It’s funny, January comes and one word looms large in everyone’s mind:
But whilst people have good intentions, it makes me quite scared how little people know about food and how easy it is to lead them to decisions. Take Channel 4s ‘Big Fat Diet Show’, which apparently aims to educate people about food. They showed dieters two cereal bars, one Special K bar and one made out of Coco Pops and asked which had the least calories.
Which do you think the women chose?
Suprise, surprise all the women went for the diet bar.But infact it was the chocololatey cocopops bar which had the least calories.
Cue shock from all dieters. However what the program ‘forgets’ to mention is that the Special K bar has grains and dried fruit in it, whereas cocopops are just puffed rice with a bit of cocoa powder on them. Obviously dried fruit has more calories than rice so it’s not a surprise the special K bar has more calories. And yet, that doesn’t mean that it’s less healthy – surely the nutritional value of dried fruit is much higher than that of puffed rice.
Little wonder then that people are getting fatter – even media that is apparently aimed at helping weightloss has it’s own sensationalist agenda. This all got me thinking; where is the line between fact and embellishment if you are a health journalist? Do you sensationalise (or even make up) a diet or health facts in order to get your scoop?
TV is for entertainment and for some reason we are just as obsessed with fat people as we are with food itself. Do journalists have a moral obligation to provide us with bare, balanced facts if it means loosing the interesting bits of their programme? And why are we educating ourselves on nutrition using the TV anyway? Surely relying on entertainment shows to educate ourselves on something so basic is setting us up for a much fatter future?
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