To discover the hidden truths about our everyday foods,
we're building our own supermarket.
And it's quite unlike any you've seen before.
That is outrageous.
I mean, at least they're honest about it.
This is an honest supermarket.
Oh, my gosh!
One that comes clean about exactly how our food is produced.
Really?
Don't tell me that!
For every pound we spend on food shopping, 77p goes
to the supermarkets, giving them a huge influence
over what we eat.
But do we really know what we're buying?
And can we trust the supermarkets to tell us the truth about what's
on their shelves?
Or do their profits come first?
Inside our Honest Supermarket, we've built our own lab,
where new scientific discoveries will reveal what the supermarkets
aren't telling us.
You can quite clearly see large plastic particles
on the surface.
We've stacked our shelves with thousands of everyday products,
and rewritten the labels to show you what's really inside.
Mechanically recovered meat with added E numbers. Ew.
Will lengthen its life, but may shorten yours.
OK!
I'm Dr Hannah Fry, I want to sort the facts
from the marketing fiction.
So, you think you are having a nice cheesy pizza,
but actually you're eating potato starch? Yes.
And this is Priya Tew, a dietician.
I don't think I'd want to eat that, then. No.
We want to know how we can avoid the pitfalls...
Oh, Lordy, lordy.
..and have safer, healthier food.
This will definitely influence how I shop.
You'll never look at the food on your supermarket shelves
in the same way again.
This is the supermarket you want to shop in.
This is the Honest Supermarket.
The Honest Supermarket is now open, and we're starting our shopping trip
in the drinks aisle, with a product so simple
you wouldn't think it could have anything to hide.
We buy more than 3 billion litres of bottled water every year.
Even though, on average, a single bottle of water can cost
500 times more than tap water.
In 2017, bottled water sales outstripped cola for the first time.
It's a big business that relies on selling us the promise of purity.
I think that bottled water is better than tap.
I just think it's more pure, and more fresh.
We always drink bottled water.
So, what exactly are we buying when it comes to bottled water?
What does all of the stuff on the label mean?
It can get a bit confusing, so here is the bottled water 101.
If the label says that it's natural mineral water,
that means it has to come from a named underground source.
And the minerals it contains, like potassium or magnesium,
have to be consistent, and printed on the label.
If instead the bottle says that it's spring water,
that too means that it comes from a named underground source.
But its mineral content can change over time,
and it doesn't have to be on the label.
Anything else, like mountain water, table water, that means
that it can come from any number of different sources,
including the tap.
To find out if bottled water is hiding any other secrets,
we're testing some in the Honest Supermarket lab.
Dr Francis Hassard from the Cranfield Water Science Institute
has analysed five different bottled waters,
alongside some good old London tap water.
Right, so what have we found?
So what we found is that the bottled water have significantly higher
bacterial numbers, compared to the London tap water.
But, actually, it's really unsurprising that we'll find it
in bottled water, because there's microbes present in the source water
where the bottled water actually comes from.
The tap water has less bacteria because it's treated with chlorine
to make it safe, while bottled water isn't.
And while the levels of bacteria Francis has found in the bottled
water are harmless, as soon as those bottles are opened,
there's potential for contamination.
Well, it's best not to leave bottled water for a significant amount
of time if you've opened it.
Just because it hasn't got this residual chlorine in there
to prevent any nasty bacteria.
Normally, people have a bottle of water, they take a sip,
and they stick it in their bag to have some later.
Yes, but, actually, you've got lots of bacteria
in your mouth, so actually you'd probably be contaminating
your own bottled water every time you drink it. Ah...
But Francis has found something that could be even more worrying
in our bottled waters.
So, another potential contaminant we're interested in
is actually microplastics.
We use almost 4 million tonnes of plastic each year in the UK,
creating an environmental time bomb.
But some of that plastic may also be creeping into our food and drink.
To see if there's plastic in our water samples,
Francis first injects them with a red dye that will stick
to any plastic particles.
The water is then poured through a filter.
So any microplastics will be trapped on the filter, will they?
That's right, yeah.
So we're going to view that using this blue light here,
and an orange filter.
And hopefully the microplastics should glow a bright
fluorescent yellow colour.
Oh, yes...
Microplastics are the yellow specs, so that you can quite clearly see
large plastic particles on the surface of this membrane here.
The results don't surprise Francis.
A 2018 study at the State University of New York,
showed that more than 90% of plastic bottled water contains
these microplastic particles.
But they only tested bottled water.
So what we've done in our lab is actually look at tap water samples.
And what did you find when you looked at the tap water?
So we did find slightly lower levels in tap water,
and in very controlled conditions, but, really, a comprehensive study
needs to be undertaken for us to fully make concrete
conclusions on that.
The level of microplastics found in our bottled waters are low,
and it's such a new area of study that the jury is still out
on whether they pose a threat.
But the uncertainty has led the World Health Organization
to commission a review into the potential harm.
Is there anything we can do to reduce the amount of microplastics
that we find in our water?
The easiest thing is to not drink water that comes
from plastic bottles.
So while many people think that bottled water is purer
than tap water, in fact, it may have higher levels of bacteria,
and microplastics.
What do our shoppers think of our new honestly labelled water?
"Honest Still Water, 90% chance it can contain microplastics."
Oh...
I think it's quite shocking, it's opened my eyes,
and I would not buy bottled water again,
based on what I've heard.
