It was much to my surprise that new SBS show Food Investigators and I got off on the wrong foot right from the start. That it improved significantly from their first, pretty disgraceful, gimmick was a huge relief.
What annoyed me so much?
The stupid 'quiz' they presented to people on what contained the most salt 'per serving'- was it baked beans, cornflakes, chips or (bread? I can't remember)?
See, while it's pretty obvious that serving sizes can differ between products for a good reason- you're going to eat a much larger quantity of baked beans as part of a meal than, say, soy sauce, serving sizes can also differ between products as part of a ploy by the manufacturer to make the product look like it doesn't contain a lot of a particular 'undesirable' nutrient.
For example, you might buy a bar of chocolate and see on the package that the chocolate provides only 16% of the recommended 'daily % fat' per serve. Pretty good, huh? You don't have to feel 'guilty' about eating your chocolate. That is, unless you read the small print in the nutrition panel where it states that one serve equals a measly 4 squares. And seriously, who limits themselves to 4 squares of chocolate if they have a whole bar? Pretty much no-one, that's who. The food manufacturers are entirely aware of this.
It's a trick of psychology whereby the manufacturer uses a tiny figure for serving size that they know makes the product appear healthier than it really is to the average consumer (who is generally too lazy to check out the nutrition panel). The average consumer will then eat more of this product based on the belief that it's really not too bad for them.
I'm willing to bet that the 'serving size' stated on the chips used in Food Investigators was somewhere around 50g, certainly no higher. When you put that up against a 150g serving of baked beans (note the serving size is three times larger) of course the baked beans are going to look bad. Not as bad as you might expect, however: the 50g serving of chips will probably contribute around 300mg of salt to the diet, while the 150g of baked beans will contain around 400mg. Looking at the amount of salt per 100g, the baked beans contain around 267mg of salt, while the chips contain a whopping 600mg. Not so much shock value in the baked beans now, is there?
Now, I'm not inclined to believe that the people behind Food Investigators are ignorant of this kind of gimmick by food manufacturers. So I can only put their decision to play the same trick on ordinary consumers as indulging in sensationalist crap where none was necessary. It's mean, and it's deliberately misleading.
In addition, with very few exceptions it makes no sense at all to look at a single nutrient in isolation from the nutrients contained in the rest of the food and using that as basis to condemn the food to exclusion from the diet. Rather than singling out, for example, baked beans as being 'bad' based on the fact that they contain higher amounts of salt 'per serve', we need to look at what a single serve of baked beans will contribute to a person's diet compared with what a single serve of chips will contribute. And let's get to the point: chips contribute shit-all when it comes to nutrition.
That 50g serve of chips is likely to be consumed as a snack, not a meal, meaning that the salt you consume in the chips comes on top of the salt contained in every other meal that day. The baked beans, on the other hand, are more likely to constitute a meal in themselves, maybe served with a bit of (preferably wholegrain) toast. For someone with salt-sensitive hypertension, they might want to choose salt-reduced baked beans, or make/bake their own lower-salt beans and bread, or choose something else entirely. But for the average person, 2 pieces of wholegrain toast with a 150g serve of baked beans is not an unacceptably salty meal- indeed, it contains less than one gram of salt (the recommended daily intake for adults is no more than 4g). In addition, the meal contains very little fat- certainly something chips cannot boast of, is high in protein, dietary fibre and complex carbohydrates, all of which are lacking in chips.
While Food Investigators inevitably reached a sound conclusion in this segment, namely that people should rely less on processed foods, they did a disservice to anyone interested in improving their health via good nutrition. Looking realistically at the place for baked beans vs chips in the diet, it makes no sense to single out and sensationalise the fact that baked beans contain more salt 'per serve' than chips.
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The only other thing I found particularly bothersome was one aspect of the 'superfoods' segment. Given that one of the presenters is a food technologist, I can only presume that he, just as I did, learned about the process of picking, cooling, packaging and transport of different fruits and vegetables as part of his degree. Although it was 'Emergency Room (!?) Doctor' Renee Lim who presented the segment and made the blunder I'm about to mention, I feel that whatsisface-the-food-technologist probably has a duty to correct these kind of idiocies.
While it should be pretty obvious to all that $50/kg dried Tibetan gojiberries are a massive rort of the public's hunger for 'superfoods', Dr Lim decided to single out blueberries for their high price per punnet ($6.95).
That's dead stupid for a couple of reasons. Not only are blueberries a highly seasonal product, they are unable to be ripened after being picked like, say, tomatoes are. As a result, upon picking the fruit are ripe and fragile and soft and so naturally have an extremely short shelf life. They must be subjected to immediate cooling (as close to instant as technologically feasible), which requires expensive equipment, then packaged and shipped around the country as quickly as possible before they start to deteriorate. God knows they, like so many other fruits and vegetables, are probably sprayed with some horrible chemicals to slow the inevitable deterioration, too, but their shelf-life is still extraordinarily short compared with a lot of other fruits. In addition, the short shelf life probably means that the seller- let's say a supermarket- has to throw out a lot of product, which costs them money and raises the price for consumers.
What's more, blueberries have always been expensive, thanks to the reasons mentioned above. The fad for blueberries as a 'superfood', however, only began around 5-7 years ago, and yet the price doesn't appear to have increased significantly more than any other fruit or vegetable. You will note that other berries are equally, if not more expensive than blueberries for the very same reason.
So, yeah. Food Investigators: STFU about blueberries. I'm sure retailers do their fair share of ripping off customers when they can get away with it, but this isn't one of those times.
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Apart from these gripes, the show is streets ahead of anything you'll see on the commercial channels. A great concept, if not perfectly executed. I think the average person could get a lot out of it, as long as they don't have to sort through too much dross of the kind mentioned above.
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