The next big program in the food fight season that I was able to see (I must admit I've yet to watch the dispatches documentary that will probably round up this series of blogs, and missed a program about an extreme diet) features 18 unhealthy eaters. These are people addicted to junk food, to pepsi, and even those that don't even eat vegetables...at all. The reasons are varied, from liking what they eat in terms of taste all the way down to one saying there's not enough time to eat anything else. Along side them will be Jamie Oliver with his team to try and wise them up, a doctor, nutritionist and Gunther von Hagens, that creepy looking guy that cuts up dead bodies. Today it will be one guy who was 25 stone at his death for the main course.

The program went in to the main areas of why junk food is bad; sugar, salt, lack of fibre, cholesterol and fat. These five areas will be looked at for why they are bad, how our 18 bad eaters are falling into bad habits, and also what the best way to avoid and potentially reverse the effects are. All in all the program was very interesting, and despite the multitude of things I've watched and read on the subject it was still able to teach me some things. I didn't quite buy in to the style but I know others would so I believe this is really essential viewing for the education of people on their habits. Below is my review.

First the ground work had to be laid out, where did junk food come from. Jamie's take on it is that firstly demands for convenience that led to the industry even existing, and then technology was ramped up like the microwave adding to the ease of convenience food. So with this how have the products changed over the last 50 years? With the help of a old fashioned butcher the show teaches us that sausages used to be over 70% meat, possibly even as high as 85%, with all the meat coming from shoulder, leg and bits of belly of the pork. This was not necessarily healthy but it was wholesome and flavoursome. These days about sausages are about 35% meat and made from the offcuts. Less wholesome, less flavour, and as such more unhealthy ingredients are added than in older times to make them taste at all.

When asked who's fault it is that this has happened by one of the 18, the butcher says it's the consumers issue ultimately, as if they didn't buy the stuff it wouldn't get made. One guy then brings up my pet peeve, the issue of "budget" This is when I could have jumped through the screen and kissed the old butcher, as his reply was that surely with today's obese society we should consume less and pay the difference for better quality. Finally someone on national television bloody well speaks out against idiocy.

Sugar

How has sugar consumption changed then, well in one example Special K cereal now has double the amount of sugar compared to 30 years ago. while bread can now contain some 1tsp sugar for every three slices. Even veg used is sweeter in supermarkets and selectively picked to be so because of consumer tastes. Later in the show they explain what we all know, sugar is bad for the teeth and it is also a source of "empty" calories, calories that give us a short burst of energy but ultimately do little to fill us up.

Ready meal consumption up 44% and fast food consumption up 80% between the years 1998 and 2003.

Fibre

An issue not usually talked about compared to the ease of salt content and fat content - lack of fibre caused by not enough vegetables. Now we go a bit Gillian in analysing poo, and the good doctor wheels out "5 years worth" of a Ugandan person's excrement and compares it to one of our vegetarian bad eaters. The difference is very sizeable, yet this isn't unusual in the wider scope of things. The average daily weight of our poo is 480g in Uganda, 310g in Delhi, but only 94g for these guys in the audience, and in all honesty that isn't much lower than the average for the nation. Why is this bad? Well quite simply put it is a major cause of bowel cancer. 80% of bowel cancer preventable by working for the 5 portions a day, and proper fibre intake to maintain a healthy digestive flow is all it takes.

To highlight this point they bring Gunther back, the crazy roger rabbit villain that he is. His task here is to show what most of us can already guess, that constipation is uncomfortable bordering on painful. Visually it is clear why it is so.

£43mil is spent on laxatives a year by the UK public when instead the money could be spent on finding 23grams of fibre a day. Switching to wholegrain foods can help, but remember fibre differences in fruit and veg. A cup of frozen pea's has three times the amount of fibre to a banana.

Fat

Time for another visual aid next as a woman consuming almost twice her daily allowance of fat (70g for a woman, 95g for a guy) gets into a bath to be covered in fat. It is here where the show unfortunately falls down for me, perhaps I'm not visual enough to take the lessons being taught here. For the sake of peoples enlightenment I hope that more people feel what they are supposed to by seeing how much fat these people are consuming over 5 years.

Kebabs contain 82g of fat, burgers 45g, and curries 23g, so make sure these are just treats rather than every day meals.

Return to Gunther; now we look at the slices of a 28 stone man and a 12 stone man. Again, we can generally work out that heavy guy will have a lot of fat that gets everywhere. When we see it actually in front of us though it is good to see, the fat guy looks a mess that is for sure. His body is just riddled with fat, and half of his body seems to be the off white colour. Compared to the normal sized man who is much more "flesh" coloured throughout it is clear that you don't see all the effects of bad eating on your waistline.