Disgusting, really, drinking plastic, who wants to drink plastic?
Drink tap water, it's fine.
And if you think you're getting plenty of healthy minerals
from your bottled water, think again.
You'd need to drink over 140 litres of mineral water to ingest the same
amount of potassium as you'd get from eating one banana.
We spend over £190 billion on groceries each year.
So as supermarkets and suppliers fight for a slice of that cash,
it's no surprise that the rules on honesty can get bent
to breaking point.
Chris Elliott is a professor of Food Safety at Queen's University
in Belfast.
Often when I walk around supermarkets,
and this is where I'm allowed to be a grumpy old man,
some of the things I see on labels really do quite annoy me now.
One of the claims that has sprung up over the last few years
is everything is natural.
I think one of the statistics I saw that 20% of all of packaging
now says the word "natural" on it.
Guys, we are just having a conversation about food
in supermarkets that are labelled with natural,
how about green natural food colouring?
That would suggest that the colouring has come from plants.
If you look at the ingredients, about half of them have nothing
to do with nature or natural.
They're just chemicals.
How about a nice natural jelly snake?
I wouldn't have thought anything was natural about that!
Absolutely, very high in sugars, there's heavily processed
oils in it.
In my definition, they don't fit natural.
Food labelling is regulated by various different bodies.
But, as Chris has discovered, there are loopholes.
When you look at it from a legal context,
there's no legislation really telling us what natural means.
What, so you can put "natural" on anything?
You can pretty much put natural on anything,
and you can try to defend that particular claim,
and I've talked to a lot of food companies who say,
"Everything is natural," and my argument was,
in my book, it's not.
Some words are regulated by law, and must be scientifically backed up.
For instance, anything labelled low-fat must have less than 3% fat.
But there are plenty of unregulated words, like natural,
good, or wholesome, that mean nothing at all.
And it's not just the words that can fool us.
These cereal bars look lovely and delicious.
They are juicy blueberries, it says on the packet.
Lots of lovely plump blueberries as an image below it.
But if you look at the ingredients list, the second biggest ingredient
just after oats is blueberry-infused diced cranberries.
Now, there are blueberries in this, but they are far, all the way down
near the bottom, at just 2%.
There's one clear reason for this -
cranberries are far cheaper than blueberries.
And even when there are rules and regulations,
the labels can still be deceptive.
If you take something like the cheese slices,
the perfect accompaniment to any burger.
Except if you look very closely at these packages,
you very rarely see the word cheese on them.
This one here, 15 slices is what it says on the front.
This one here, delicious dairy single.
And that's because there are strict rules
about what you can call cheese.
It has to come entirely from milk, for a start.
It turns out, some slices are bulked out with ingredients like
vegetable oil, and have as little as 11% actual cheese in them.
So, what's the rest?
Yeah.
Blueberry-infused diced cranberries.
That is outrageous.
So, that's 89% that's not cheese.
That's shocking.
That is absolutely shocking.
Food packaging may test the limits of truthfulness.
But there are some supermarket areas that we usually feel we can trust,
like the fresh food aisles.
We think we're getting food straight from the land,
or the sea.
Come to any supermarket fish aisle, and you'll be bombarded by signs
and labels that imply a just-off-the-boat freshness.
But what do we think fresh actually means
when it comes to fish?
I'd expect it to be, at the most, a day old,
or two days old.
I wouldn't imagine it to be any older than about three days old.
Four days.
I'm saying seven.
So when it comes to fish, we think that fresh means anything
from a few days to maybe a week old.
Sure seems like a fair assumption, but is it true?
In the Honest Supermarket lab, Priya is with fish specialist
Richard Chivers to try and find out the truth about our fish.
He's spent over 30 years testing fish for supermarkets
and suppliers.
Do you think that the general public have got the right perspective
on what fresh means in terms of fish?
Almost certainly not.
We have ten pieces of cod, bought this morning from five different
British supermarkets.
Richard's going to test how fresh it is using the industry standard
Torry scoring system.
First thing I look at is the colour and the form of the fish,
so we want to be looking towards this sort of thing.
Bluish translucency that we have here.
All of our samples are within their use-by date,
so can be legally sold.
But the supermarkets themselves are largely in control
of setting these dates.
And there's little regulation, as long as the fish won't make you ill.
This breakdown here, where the connective tissue
is pulling apart, this is the action of bacteria.
You've got discoloration here, definitely.
It's a bit yellow-y, and a bit orange over here.
This is spoilage.
This slimy sort of look, I would be very dubious about that.
As with all meat, as soon as a fish dies, digestive enzymes and bacteria
start to degrade to the flesh, causing the changes in appearance,
smell, and taste, that Richard is looking for.
I don't think I'd want to eat that, then. No.
And even the freshest fish has some surprises in store.
This is a nice looking fillet.
It's got company, mind you.
I'm not liking the look of that so much.
What is it?
Well, it's a harmless cod worm, but he is alive, he's just come
out of the fillet, and been having a look around.
But there's a blueish translucency to that, I like that.
The muscle blocks are still firmly holding together.
That would be my pick of the fillets so far.
Minus the worm? Minus the worm, yes.
Richard spotted something else you might not expect to see
in your fresh fish.
I'm pretty certain that I'll be able to squeeze some water out of that,
because I can see it coming up already,
that's the sign of a fish that's been frozen
and has not been well stored in cold storage afterwards.
