Panorama, which appears to now be the Daily Mail of television journalism, decided to attack the sugar industry last night. It was a rather peculiar programme. So what did we find out?

1. That the World Health Organisation is a political institute lobbied by the food industry. Gosh! I would never had expected that. Let me think for a bit. WHO can influence the way food is managed in around 90 countries. So, it stands to reason that the food industry should be concerned about what they decide.
2. That some conferences that recommend how foodstuffs are to be consumed are funded and influenced by the food industry. What’s unusual about this? Take the IT industry as an alternative example: Conferences all over the world are sponsored by IT companies. They usually have promotional stands at these events. The only valid concerns that Panorama had was that the funding was not made clear to the participants and that the recommendations were not vetted by the participants following the close of the conference. However, that said, these two issues appear to show up the naivety of the participants.
3. That food labelling is a bit of dodgy area and provided that the ingredients are described on the label, manufacturers can name the food whatever they want. Knock me down with a feather.

Panorama worked with the Co-op to produce a mousse that was targeted at children. So we had the fun name, labelling, free gift and fun bouncy advert. They even stuck children in front of a TV for ten minutes (which included the advert during this period). After that they let parents and children out into a store to see if kids would go for it. Guess what? They did. What’s more other shoppers who were not part of the ‘experiment’ did too. That’s not surprising either. It’s a supermarket dummies. It’s designed to sell food.

What irked me even more was the fact that after parents were told that each pot of mousse contained about 4 1/2 teaspoons of sugar (half the recommended intake for a child), they appeared shocked and decided that if they’d known that they wouldn’t have let their children have the dessert. Where do I start with this? Hmm.. The labelling said that out of every 125g, 26g is sugar. Now, parents, go and get a bag of sugar. Measure out 26g of sugar. Now see how many teaspoons that makes. Spooky isn’t it? I won’t even bother commenting on letting children decide what they want to eat.

So there we have it. Or maybe not. No-one in the programme complained that jam has too much sugar (over 60% of jam is sugar), nor was there any discussion that the reason there is so much sugar in foods is because of the need to cut down on fat content. And of course, sugar makes fat.

Governments need to spend time and money educating people about food. How food works in the body and how to read food labels. And whilst I’m on a roll, perhaps how to bring up children.