Overweight, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption among Dutch adults have hardly decreased in the past three years. This is evident from figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). The National Prevention Agreement, which was presented in 2018 by the Ministry of Health and aimed at encouraging the Dutch to adopt a healthier lifestyle, has not yet led to a decrease in the figures.
There are also still large differences in wealth and education levels when it comes to smoking, excessive drinking and overweight. For example, among the low-educated Dutch, about 60 percent is overweight, compared to 41 percent among the highly educated. In the category of excessive drinking, the highly educated are overrepresented: 9 percent of them are ‘heavy drinkers’, compared to 6 percent among the less educated. About one in three low-income people smoke, compared to one in seven high-income people.
National Prevention Agreement
After more than six months of negotiations with more than 70 organisations, including umbrella organizations in the business community and sports associations, the then State Secretary for Health Paul Blokhuis (CU) presented the National Prevention Agreement in 2018. The aim of this was to keep Dutch people healthy for longer by allowing them to adopt a better lifestyle.
The 35,000 deaths and 9 billion euros in health care expenditure that the Netherlands had annually in 2018 due to smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and overweight had to be reduced. To this end, agreements were made with supermarkets and the catering industry, among others, to limit children’s marketing for unhealthy products, to reduce the amount of sugar products such as soft drinks and dairy products and to encourage cycling to school and work.
When the agreement was presented, there was immediate criticism that the plans contained many soft, steering measures, but few hard rules and prohibitions. The RIVM, among others, which calculated the plans, stated that the approach to alcohol consumption and overweight was not sufficient to achieve the self-set goals. Only the ambitions to reduce smoking were ‘possibly achievable’.
According to professors of health law Brigit Toebes (University of Groningen) and Jos Dute (Radboud University), this was because only the tobacco industry was not involved in the negotiations. The food and alcohol industry was allowed to have a say: there was no sugar tax for that reason, Toebes and Dute argued at the time. NRC†