Hold on a minute.
This is fresh fish, and you've just told me
it's been previously frozen?
A lot of the fish is now defrosted.
By law, the supermarkets do have to state on the label
if your fish has been defrosted.
But they don't have to make it very prominent.
If I looked at this package, I would see here it says,
"Skinless, boneless, cod, defrosted."
Oh, yes...
Really, really tiny print though. It is.
That will now have a dryness to the mouth feel,
and when you cook it, you will have less flavour.
I'm surprised that you haven't smelt this fish, is sniffing the fish
something that we should be doing?
No, not in its chilled condition.
You won't get anything from it.
It's only when you cook it that the odours are released.
So, time for Richard's most important tests...
OK, shall we stick them in the microwave, see what happens? Yeah!
..the smell and taste of the cooked fish.
The acid test is to taste some of it, see what we can do,
scoring it against the Torry scoring system.
The Torry scale runs from one to ten, where ten is fresh
from the sea, one is inedible.
And anything less than a six probably shouldn't be sold.
I wouldn't want to see anything below six,
because that says that it's unacceptable.
It's not got the flavours we want.
I don't want to get ammonia odours from these things,
because that's a breakdown product of bacterial action.
It's definitely bad. I don't want to be eating it, no.
You don't want to be eating that.
So, yeah, it's not bad.
It is a seven.
Seven, neutral.
Yep.
Let's see what's going on.
No.
That is a six.
Very sure of this? Absolutely.
Like chewing cotton wool, there's just nothing there.
Time to taste number five...
Hot.
..the one Richard thought looked the most alarming
during the visual inspection.
Oh, dear God...
That is really off.
Oh, yes, definitely ammonia in there, isn't there?
Absolutely, yes.
So, Richard, you're telling me it smells off? Mm-hmm.
Are you still going to eat it? Yes.
And is that not going to make you ill?
No, no.
One of the good things about the white fish when they go off,
they will taste awful, but it will not make you ill.
The ones you've got to watch out for are tuna,
mackerel, sardines, those spoiled, they can make you ill.
Do you want to go first? No.
Oh, all right, then.
Oh, Lordy, lordy.
Here we go.
Yeah.
That's not good, is it? It is bad.
It's not good at all. It's horrible.
It's a four. It's a four. Ugh.
And it's been bought today from the shop? Yes.
That's just unacceptable, isn't it?
It shouldn't be on the shelf at all.
Definitely not, no.
How old do you think this fish is?
That is the equivalent of fish that is
about 20 days from catching.
20 days? Yeah. Wow.
Either this fish is 20 days old, or it's been badly stored
at temperatures that have accelerated the spoilage.
So, is any of our fresh fish up to scratch?
The freshest fish we got would have been number one,
number nine, and number ten, which scored seven and a half
on the Torry scoring system.
That still gives them an equivalent age of 10-12 days.
It doesn't taste of very much at all, you would say, "I've eaten cod
and I've done my part."
The majority of fish that we're picking up in the supermarket
tastes bland because actually it's old?
Yes.
Thinking at the other end of the scale, how many of these fish
shouldn't have been sold?
Three definitely shouldn't have been sold, they were off.
There are a couple there that are scoring six,
six and a half, that are, you would have to eat them today.
So that's 30% of our sample were definitely off...
Yep.
..with another 20% potentially by tomorrow.
That's quite scary.
What we're seeing reflected in these scores is the fact
that by the time it has to go through processing,
transport, distribution, it's simply been kept too long,
been allowed to warm up far too much.
So if I'm going into the supermarket, and I want to make
the best choice in terms of buying fresh fish,
what should I do?
Personally, I would buy frozen, because you catch the fish,
you freeze it on the vessel, bring it back on shore,
and all that fresh flavour is retained in there,
it's locked in by the freezing process.
So, do you buy frozen fish? Yes.
I think that says it all, really.
A recent survey found that almost a third of us think frozen food
is inferior to fresh.
But it looks like we might need to think again.
This fresh fish could be 20 days old?
Oh, my gosh.
No wonder it doesn't last more than five minutes in your fridge.
That's quite horrifying.
Is that legal?
When you buy it, you don't think you're buying defrosted fish.
That is misleading, definitely.
Supermarkets haven't just changed the way we shop,
they've also driven huge changes in food production.
And modern farming practises mean there are some things in our food
that are almost impossible to avoid.
But it's only in the Honest Supermarket that you will actually
find them on the labels.
Eight out of ten may contain pesticides.
That's nasty.
I mean, sprayed 32 times?
If I saw signs like that, that would make me second-guess
whether I was going to buy it.
I mean, at least they're honest about it.
Pesticides in our food, is it something that we should be
worried about?
Debate is raging between anti-pesticide groups on one side,
and the agricultural industry on the other.
I want to hear the for and against.
Josie Cohen is head of policy and campaigns
for the Pesticide Action Network.
And she thinks there's cause for concern.
40% of UK food contains pesticides.
If we then just look at fruit and vegetable,
that goes up to between 60%-70%.
Wowza!
Have we always used this much pesticide?
Actually, pesticide use in the UK is rising.
So in 1990, the average UK potato was sprayed around 12 times
in one growing season.
By 2016, that had gone up to 32 times.
There are strict regulations to limit the amount of any pesticide
that can be used on food crops,
but Josie thinks they may not be sufficient.
