Their pitch is particularly seductive during a cost-of-living crisis given they claim to offer families good value.
For example, a family of four could dine out at KFC for $27.95 with four pieces of chicken, four tenders, 10 nuggets, one large chips, one large potato and gravy, and sauces. Gary Wittert, professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide and senior consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, says that sort of meal “has no nutrition and actually not only is it not healthy, but it’s decidedly risky”.
“I can get them a healthier meal for less,” Wittert says. “You can get a packet of chicken for a family of four for maybe $8 or $10, plus let’s just say you got frozen peas at Aldi for $2 and some broccoli which is $3.95 a kilo and one other vegetable and I reckon I’m up to $15.”
Food industry’s influence
Wittert, who once worked on a project to help McDonald’s Australia improve the nutritional value of its food, says efforts to improve public health through diet are being frustrated by vested interests and a lack of political will.
“The food industry is focused around hedonism, the taste and the texture of food because, of course, they want you to come back and buy some more of it,” he says. “And they have advertising budgets which are much bigger than the GDP of many African countries.
“While health promotion agencies might be trying to tell the population one thing, the food industry is trying to influence a population to do something else.”
The University of Adelaide’s work with McDonald’s Australia led to changes in the nutritional quality of its food, but a change of leadership in the US prompted the changes to be unwound.
The profound lesson for Wittert from that experience was that the big players in the fast-food industry talk about entirely different things when it comes to the “quality” of food in quick-service restaurants.
“The [McDonald’s Australia] CEO came to speak to us, and said: ‘You know, I get all these complaints about bad food. What do you mean bad food? We’ve got the best food in the world.’
“And we’re like: ‘No, you’ve got bad food.’ This was going backwards and forwards as he got more and more annoyed and red in the face.
“But it just turned out that we were talking about completely different things. He was talking about food safety, and the quality of the product and the safety in a safety sense. We were talking about nutritional quality.”
This point is brought home in the prospectus for the blockbusting float of Mexican food chain Guzman y Gomez. The document lists five key regulations and standards relevant to its operations, but there is no mention of rules or regulations around nutrition.
University of Adelaide professor of medicine Gary Wittert says vested interests are frustrating efforts to improve public health through diet.
Under the heading “Food Service”, the document refers to the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Act, which is the primary piece of legislation governing food production and safety standards in Australia. It includes labelling and other information requirements as well as food production and safety standards.
Guzman y Gomez says in its prospectus that its food “is 100 per cent clean, meaning that it contains no added preservatives, no added colours, no artificial flavours, and no unacceptable additives”. But is it good for you?
Moloney believes we should follow the United Kingdom and have clearer labelling of the number of calories in fast-food products, as well as launching a government-funded campaign warning against the dangers of excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.
“The ravages of sugar and processed foods and seed oils have real costs to society – Australia has led the world in cigarettes but ignored these other perils,” he says.
Australians are actually living longer than ever, but they are not living healthier lives.
Since 1990, the average lifespan of an Australian has risen by five years, but at least one year of that gain in life expectancy will be lived with disease or disability, according to research by the Grattan Institute as part of a critique of the federal government’s Australian Centre for Disease Control.
The report, published in February 2023, found that as Australia’s population grows bigger and older, the total number of years being lived in disability has been rapidly climbing: from 500,000 in 2000 to 700,000 in 2019. On average, Australians are now spending an eighth of their life in ill-health.
Wittert laments the fact that there is a lack of coherence in the messages from healthcare professionals while the food industry lobbyists increase their influence in Canberra.
“There’s nothing like a rabble to confuse policymakers who then say we are not going to listen to them – that’s problem one,” he says.
“Problem two is the vested interests, both in people giving advice as well as people receiving advice, as well as lobby groups and so on. The consequence is there’s just a lack of political will because it’s not worth the effort.”
Best strategy to teach children
He says the best strategy for counteracting the impact food companies are having on the rise in chronic disease is to teach children how to critically listen and not to take things at face value.
“Also, we should train them about healthy lifestyle behaviours, health literacy and health competency,” Wittert says. “So that when people come out of school, over the course of five years, whatever it happens to be, they have sufficient agency to manage themselves in the healthcare system, and to navigate that system, and that should have benefits for chronic disease prevention.”
The chronic disease crisis in Australia is escalating and is now costing about $70 billion a year in healthcare treatment. The Grattan Institute says the total cost to the economy each year is $100 billion.
Two in three Australians are overweight or obese and three in 10 adults are not performing recommended levels of physical activity, according to a report published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2022.
The same report noted that one in 20 Australians, or about 1.3 million, were living with diabetes (type 1, type 2 and other diabetes) in 2020.
Chronic disease can be attacked through campaigns and incentives for Australians to modify their behaviour.
“About 38 per cent of the burden of chronic diseases is caused by these modifiable risk factors, such as smoking, obesity and overweight, poor nutrition, or social isolation,” the Grattan Institute report said.
Internal Consulting Group’s Moloney says the chronic health crisis in Australia requires the sort of political leadership shown 30 years ago when the Hawke-Keating government introduced superannuation.
“What we’ve focused on in Australia has been wealth span, which is what Paul Keating did with superannuation, but wealth span needs to be balanced with lifespan and health span,” he says.
Dr Fiona Willer, vice president of Dietitians Australia, says one of the barriers to people finding sound advice about diet in Australia is the lack of distinction between those who are qualified nutritionists and dietitians and those who are not.
‘Heap of overreach’ on nutrition
“We have all sorts of non-nutrition professionals providing nutrition advice, from GPs moonlighting as dietitians to personal trainers moonlighting as nutritionists – there’s a whole heap of overreach,” she says.
“It’s not that their advice is not helpful for people, but often it is irrelevant and sometimes it’s very harmful. For general advice, we have the Australian dietary guidelines that are good, solid, basic advice for someone who really doesn’t know what’s right, and what’s unhelpful.
“Then, for everyone else who wants to get a bit more deeply into it, having individualised advice from a dietitian will be the best option.”
Willer agrees with Wittert about the need for Australians to be far more sceptical about what they are being told about their diet.
“People should be checking who the messenger is, what their background is – and if it doesn’t sound like a broad variety of foods, lots of fruit and veg, then they’re trying to sell you something other than good nutrition,” she says.
Willer, however, is opposed to forcing fast-food companies to list the number of calories in each serving.
“When we reduce something as complex as food just down to the energy it’s got in it, that absolutely washes away all the good things about food,” she says. “It will make people fall down the rabbit hole of eating disorders much more readily.”
One worrying aspect of Moloney’s quest to find his ideal diet was the lack of help from his local doctor. “When I questioned him, he had little background and understanding of nutrition from his medical training and had never questioned my diet and wellness regime,” he says.
Professor Elena George, senior research fellow at Deakin University’s Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition and School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, says GPs don’t have a lot of knowledge when it comes to nutrition because they don’t have a lot of training.
“When you distil it down, whole food is healthy, so avoid processed foods and eat a range of vegetables,” George says.
It so happens this simple and straightforward advice formed the core of Moloney’s diet, which he says should help him live for a very long time.
“I’m planning to live to as close to 100 as possible because I want to spend a lot of time with my grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” he says.