Admit it, you thought The Men Who Made Us Fat (9pm, BBC2, 14 June) was going to be a hatchet job too.
It bore all the hallmarks: a sensationalist title a stereotypical “I’m blah and I’ll be telling the story about blah” hack and promises we were going to hear about “a war”, “a new kind of epidemic” and more ominously the food industry’s role in “choreographing temptation”.
But although there was criticism of the industry, it was generally fair. Indeed this was one of the most intelligent documentaries on obesity I’ve seen. Instead of lazily pointing the finger at the usual suspects, Jacques Peretti looked at the root causes, which, he argued compellingly, lay in 1970s America, and more specifically in the role Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary Earl Butz played in championing high fructose corn syrup.
Cheaper than sucrose but sweeter, it soon replaced it in soft drinks - with dire consequences for our waistlines. It didn’t help that a prominent US doctor claimed fat was to blame for the rise in heart disease and not sugar - a theory unsurprisingly endorsed by the sugar lobby - or that British nutritionist, John Yudkin, the lone voice warning of its dangers, was discredited.
In the UK, this cleared the way for the rise of the snacking industry, with its finger of Fudge that’s “just enough to give your kids a treat”, and for the emergence of low-fat ready meals in which, yep, the fat was replaced with sugar. And sugar will be the one part of this industry feeling battered and bruised after this powerful documentary.
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