What's really worrying is the fact that safety levels are set
just for individual chemicals, and people aren't really looking
at how these chemicals interact with each other.
Up to 30 different chemicals can be used on one crop,
and Josie's compiled a hit list of the fruit and veg most likely
to have been treated with these so-called chemical cocktails.
Grapefruits and oranges, and also lemons and limes,
they're all over 90%.
90% chance of finding more than one pesticide inside it?
Exactly.
Then we've got strawberries, which comes in at 84%.
Pears, grapes. Oh, this is all the delicious stuff.
Which is how it ends up in wine.
Then we've got peaches and nectarines. Yeah.
Cherries. OK.
Then we've got the first vegetable on the list, which is parsnip.
Then we've got the great British institution,
the apple, which, concerningly, comes in at 64%,
with multiple residues.
So, is the answer to just go organic?
We have roughly between 450-500 different pesticides
currently authorised. In organic, that number is 28.
So organic can solve some of the problem.
The reality is that a lot of us can't afford to eat organic,
so maybe we need to be a bit more strategic about it.
So, strawberries for example, 84% multiple residues,
I only buy organic strawberries.
Sean Sparling is an independent agronomist, who has been advising
farmers on crop production for over 30 years.
He doesn't agree that we should be worried about pesticides.
We detect pesticides down to levels in the parts per billion.
I mean, tiny, tiny amount, and people need to understand
that it's not the toxin which is the problem, it's the dose.
There's more toxin in one cup of coffee than there is in all
the pesticide residues in all the food you will eat
over an entire year. Everything is hazardous.
23 tubes of toothpaste in a day will kill you.
Drinking six litres of water in one go will kill you.
You're saying that the concentration that we consume
is at a level that we don't need to be concerned about?
That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah.
There was a study done in Denmark this year
that showed one glass of wine every seven years
is about the same sort of risk as pesticide residue.
Sean's argument sounds convincing,
but what does he make of the chemical cocktail effect?
Can you rule out the chance of the sort of cocktail
of pesticides interacting with each other in a weird way, though?
I can't do that, because I'm not a scientist.
But I think, as we go on, we can trust the scientists
and we can trust that, when something's not right,
it's taken out of the marketplace,
because we see that happen all the time.
We're very, very good at self-regulation as an industry.
I've heard both sides of the debate, but can science settle the argument?
Andreas Kortenkamp is a professor
of human toxicology at Brunel University.
He wanted to know if the limits set for individual chemicals
were still safe if they were used in a chemical cocktail.
We have done this by deliberately combining a fairly large number
of chemicals at levels where, alone, they don't produce any effect,
as shown here.
So the dogma would predict nothing should happen.
But put them together, and the effect shot up.
This was rather startling, really, and blew the fundamentals
of this idea out of the water.
Andreas then began testing the impact of chemical
cocktails on rats.
What you see here, for example, is the effect of various chemicals,
some of them pesticides,
on the sexual development of young male rats.
So, individually applied, these chemicals don't do anything.
But put them together at these very same doses,
and you get a feminisation of these male rats.
Halfway between what a male should be like and what a female is.
So this cocktail effectively disrupts
the normal sexual development of male rats.
Further experiments on hamster cells show other cocktails causing genetic
damage at a cellular level.
And while we can't yet draw conclusions about the possible
effects on humans, Andreas believes these studies suggest
that the current protections are just not adequate.
Current chemical regulations in Europe and anywhere else do not
protect the consumer from the effects of multiple chemicals.
The science is there, the evidence is there,
so the regulation is lagging really behind the science.
Before we all start running away from our fruit salads in a panic,
let's be sensible here,
because the benefits of eating fresh fruit and vegetables far outweigh
any of the potential dangers from pesticides.
But until the regulations catch up with the science,
watching out for products with high levels of multiple pesticides
probably isn't a bad idea.
We've seen how our reliance on supermarkets can come
at the expense of food quality, or even our health.
But there's another cost that few of us consider,
and that the supermarkets certainly don't come clean about -
the cost that different foods have on the planet.
When it comes to climate change, the food and drink we consume
is responsible for up to one third of our carbon footprint.
But the emissions for different foods vary wildly.
For you, Jessica.
I want to know what the average food shop would reveal
if it was honest about its carbon footprint.
So I've come to Hertfordshire to meet the Bouchers.
Teenagers Jessica and Ben,
mum, Karen, and dad, Andrew.
So this is your weekly shop. It is.
Cake. Yeah!
Chocolate. Yeah.
The essentials. Yeah!
How about your carbon footprint?
Do you ever consider your carbon footprint when you're shopping?
Honestly, no. You don't really think about it.
You just don't really think about where it's coming from. No.
I don't think you're alone in that, to be honest.
To find out how the Bouchers' weekly shop rates from a carbon footprint
point of view, I've invited Lancaster University's Professor
Mike Berners-Lee, one of the UK's leading experts on the subject.
Hello. Hello. Hi, good to meet you.
OK, so I'd like to see if you can order this as best
you can, in carbon footprint terms.
So, if we say this is the high carbon end of the table,
and that's the low carbon end of the table,
do you want to have a go at just rearranging the foods
in carbon order? Wow.
OK. So... So, low...
It's got a British flag on it, so it's...
The Yorkshire tea, that's over here, surely.
Cheese, British cheese, yeah.
So your tactic generally is, anything British flag
you're kind of chucking down this low end.
Stuff that was grown far away, down this end. Yeah.
