Alder Hey doctor: hungry children are eating emergency medicine as families go without food

A consultant at one of Britain's most revered children's hospitals has issued a stark warning that food insecurity is now changing the fundamental biology of childhood disease, with young patients reduced to eating life-saving glucose because there is nothing else at home.

Ian Sinha, a consultant respiratory paediatrician at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, has told of the harrowing reality facing the children he treats. One teenager with diabetes, he said, was so hungry and so bereft of food at home that he resorted to eating the emergency glucose prescribed to save his life during severe hypoglycaemia. Another young asthma patient stopped eating altogether after becoming terrified of rats in her kitchen, and subsequently developed an eating disorder.

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are the everyday consequences of a national failure that is now playing out on the wards of our hospitals, and Dr Sinha is blunt about what it means. Food insecurity, he argues, is pre-destining the life outcomes of millions of British children from the very beginning.

What is happening to children's health in Britain?

Dr Sinha, who has spent years treating the most vulnerable young patients in the North West, says the impact of poverty on child health is now impossible to ignore. He points to NHS data showing that around 700 children a year are admitted to hospital in England with malnutrition, rickets or scurvy, diseases that most Britons assumed had been consigned to the history books.

The doctor also highlights that dietary inequalities are driving higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental decay among children from poorer backgrounds. Around half the children in Alder Hey's severe asthma clinic are obese, he says, with a greater symptom burden and poorer responses to treatment.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the physical evidence. The height of five-year-olds in the UK has been falling since 2013, and British children are now shorter than those in almost all other comparable countries. Height, Dr Sinha notes, is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness, infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality.

How does food insecurity affect families and children?

The doctor's testimony paints a grim picture of life for families who simply cannot afford to feed their children properly. Some families of children with cystic fibrosis rely on food banks, yet the parcels they receive often contain almost nothing suitable for children, let alone those living with a life-limiting condition. Support for gluten-free food for children with coeliac disease is being withdrawn, despite uncontrolled disease causing stunted growth and increasing the risk of cancer.

Dr Sinha explains that hunger reduces a child's capacity to learn and develop, and that food insecurity in childhood is linked to poorer academic, behavioural and emotional outcomes from infancy. When he sees preterm babies who have spent months in intensive care, he tells families that nutrition is crucial for preventing future heart and lung disease, yet many are limited to buying the cheapest ultra-processed food.

What is the Right to Food Commission demanding?

Dr Sinha's experience has led him to join the Right to Food Commission, established by the Right to Food campaign led by Liverpool West Derby MP Ian Byrne. The commission's official report, launched at this week's Labour Party Conference, provides what it calls a 'roadmap to food security for all by 2035'.

The report represents a direct challenge to the new Prime Minister, who has himself stated openly that our politics and economics have failed people over the past 40 years. Dr Sinha says nowhere is this more evident than in the collective failure to ensure all of our children are fed.

This evidence represents a profound national failure and speaks to a profound economic and political failure.

Dr Sinha urges the Prime Minister to read the commission's report and listen to the sobering reality of food insecurity in this country. He calls for the Government to take an interventionist approach and develop what he describes as a Beveridge style report for the 21st Century, a reference to the great reforming report that laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state.

Nothing less, he insists, will help ensure all our children are able to live healthy lives and have the foundation to realise their potential.

Why does this matter for Britain's future?

For a nation that prides itself on pragmatism and on looking after its own, the idea that children in 21st century Britain are going hungry while being treated in our hospitals is a profound indictment. The Beveridge report of 1942 was born of a determination to slay the five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Today, want is back with a vengeance, and it is our children who are paying the price.

Dr Sinha's warning is not a political point-scoring exercise. It is a clinical observation from the front line of paediatric medicine, and it demands a response that matches the scale of the crisis. The question is whether our political class has the will to deliver it.