Later in the show Jamie gets three of the guys doing a heart and lung function test. The surprise here was that the morbidly obese guy was more "healthy" than a slightly overweight younger guy. Here is where the BMI method is so crucially off and why it needs caution. When taking the obese guy and moderately overweight guy (we'll come to the morbidly obese man again soon) for a scan it is shown that the obese guy has 15% fat, but the slightly overweight guy actually was more fat, and more in his liver. Interestingly the thinner people on the show are also said to be over the 25% limit for fat content. How can this be? It's all those internal fat deposits, in our livers, around our hearts and around out gut.

Now about the morbidly obese guy who was actually "healthier" than the moderately overweight guy...he has a body content of 50% fat, but crucially he has almost as much fat in his liver as he does water, something worryingly unhealthy. It's reversible though, and thank god because he looked so dejected. It is this sort of frankness about peoples health that is needed. When told about her status one older woman saw for the first time how, statistically at least, she only had 7 years left to live unless she sorted herself out.

Most important in this section of the show was how BMI needs to be used with caution, though they never said it. A person that was obese was actually much more fit than someone who was moderately overweight. He still had fat around him, but very little internally and he was well built. In all analysis this guy was podgy but heavy with it and this counted against him. The moderately overweight guy however was skinny, very little muscle, and lots more fat. He was less fit through lack of exercise and yet BMI claims he is healthier. It is so important that you get an extensive medical if you want to have a more clear picture of the state of your body rather than just relying on a one off calculation.

Cholesterol

Along with Fibre this subject isn't talked about as much, more used as a buzz word for health nuts. The basics are that bad cholesterol builds up in your arteries and can cause a stroke or heart attack when the arteries rupture, while good cholesterol actually cleans away the bad kind.

Saturate fat is bad, but olive oil is very good. Full fat cheese and red meat are sources of bad cholesterol while nuts, oily fish, chickpeas and lentils contain the good variety. Also remember that bitter chocolate, red wine, strawberries and raspberries are good anti-oxidents that also prevent clogging by cholesterol.

Salt

Next I feared my world was about to be shattered, Pizza was being attacked! A Pizza Hut pizza has 9g of salt per person per portion (quarter of a pizza), but eating more obviously means more salt. The quarter of a pizza alone is more salt than we should be eating. What is even more concerning is that 1 in 4 of us are salt sensitive and can have small amounts of salt cause arteries to narrow quickly. Jamie puts on his chef hat once more and so makes a tomato sauce out of garlic, chilli, basil and tinned tomatos, while pepper and herbs give flavour meaning less salt is needed. This is obvious to anyone that even considers home cooking, but the fact here is that it only takes a minute to cook that up. It takes longer to heat up a microwave meal or order a pizza. Thankfully my world wasn't quite so shattered, but I am glad I personally stopped my pizza three times a week habit.

Calories and weight

Finally a look at the weight issue, and how we all put it on so easily. Take Claire, one of the 18. She is a dance teacher and is fairly active but even considering this is eating about 300 calories a day over her limit. Doesn't sound much? Well it's a latte and a packet of crisps a day, but it all adds up, 15 months later it's an extra 3 stone on her weight. It is the small things we think are inconsequential per day that we do every day that add up.

Eat unsweetened popcorn not crisps, unsweetened fruit juice and sparkling water not fizzy drinks.

An interesting aside that I certainly didn't know is about chewing. On the subject of eating the right foods it came up about this "myth" of chewing 20 times with each mouthful, but it's not a myth. The action actually tells your brain you're full as you do it and so encourages you to eat less. But on top of this you can also make yourself feel full with what you eat by using slow release energy that can be found in wholemeal foods. However if you really have to eat white bread and pasta it was revealed that putting oily fish on for your meal can actually reverse the negative effects of the white goods.

Ultimately variety is the spice of life, the life span of Japanese people is 10 years longer than the Scottish (83 vs 73), and this is possibly because of a wide variety of fruit and veg used every day in the Japanese diet.

The finale

Now we have Gunther and his dissection of a 25 stone man, no doubt not for the squeamish, but let's look. The dead man's tissue, almost all fat, has to be an inch thick or so as it's removed to be able to see the organs inside, and the amount of fat inside the man is disgusting, not even letting us clearly see the organs. It is actually hiding the heart, and has pushed up the diaphragm by several inches to the level of his nipples, constricting the amount of space for what are now deformed lungs. Gunther takes out the organs as a whole to look specifically at them comparatively with a normal man. For a start they are 3 times the weight of the normal man's organs. In comparison the lungs are quite small to the normal size, and the texture completely different, clearly damaged, while the heart is twice the size of a normal man's heart because of fat infiltrating the muscle. Gunther's claim is that it is this, a direct result of over eating, is what killed him, and visually you can't get any more impact than this about how unhealthy eating can do very, very, nasty things to your insides.