So you are using where things are from quite a lot.
A lot. OK.
How did they do?
Well, I'm going to have to rescue
these bananas from the high-carbon end.
So, although they've come from a very long way away,
they have been grown in a nice sunny climate,
and they will have travelled on a boat.
A boat is something like 100 times more efficient way of transporting
something, compared to putting it on an aeroplane.
I'd put them pretty well down the low-carbon end of the table.
Really? Wow. Yeah, they're not bad at all.
Same goes for lots of other fruit. Wow.
Apples, pears, pineapples, melons, anything that's sturdy enough to go
on a boat, it doesn't matter that much where it comes
from in the world. I can also rescue this wine for you.
Excellent news. Good news, more good news.
That's brilliant.
Because, although it comes all the way from New Zealand,
it comes on a boat rather than an airplane.
Even better if it's bottled in the UK, because that means
that the glass itself hasn't had to travel
from the other side of the world.
The highest carbon thing on the whole table,
which you've put in the middle ground here, so we need to talk,
has got to be, I'm afraid, this British beef.
All animals are relatively inefficient ways of producing food
because you feed food into an animal, and they waste most
of it along the way. Right.
When you feed a soybean to a cow, you only get about a tenth
of the nutrition back... Right. ..in meat or dairy.
So beef and sheep, as well, ruminate,
which means they burp out methane,
which is a very highly intense greenhouse gas,
so that doubles the carbon footprint.
So, I'm afraid beef is right up at the very,
very high end of it. What about lamb, then?
so are you saying lamb goes down on that end as well? Yeah, afraid so.
But it's not true of chicken, so you've got chicken in the middle,
in about the right place.
This chicken is probably the least carbon intensive of all the meats,
and that's just because chickens grow quickly. Right.
Chicken, per kilogram, has less than a quarter
of the carbon footprint of the beef or the lamb.
Hang on, how about cheese, then?
We've got cheese all the way down here, down this low-end.
Yeah, so more mistakes to come.
So, here's the cheese. I'm going to move it up quite a long way.
Cheese also comes from an animal, but it's more efficient to keep
the animal alive and take its milk or its eggs
than it is to kill the animal.
So, for that reason, not quite so high carbon as the beef.
But still high. It's about here. It's still high.
That's what they got wrong. What did they do well?
You did really well with your Peruvian asparagus.
Right where it needs to be, right up at the high-carbon end.
So, in season, British asparagus is fantastic. Fantastic.
Yeah. The minute it's out of season, it's almost certainly gone
on an aeroplane, which makes it a very high-carbon product.
And you've got the bread right down at the low-carbon end,
which is fantastic.
As long as you promise me you're going to eat it all.
We constantly have this conversation about how much bread we throw out.
It is the UK's most wasted food product.
So it's a great low-carbon food, as long as you eat it.
Around a quarter of all the food we buy in the UK
is thrown away, uneaten.
Wow, the table looks quite different.
Yes, yeah. Somehow, we've all got it stuck in our heads
that the further something's come, the worse it is.
But are you surprised that turns out to be wrong?
Yeah, very surprised. I mean, the wine's obviously
from New Zealand, halfway around the world,
you'd think that would be top of the list on the carbon footprint,
but it's the other way around. Yeah.
I'm really surprised about the bananas.
Cheese and the dairy products. Yeah.
And the meat, obviously, the British meat. Right at the top.
Mike has gone through and worked out the total carbon footprint
of the Bouchers' food,
and they're in for a shock.
With the best estimates we can make, we thought it was about
160kg of carbon dioxide equivalent.
So, if you're driving a medium-sized petrol car,
that's the same as the emissions that would come out of your exhaust
pipe over about a 525-mile journey.
Really? 525-mile journey!
Wow. That's just this shop.
Oops!
And you're probably about average for a UK family of four people.
Right.
Are there a few key tips that you can give everyone
to have in their minds when they're shopping?
Yeah, there are.
So, first up and most important, is reduce the meat and dairy
and especially less of the beef and lamb.
Secondly, it's just to eat what you buy.
And then the third thing, it's great to eat a lot
of fruit and vegetables
but, if they've come from a long way away,
they need to be robust enough that they could have travelled
on a boat rather than an aeroplane.
So, having done this exercise, do you actually think
it's going to make a difference to how you shop?
Yes. Yeah. Definitely.
We got very used to having things out of season.
So strawberries in December.
Now that we have had a bit of education on it,
I don't think we've got any excuses.
No product labels currently state the carbon footprint
of the food inside,
but would they really make any difference to the way we shop?
We've rustled up some Honest Supermarket labels for some
of the best and the worst food offenders.
We've got some strawberries from Belgium, and some
bananas from Columbia.
"Strawberries, carbon footprint, CO2 equivalent to 9.75 miles."
The bananas is 1.2 miles.
That is unbelievable.
It's cos Belgium is a lot closer.
Colombia is in South America, so how is that possible?
I think definitely it would change my perception in what I pick up.
This will definitely influence how I shop.
At the same time, if you want the strawberries,
you're going to get the strawberries! Yeah.
Supermarkets are increasingly offering us food that's cheaper,
lasts longer, and is more convenient.
In fact, a recent study found that half of all the food bought
by families in the UK is now what's known as ultra processed.
Are the supermarkets being honest about the consequences
of all of that convenience on our health?
