Healthy living

Healthy living is high on the Government’s agenda. Taking effective action on diet and exercise now will help to tackle heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a whole range of factors critical to our health and wellbeing. The current picture is not a healthy one:

• Obesity is a growing problem for both adults and children.  In 2006 23.7% of men, 24.2% of women and 16% of children aged 2 to 15 were classed as obese (Health Survey for England, 2006).
• Diets are typically high in fat and saturated fats, salt and sugar, and low in fibre and essential vitamins and minerals. A typical adult consumes less than 3 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, nearly 9 grams of salt and over 13% of calories are supplied by saturated fats (National Diet and Nutrition Survey, 2002).
• Inactive lifestyles are known to contribute to ill health. In 2006 40% of men and 28% of women were achieving the recommended levels of physical activity to benefit their health. However 22% of men and 30% of women were classed as inactive, doing less than one occasion of 30 minutes of activity a week (Health Survey for England, 2006).

We believe that Boots has a role to play in helping to address concerns over unhealthy diets and rising levels of obesity. We want to use our expertise to help our customers make positive changes and live healthier lives. This goal is reflected in both the range of products that we offer and the way that we develop them:

• Our healthy eating lunchtime foods, drinks and snacking products are developed in accordance with healthy eating guidelines for fat, saturated fat and salt in particular*.
• Our nutrition labelling is clear and informative*.
• We offer products to support breastfeeding mothers and a range of baby and toddler foods and drinks.
• We offer an extensive range of vitamins and nutritional supplements to complement a healthy diet.
• We have expert solutions to help our customers manage their weight.
• We help our customers make positive changes in their lives to improve their health such as stopping smoking and being more active.

* Boots commitment to healthy living is underpinned by our healthy eating approach that adopts strict nutrition criteria for the entire Shapers and Delicious ranges of lunchtime food, drink and snacking products. We also introduced the Food Standards Agency (FSA) traffic light colour coding in May 2007. This helps our customers put healthy eating into practice. For each product you can instantly see the amount of calories, fat, saturated fat, salt and sugars in a serving, along with the traffic light colour code that indicates whether the levels are high (red), medium (amber) or low (green) in line with FSA guidance.

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