The Men Who Made Us Fat (That Aren't Us)...

Its been a while since my first post. Mainly because I still find blogging self-indulgent and don't really believe that anyone gives a shit about what I say. BUT I did feel compelled to add my two-cents on a good, but misleading BBC documentary I watched on Iplayer this evening. If you watched it too I'd be keen to hear what you think.

Now don’t get me wrong the food industry has a lot to answer for, especially in relation to misleading advertising re: health food. This BBC documentary, whilst highlighting many of these issues, is guilty of the very nutritional naivety that these companies have profited from. Misleading claims about what is healthy and unhealthy and confusion about some basic points of nutrition somewhat weakens the BBC’s position on these issues.

Lets start with the Negatives:

Dorset Cereals, complete with its
"misleading" label
consisting of nothing but
the actual ingredients
in the package. Bastards!

In the first five minutes we are told how organic cereal, Prêt salads and yoghurt snacks are “more fattening” than Weetabix, a Big Mac and a Krispy Kreme donut respectively. Consumer “expert” Giles Quick is rolled out to give his opinion on a range of so-called “health” products. Why someone from a consumer intelligence agency is being touted as some sort of nutritional expert is beyond me, but we are inflicted to is ill-informed wisdom as if it were gospel.  

First under investigation is a honey granola cereal (hardly the healthiest cereal anyway) which had the audacity to list the actual ingredients on the front cover (“all of these ingredients sound pretty healthy, don’t they?” he notes smugly. Yes, Giles, because they are!) He then tries to claim that its high presence of saturated fat made it a “fattening” product! What kind of pseudo-science babble is that?! A product is only “fattening” if you eat too much of it, the presence of fat does NOT make it fattening. It is plainly obvious that the fat comes from all the nuts and seeds in the cereal, the same nuts and seeds that are low GI, high in Omega 3’s and almost all the essential fatty acids most people are so lacking in!

Yes, if you ate bowl after bowl of it you will get fat but you would get fat if you ate 5000 calories worth of carrots a day. Fat does not equal fattening! 

Is the BBC really trying to claim a Big Mac
is "healthier" than a Pret Salad?
It might have fewer calories
but not all calories are created equal

We are then shown that a prêt salad has more calories than a Big Mac. This may be true but to suggest that the Big Mac (the same Big Mac that NEVER DECAYS due to all the artificial preservatives) is healthier than a Rocket and Lentil salad is plain madness! Yes it has more calories but that only becomes a problem if you eat too many calories over the course of an entire day; not a single 500-calorie meal! A rocket salad is packed with nutrients whilst a Big Mac is a nutritionally void frankenfood! Plus who eats a Big Mac on its own? They come with fries and a sugary drink which ramps the calories way past that of the Pret Salad!

The summary of all this pseudo-science waffle is that just because something has fat or calories it is unhealthy. WRONG! All calories are NOT created equal, the calories in a prêt salad are better for you than the calories in a Big Mac. You will only get fat if you eat too many of them!

 ...And now the Positives 

The program did go on to make a lot of good points and rightly held the “health” food industry to account on a variety of matters, including the ludicrous claim by companies like P&G that market their juices as “fruit juice” despite containing as little as 5% juice 

Another interesting segment was with Harvard Business professor Pierre Chandon (again not a nutritional expert). He told us of his study comparing consumer perception of a foot-long Subway sandwich with that oft-cited nemesis the Big Mac, the former marketed as healthy and the latter with a reputation as fast-track heart attack. 

Now my first reaction to this was, “who in their right mind would think a foot-long Subway was a healthy food?” but that is beside the point. The point of the study was that people did think a Footlong subway contained fewer calories than a Big Mac and that was due to misleading marketing. People are so fixated on the idea that “low-fat” means “unfattening” or “healthy” that anything marketed thus is seen as healthy. People think in dichotomies of Healthy or Un-healthy. Food companies have realised this and realised that just one “health” claim is enough to trick consumers into thinking food is healthy. This is a serious issue and the BBC does a good job of highlighting this.

Throughout the show, I kept wanting to answer the question of "who made us fat?" with "us and our own stupidity"; anyone who eats a footlong subway thinking they are on the fast-track to skinny town needs their head examined! This was only confounded by the BBC making so many basic nutritional errors with regards to "fat content" and "fattening". This assumption would be misplaced, however. Food marketing is so incessant and pervasive that those who don't have the time to look up the difference between mono and polyunsaturated fats or LDL and HDL cholesterol will believe the crap these companies lie about and they need to be held to account....fast! Unfortunately amateurish documentaries like this one only highlight the pervasiveness of the "health food" myth by making so many of the basic mistakes that the consumers they are trying to protect are being duped into!