I want to shed some light on the hidden ingredients
of ultra-processed foods...
To be honest, Naz, I think this actually looks like quite a delicious picnic.
..so I'm meeting University of Greenwich food scientist,
Dr Nazanin Zand.
So, all the foods are quite recognisable
but, if you actually look at the list of ingredients,
there are a lot of words on here that, I mean, I barely know
how to pronounce them. What are all these different things doing?
So usually you have preservatives, which makes them safer for a longer
period, emulsifier, which makes them blend better,
antioxidants to stop them discolouring.
Flavouring, some of them, in fact, have glossing agents,
to make them more shiny. Like this kind of stuff.
That's correct, yes.
I just thought that was sugary goodness!
To show me just how different ultra-processed foods are to
food we'd cook at home, Nazanin wants us to take
a very close look at one of the nation's favourite meals.
Supermarket pizza sales are worth almost £1 billion a year and rising.
OK, pizza, pretty simple.
Making this at home, it's got, well, about five or six ingredients.
Some cheese, flour, tomato, a bit of pepperoni...
it's quite straightforward, right?
Yes, however, once you are talking about a processed pizza,
as you can see from the label of these products,
you will have about 25 different ingredients,
and if you take... 25 ingredients! That's absolutely incredible.
Yes.
Time for an industrial cooking lesson.
To show me what all these extra ingredients do,
Naz has chosen an average mid-priced supermarket pizza
for us to try and copy.
Well, step one, I'm going to guess we're going to make the dough.
Yes, absolutely, so we start with some flour
and this pizza would have lots of additives being added
to it, such as three emulsifiers that we have here.
For example, E471e, and this is added to the food
so it would be easier to knead the dough,
and it becomes more machine-able through large-scale processing.
So this is just to make the manufacturing process easy
and profitable as possible? Absolutely.
And then they have palm oil, coconut oil, and rapeseed oil...
Oh. ..being added to the flour. Three different kinds of oil?
And also we have guar gum,
and this is a gelling, thickening agent,
used not only in food, but also in pharmaceutical
industry for, like, shampoos and toothpaste.
It doesn't matter whether you're making pizzas or toothpaste,
you're using the same tricks. Yes.
They also have E920, which adds to the strength
of the dough, and often comes from animal origins
such as hair or nails, or bristle.
Sorry, nail, hair, and bristle?
Yes. Delicious!
That feels pretty much like normal dough, really. Yes.
Cheese next, I'm going to guess.
In many of the supermarket pizzas, what you have as a topping
is a processed-type cheese, which contains, for example,
potato flour, rennet, acidity regulators.
So you think you're having a nice cheesy pizza... Yes.
..but actually you're eating potato starch.
Yes, it is much faster to make,
therefore it's much cheaper.
OK, next up, pepperoni. What's going on here?
Pepperoni, as it is being already a processed food,
it contains a lot of ingredients.
One of the most controversial is sodium nitrate.
It gives you the red colour you see, and stops the meat from going grey
or discoloration of the meat.
It's slightly less appetising, isn't it? Yes.
So we're done? Yes. Amazing.
This is finished and now we can go and put it in the oven. OK, perfect.
If we're being honest, though, all of these extra ingredients,
they might not sound that appetising,
are they actually bad for you?
Sodium nitrate, at high level of consumption,
they have been increased risk of cancer, for example.
You said at high levels. Yes.
You're not going to get cancer from eating this pizza? No.
You won't get cancer from consuming this pizza.
The question becomes the frequency and of the amount of consumption.
There's now such a strong body of evidence linking sodium nitrate
to bowel cancer that it's been classed as a carcinogen
by the World Health Organization.
But what about the rest of the additives?
They're all approved as safe.
However, there is currently no study that has actually been long enough,
conducted in a controlled environment, that can prove
or disprove that these products are safe.
You can't be absolutely sure that in the long,
long-term, this stuff is fine.
And it's not just the additives that are giving Naz cause for concern.
These foods, they are also very fattening,
and they are very high in sugar and very high in salt, in fact.
You should also be aware of what's not in these types
of ultra-processed foods.
You're not really receiving any of your dietary intake
in relation to vitamins and minerals.
Because there's nothing good in it.
These are really energy-dense empty calorie.
A global study last year analysed 23,000 packaged foods,
and found that 69% of them were nutritionally poor.
And yet, we're eating more of them than ever.
But Naz doesn't think the supermarkets are entirely to blame.
We, the consumer, in fact, we bear some of the responsibilities,
and we are the driver behind this, because we are demanding
convenience, and we are demanding food at a lower cost.
Well... LAUGHS
I mean, it doesn't look bad.
But, I mean, I'd eat that...
..apart from the cow hair thing!
Maybe it's time for an Honest Supermarket makeover
in the pizza aisle.
"Honest pepperoni pizza."
"Ultra processed."
"It will lengthen its life..."
"But may shorten yours." OK!
With this label, you know, I would stay miles away.
I'm glad it's on there, so I know not to buy it.
One big upside to supermarket domination
has been the rise of cheaper food.
In fact, the proportion of income spent on it has halved
in the last 60 years.
But cheap food can come at a high price for the environment,
and there's one ingredient that is so cheap and versatile
it's become the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet.
You will find palm oil in cakes and biscuits and cereals.
You will also find it in bread, in spreads.
Even your dog's not innocent
because palm oil is used in a lot of pet foods.
