UN: Taxes on unhealthy food necessary to fight obesity

Unhealthy diets pose a greater risk to global health than the increasingly regulated sale of tobacco, and governments must move quickly to tax harmful food products, a U.N. investigator said Monday. In a statement issued at the opening of the annual summit of the World Health Organization (WHO), Olivier de Schutter called for efforts to launch negotiations on a global agreement to address the obesity epidemic. "Unhealthy diets are now a greater threat to global health than tobacco. Just as the world came together to regulate the risks of tobacco, a bold framework convention on adequate diets must now be agreed," de Schutter wrote. De Schutter, a Belgian professor, has been the top food official at the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council since 2008.