Dr. Peter Scarborough, a senior researcher at Oxford University’s department of public health, claims that English people eat more healthily than their Scottish, Irish and Welsh neighbours. Scarborough said that national surveys show that people south of the border tend to eat better and that the mortality rates in other parts of the UK, especially in Scotland, are considerably higher than in England. Scarborough’s research has found that over half the difference (53%) is due to diet, “This study has shown that diet alone explains a substantial part of the inequalities in cardiovascular and cancer rates in the four countries of the UK.”
He estimated that if the death rates from heart disease, stroke and cancer were as low in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales as they are in England, 7,000 fewer people would die a year.
Dr.Scarborough believes that the unhealthy diet in Scotland mainly has to do with wealth, saying, “The difference in dietary quality between Scotland and England can largely be put down to the fact that England is a more affluent country. Similar differences in dietary quality can be seen within regions of England – for example the North East and South East.’ Louis Ruddy, a first year St Anne’s student from Glasgow, thinks that unhealthy eating is embedded in the lifestyle of many Scots, “Our generation has not been set an example of eating healthily. All they’ve ever known is to eat fast food, no one is used to cooking healthily. It all has to do with the eating patterns which have been passed on to the children by their parents, making it a continuous cycle.”
The study found that while the English eat just under 2,300 calories a day, elsewhere in the UK the intake is about 100 calories higher.
Scarborough emphasised that the recent findings were not in any way meant to be inflammatory, “’We certainly did not consider the results to be provocative. Our objective was to assess whether diet was an important contributor to health inequalities, so that policy makers could direct their initiatives towards reducing these.”