In fact, it's now found in almost half of our
packaged supermarket products.
But it's our rain forests that are paying.
I know that a lot of it comes from the Indonesian rainforest.
Destroying the habitat of orangutans.
Because of the chopping down all the trees.
It's not good for the environment.
I'm also aware that it's used in things like Nutella,
much to my chagrin.
85% of the world's palm oil comes from Malaysia or Indonesia,
where huge swathes of native rain forest have been destroyed to make
space for palm oil plantations.
You won't find those facts on any food labels.
But there is one supermarket trying to be more honest
about the true cost of palm oil.
Richard Walker is the managing director of Iceland.
I flew out to take a look at the palm oil plantations,
and witnessed the vast scale of them.
I mean, from one horizon to the other
with no noise, no sounds at all of any animals in there, whatsoever.
The problem comes from the fact that palm oil is almost exclusively
grown in areas of tropical rain forest, and despite the fact
that they only cover 2% of our planet's land area,
they actually account for almost 50% of all of our biodiversity,
all of our nature, so these are the crown jewels
of the planet, and we are destroying them, all for the sake
of growing palm oil.
If we don't act now, I believe that we will lose
many keystone species, such as the orangutan.
In 2018, Iceland announced that it would stop using palm oil
in its own-brand products by the end of the year.
If successful, it would be the first supermarket to do so.
If I found out a supermarket was going out of their way to not
use palm oil, I would... I would go out of my way
to shop at that supermarket.
It was an admirable plan, but replacing palm oil
is no easy feat.
In the Honest Supermarket lab, Priya is meeting food scientist,
Dr Sarah Berry, from King's College, London
to find out just how tough a job Iceland had on its hands.
Sarah, we've got here toothpaste, biscuits,
bread, peanut butter.
All of these contain palm oil, so why is palm oil so popular?
One of the reasons is because it has such a high yield.
So I've got a palm fruit here
and if I cut this open, what you can see here
is you have the fleshy outer bit, from which we can get palm oil,
and then you can also extract the oil from the nut inside,
which is palm kernel oil.
And that's quite unusual, so most other edible oils come
just from this fleshy outer layer.
And you get hundreds of these growing on each palm tree,
and you can get many palm trees growing on a small amount of land.
Palm oil yield is so high that, compared to crops like soya,
it can take around a tenth of the land to produce the same
amount of oil, making it a far cheaper alternative.
But it's not just the price tag that makes palm oil unique.
Palm oil is really special, because we can actually separate
it into lots of different components for different applications.
So this is a jar of palm oil that's actually been sitting on my desk
for the last six months... Wow. ..and it's naturally separated.
So what you have here is the very unsaturated liquid oil,
and we use that often for cooking, and down here we have the solid
saturated fat components,
so we would use it for puff pastry, for example.
We would also blend it for use in spreads,
chocolate, confectionery products.
We've also got the palm kernel, which is from the middle part,
that has a texture that's really suitable for applications
such as lipstick and other products.
So the key to its versatility is the different melting points
of all of these different parts of the palm oil.
So I've got the different parts of the oils here,
and if we heat this up, they'll all melt at different temperatures.
So now all parts of the palm oil fats are melted,
but it took about four times as long for this solid bit to melt.
This is what allows it to mimic everything from butter
to lard, to vegetable oil, in thousands of products.
Is it possible to replace palm oil?
So it's certainly not possible to replace palm oil with one fat.
It is possible to replace palm oil with a wide variety of fats
and oils. The problem is, this would involve using animal
fats, very expensive fats, like cocoa butter,
and also fats that have a very low yield as well.
So it's plagued with difficulties, really.
And it turned out these difficulties caused some problems for Iceland.
The supermarket chain Iceland has continued to sell own-brand
products containing palm oil, despite pledging to stop doing so
by the end of last year.
Although Iceland had managed to remove palm oil from over 100
products, there were some lines where they admitted it simply
wasn't technically feasible,
or that doing so would result in a massive cost increase.
A BBC investigation found the chain was unable to meet the deadline
and simply removed its name, its branding, from some items,
rather than the ingredient of palm oil.
I could have held a gun to our head, to our suppliers,
and told them they've "got to do it or else" by the end of the year,
but they couldn't quite manage it.
As Iceland discovered, the debate about palm oil is a complex one
and, while most supermarkets won't be as truthful
as the Honest Supermarket about the impact of palm oil,
there are still things you can look for.
If it is something that concerns you,
then you can check the labels of your products for alternatives,
or for this symbol here, the RSPO.
That essentially says that the palm oil that's being used comes
from a certified sustainable source.
Our health is big business.
One study found that over three quarters of us will pay
more for food if we think it's better for us.
And for the supermarkets and food suppliers,
that creates a big marketing opportunity.
They're even trying to transform one of the biggest food demons -
sugar - into a health food.
You might be surprised to learn that there are actually 61
different names for sugar, and here they all are. Ready?
Try not to blink.
Recently, plain white sugar, or sucrose, has got a bad
reputation. A study last year found that 66% of us are worried
about the amount of sugar we eat.
And so a whole load of supposedly healthier alternatives have hit
the supermarket shelves.
Yeah, I'm onto coconut sugar right now.
Coconut sugar is great.
I use rice syrup.
We put honey on our porridge every morning.
If I'm trying to be healthy, I might go for some Manuka honey
or something like that.
But I prefer, like, brown sugar so it's more natural for you.
