The report, commissioned by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC), provides the first comprehensive estimate of the food-related cost of chronic disease caused by the current food system.

The food-related cost of chronic disease in the UK was calculated by combining healthcare (£67.5bn), social care (£14.3bn), welfare (£10.1bn), productivity (£116.4bn) and human cost (£60bn) of chronic disease attributable to the current food ecosystem.

The report makes the case for a new economy of food, anchored in three key principles:

• the right of every citizen – irrespective of class, income, gender, geography, race or age – to sufficient, affordable, healthy food;
• a regulatory environment which curtails the power of Big Food, promotes dietary health and halts the rise of chronic disease;
• financial architecture that redirects money away from perverse subsidies and post-hoc damage limitation, towards preventive healthcare and the production of sustainable, nutritious food.

Prof Tim Jackson, the director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at Surrey University, who carried out the analysis, said: 'The connection between diet and health is often discussed, but the economics of that link are staggering.

'When we factor in the health impacts, we discover that the true cost of an unhealthy diet is more than three times what we think we're paying for our food. Some of these hidden costs, like lost economic productivity, can be hard to see.'

FFCC chief executive, Sue Pritchard, added: 'The state of the nation's health is not simply the result of under-investment in the NHS. It represents the longstanding failure to take seriously the critical relationship between food and farming, health and inequalities.'