of hospital beds are filled with patients due to a disease which began from a lack of nutritional understanding. The picture gets bleaker with the knowledge that the five-year medical degree, which all GPs and hospital doctors have to complete, reportedly contains less than 12 hours learning on nutrition.
Let that sink in.
We have an NHS service that we treasure and one that was once the envy of the world yet we abuse it by failing to train our medics to recognise, understand and treat the prime cause of the strain that will eventually destroy it.
Obesity, almost exclusively driven by poor lifestyle choices and options, costs the nation around £27 billion a year. The government rightly talks about prevention but one of the hottest trends around is the GLP-1 weight loss drugs that are being hailed as a wonder cure; they aren’t and they only further enshrine society’s use of drugs rather than adopting healthier, drug-free lifestyles.
This is the time for big changes and I hope the government is brave enough to make the type of radical changes that actually brought the NHS into existence 76 years ago. If they don’t, the NHS as we know and love it is doomed.
Reform is not about replacing one set of drugs with another. It must drill down deeply into the UK’s attitude to food and drink and health, and take some tough decisions. Do we want our children exposed to junk food messaging; do you we want them to see fast food as a daily experience; do we want them to consume drinks laden with sugar and do we want them to stay ignorant about nutrition and have limited health as they grow into adulthood?
The obvious answer is No. But it takes more and that is what Health Secretary Wes Streeting has to accept. He needs to revolutionise education and awareness across health, diet and lifestyle. The watershed on junk food adverts is a signal we are heading in the right direction but there is still a very long way to go.
Let’s be honest about the NHS has become – a National Hospital Service. We have to change that while we still have time. We have to look at the way doctors are trained and how nutrition and health knowledge is promoted to the public.
We have to examine our addiction to prescribing. We have made small strides with doctors directing patients to health and wellness regimes rather than medication but the only way to truly save the nation’s health and NHS is to move our whole model away from drugs.
We have a duty to educate and inform people and equip them to make informed choices. We cannot force them but we can empower them by boosting knowledge and restricting the influence of junk and processed food and drink.
In reality, we should not be in the position of dishing out medicine for something that is a lifestyle problem. The NHS was not designed for that and if we want to preserve the NHS, then we have to change rapidly and radically.
- Steve Bennett is a qualified health coach and the author of the book Fibre First, an investigation into the human body, food production, diet culture and science. It advocates fibre as a shield to ultra-processed foods and includes an in-depth analysis into the impact lifestyle plays on a multitude of conditions and health concerns. His Tree of Afflictions diagram, which depicts the catalyst to the vast majority of chronic diseases, is now being adopted by many doctors, medical professionals and even life insurance companies.
- Fiona Bristow