Canadian health influencer Will Tennyson spent 24 hours in a town brutally dubbed the “UK’s fattest” due to its astonishing number of fast food shops
A Canadian health influencer was left stunned when he visited a Greggs for the first time, in a town dubbed the “fattest” in the UK.
Ebbw Vale in Wales, garnered the unflattering title back in 2023 after it was found 73% of restaurants were fast food outlets – with many delivering to the same addresses three times a day.
Will Tennyson spent 24 hours in the area to find what it was really like. But before speaking to residents about crippling economic struggles, he started like many hungry Brits do, with a trip to the local Greggs. And what he uncovered in the beloved bakery chain stunned him.
The YouTube star, who has almost four million subscribers, asked the chatty woman behind the till what Greggs was most known for. Unsurprisingly the response was the iconic sausage roll. Minutes later, after getting his coffee, sausage roll, salted caramel donut and lemon meringue muffin, Will sat at a nearby table.
The Toronto-born lad said: “They are the king of sausage rolls. That entire display is almost completely empty which is insane, it is only 9.30 in the morning. And it is only £1.30… insane.”
But after taking his first bite, he soon realised why the delicious pastries were flying off the shelf. “That is an exquisite sausage roll,” he told the camera. “I’m going to be smiling a lot today. This would be the breakfast of my dreams when I was eight-years-old.
“Now I strive to have a breakfast where I can see the nutritional value but this is awesome. Like you really can’t go wrong with this, just pastry, meat, you can just see a shining of grease and butter and fat.”
However, he did warn that the delicious sausage roll have 24 grams of fats and just nine grams of protein. He continued: “Wow, that is good texture on this thing. A lot of people get this for breakfast here, it is a lot of calories, no protein, it is all fat, all carbs, so it is going to be a lot of calories but it is not going to keep you that full.”
He added: “Everything at Greggs is so reasonably priced it is easy to end up leaving with so many things you didn’t expect to get, like this pack of four sausage rolls which I’m heavily considering.”
Later in his video, he said the cost-of-living crisis and a lack of employment opportunities was impacting the health choices of locals.
To make the point, he explained how a packet containing six eggs in the only green grocer in town cost £3.50 – compared to a breakfast roll and coffee in Greggs costing just £2.95.
Will said it was “hard to argue with the convenience” and that he may have struggled to have lost the weight he did in his younger years had he been based in Ebbw Vale.
He said the vast number of incredibly cheap fast food options available was “super scary” to think about and he claimed locals, who spoke to him about their struggles, were “literally set up for failure” because of the lack of affordable healthy meals.
The content creator added: “24 hours in the UK’s most obese town was eye-opening. People here are kind of trapped.
“They have limited choices to be healthy and breaking the norm is extremely difficult and when financial troubles are in the mix, it isn’t about health, it is purely about survival and putting food on the table.”
You can watch Will’s visit to Ebbw Vale in full here