Head to Head: new NHS plan versus ANH Blueprint

Rob Verkerk PhD, executive & scientific director

On 3 July 2025, the UK Government published its “Fit for the Future” 10‑Year Health Plan for England.  You could call it the UK’s version of the US government’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) strategy—only, like the governments responsible for each plan—they differ greatly!

The UK’s plan is built around three shifts that are described as “transformational”: hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. Sounds reasonable, and it definitely is a kind of plan, but is it really going to be transformational?

This is how the plan proposes to change the face of healthcare under a decaying, cash-strapped, National Health Service (NHS). It promises more care closer to home via neighbourhood health centres (i.e., it pushes long-term care out of hospitals and into communities with less specialist care), it speeds up access with a “doctor‑in‑your‑pocket” NHS App offering appointment‑booking, self‑referrals and unified health records (i.e., it further erodes the doctor/patient relationship and places greater reliance on AI in health or disease management), and places a new emphasis on preventing diseases early—tackling obesity, boosting vaccines and screenings, and making healthy choices easier (i.e., it conflates early diagnosis that is recognised to be linked to drug over-prescription with true disease prevention that’s really more about health creation).

The plan also attempts to put a big tick in the box of healthcare inequality by diverting billions to underserved communities and publishing waiting‑time breakdowns by demographic, aiming to close persistent gaps in care.

Could There have Been a Better Plan?

This is the question many of us ask ourselves when we see the NHS lurch from crisis to crisis, with plan after plan failing, and public satisfaction with NHS fall to record lows. These are all things we get regular reminders about from The Kings Fund.

Over the last 30 years, while death rates from certain chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease has slowed because of advances in treatments, the overall prevalence of chronic diseases in the UK has continued to rise, driven largely by an aging population and unhealthy diets and lifestyles. For example, the share of adults with multimorbidity (two or more chronic conditions) climbed from about 31% in 2004 to 53% in 2019.  Obesity rates (and waist sizes) have grown significantly—adult obesity in the UK has roughly quadrupled since the 1980s, now affecting around 31% of adults. 

How might we then slow the tide of chronic disease? This is of course the 64 million (or is it now billion?) dollar question.

It’s one we spent many years researching and developing as part of our regen health project, including via consensus among key players in the alternative health space. We published this in our Blueprint for Health System Sustainability back in December 2018.

To help us answer this question, we decided to put it to an AI Large Language Model (LLM), asking it to interpret both plans critically from an ANH perspective. Let’s appreciate that it’s these kinds of language comparisons that LLMs do well – and let’s not confuse the capabilities of an LLM with real, full-blown general intelligence, referred to increasingly as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and others are now researching—but are not yet publicly available.

While we asked Grok, Google Gemini and ChatGPT identical questions, to keep things simple we’re just showing you below the answer from ChatGPT, mildly edited for sense in places. The answers from the other two LLMs were somewhat similar, but lacked the comparison table that ChatGPT provided that we thought was interesting.

Check out ChatGPT’s response below…

ChatGPT comparison of UK “Fit for the Future” plan versus the ANH Blueprint

While the UK Government’s 10-Year Health Plan presents itself as a forward-thinking initiative, its emphasis remains firmly rooted in the traditional biomedical model—a model built to manage disease rather than to foster health. In contrast, ANH International’s Blueprint for Health System Sustainability calls for a paradigm shift—one that places the individual at the centre, focuses upstream, and builds resilience, not just diagnoses.

1. ‘Prevention’ by Another Name: A Pharmaceutical Trojan Horse

The government’s version of prevention is increasingly defined by the early detection of disease markers, which typically justify the early deployment of pharmaceutical interventions. But detecting risk is not the same as preventing disease—especially when the prescribed outcome is a lifelong dependence on medication.

The ANH Blueprint challenges this reductionist logic:

“Pharmaceuticals tend to address symptoms rather than causes… [and] excessive use… contributes to serious adverse reactions and environmental effects”.

True prevention, as ANH outlines, occurs when biological resilience is strengthened through natural, lifestyle-based methods—not when health is pathologized earlier and treated chemically.

2. Food Reformulation: Rearranging the Deckchairs on a Sinking Ship

The Government’s plan asks food manufacturers to “reformulate” ultra-processed products to be “healthier” and encourages the public to reduce caloric intake by 20%. Yet this view is built on the outdated and scientifically shaky “energy balance” model of obesity (that considers body weight to be largely dependent on the ratio of calories ‘in’ versus calories ‘out’).

ANH rightly exposes this approach as flawed:

“Public health recommendations to reduce caloric intake have repeatedly failed… telling people to eat less does not significantly improve net outcomes… especially where satiety and hunger signals are scrambled due to metabolic dysfunction”.

Simply reducing calories without addressing the hormonal, metabolic and psychological drivers of eating behaviour does not work. Reformulated junk food is still junk food.

3. Systemic Blind Spots: Ignoring Underlying Causes of Chronic Disease

The UK Plan remains symptom-focused, allocating vast resources to treating conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes, while leaving the underlying behavioural, nutritional, lifestyle, environmental and commercial drivers almost untouched.

Meanwhile, ANH highlights the true cost:

“The combined costs of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the UK exceed £50 billion annually… yet these are preventable diseases stemming from metabolic dysfunction”.

By contrast, the ANH blueprint proposes targeted, multi-factorial interventions—dietary change, movement, stress resilience, sleep quality as well as tackling issues like social isolation and addiction—delivered through community, not just clinic.

4. Empowerment vs Dependency

The Government plan entrenches a centralised, top-down system where the public is a passive recipient of screening, treatment, and advice. It presumes the citizen cannot be trusted to manage their health without clinical oversight.

ANH flips that script:

“The emphasis must be on upstream, preventative approaches… that build ‘personally acquired potential’ for health”.

This model sees the citizen not as a patient, but as an active co-creator of health—with support from multi-disciplinary teams and access to tools, education, and community-based resources.

Conclusion: Systems Thinking or Sticking Plasters?

Where the UK Government continues to rebrand early-stage disease detection as prevention, ANH International insists that sustainable healthcare must begin long before disease markers appear.

Where Government campaigns focus on calorie cuts and product reformulation, ANH points to the need for deep lifestyle and environmental transformation—starting with education, autonomy, and upstream thinking.

We don’t need a more efficient disease management machine. We need a living, adaptive system that creates health. Until the Government adopts such a view, sustainability and health regeneration will remain out of reach.

Visual Summary: Disease Management vs Health Creation

🔍 The Critical Distinction

“Prevention in the NHS model means ‘find disease earlier.’ Prevention in the ANH model means ‘create so much health that disease has no foothold.’”

🧭 Bottom Line

UK Plan: Incremental change, centred on managing sickness.
ANH Blueprint: Systemic shift, centred on cultivating health.

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Epilogue

Doesn’t that conclusion from ChatGPT say it all? It may be safer for us to not expect any big solutions to come from big government. That’s been the pattern from multiple governments over recent decades – so why should we expect anything different, especially from Starmer’s government in the UK?

We, individually, and within our own communities (local and non-local), hold the keys to our health, and for that we need our freedom, the ability to exercise choice, and the free flow of health information. These are three central pillars of our work at ANH and we work hard to defend and protect their rights – whether we’re in the UK, USA, the EU – or anywhere else!

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