They're all more expensive than plain white sugar,
but are they actually any better for us?
To find out, we've enlisted the help of Dr Nicola Guess,
a nutritional scientist from King's College London.
I think we've demonised table sugar.
There's been a book about it being a poison.
You hear it called toxic, and I think people have this idea
that if something is natural, or is perceived to be natural,
that it doesn't have such an effect on your blood sugar.
The healthiest sugars, like those found in whole fruits
are released slowly into the bloodstream,
avoiding sharp spikes in blood sugar that can damage
our cardiovascular system.
People seek to replace table sugar with alternative sugars.
I see them around supermarkets.
Agave syrup, date sugar, coconut sugar.
All of which, because they come from plants or fruits,
tend to have a halo of healthiness around them.
Here we go!
To find out if these alternative sugars avoid the sharp rise in blood
sugar we get from standard white sugar, Nicola is going to test some
using a group of dancers
here at the Anna Fiorentini Theatre & Film School.
Each dancer gets 50g of one of our sugars mixed in with water.
Edie is getting standard white granulated sugar.
Cynthia is having agave.
Charlotte, honey.
Jemima, coconut sugar.
And Serafina has date syrup.
All right, so welcome back.
Nicola takes blood samples at 30 and 60 minutes
to see how high their blood sugar levels have risen.
So the measurement we use for blood sugar is in millimoles per litre,
so that is the concentration of sugar in the blood.
Well done, everybody!
The results are in.
So, with the granulated sugar, we started at 5.5,
and then it went up to 8.2 by 60 minutes.
So you've got quite a sharp rise,
and that's really what we would expect.
So, have our sugar alternatives avoided the sharp rises in blood
sugar that can dangerously increase the risk of heart disease
and type 2 diabetes?
First up, honey.
It starts off at 4.9 millimoles per litre,
by 60 minutes, we're seeing it's going up to 7.6.
So that's not far off white sugar.
So the next one that we tested was agave.
The agave did slightly better,
ending up 6.9 millimoles per litre.
And the date syrup a little better still,
at 6.4 millimoles.
Lastly, we have the coconut sugar.
Our coconut sugars went up to 12 millimoles per litre by 60 minutes.
So, although it's marketed as a natural product,
it actually makes your blood sugar go higher than white sugar.
So the honey was similar to standard white sugar,
the agave end date syrup showed slightly lower levels,
but not enough to really make a difference,
and the coconut sugar was actually worse.
I think it would be fair to say that, once in the body,
our alternative sugars do exactly the same thing as granulated sugar.
This is to be expected because the chemical make-up
of the sugar is basically the same,
but I think what these results show
is that some of the marketing is very misleading.
But do our shoppers agree?
"Coconut sugar, still just sugar -
"no healthier than the standard stuff." Oh, my God.
It looks healthier, it's brown rather than the standard white.
It's very deceptive. We do have this in our house,
so I actually thought it was healthier than sugar.
Did not know that. I'm learning something today.
That's a very valuable fact, especially for her.
No, honestly, cos I thought there was a difference.
Essentially, whatever type of sugar you eat,
the effect on the body is going to be similar
and the overall advice is to limit your consumption.
It seems that sugar by any other name
really is just sugar.
We've seen how products and packaging can pull the wool
over our eyes, and bend the truth,
but that's not the only tactic the supermarkets use to get us
to part with our cash.
You probably come to the supermarket with a very clear idea in your mind
of the things that you want to buy. Maybe you're even using a list.
But you probably won't to be surprised to hear
that supermarkets are using every psychological trick in the book
to get you to surreptitiously add items to your basket.
Professor Barry Smith runs the Centre For The Study
Of The Senses at the University of London.
Supermarkets are these multi-sensory playgrounds,
where a huge amount of sensory information
is going on at the same time.
Barry and his team conduct experiments to investigate the way
that retailers can manipulate our senses
to influence our shopping habits.
Everything from studying the impact of different smells
on our brain waves...
We're going to present you with a series of smells
of things you might find in the supermarket
and record what we see from the brain.
..to tracking how packaging influences our buying decisions.
You're going to see a pair of food images on the screen.
There will then be a probe, and we want you to indicate
whether the probe was on the left or on the right.
And it's clear to him that supermarkets are trying
to influence your decisions
from the moment you step through the door.
We often get the fresh fruit and vegetables first.
Of course, if you're putting healthy items into your basket first,
maybe it's not so bad to then help yourself to the treats later on.
"OK, I've got the fruit and veg, now maybe I can have a doughnut,
"now maybe I can have some cake or some biscuits."
They also make it hard for you to pop in
for just the bare essentials.
Very often the staples, like the milk or the bread,
or the tea and coffee that we always put into our basket,
they will be in the middle of the aisles.
So that means you've got to travel down the aisles with the chance
of having your eye caught by things on either side
on the way to get what's on your list, and what you need to buy.
Even our sense of touch can be exploited.
People tend to assume that when something is very heavy
and weighty, it means it's of good quality.
And you will see people pick bottles of wine off the shelf -
"which will I have?" - they will go with the heavier one.
So it really is making sense now to wine manufacturers
to put their wines in heavier and heavier bottles.
Some research suggests that people don't just prefer heavier bottles,
they'll pay more for them.
And this is really stonkingly heavy.
Often, these influences on our senses occur without us noticing,
targeting our unconscious desires and preferences.
You can sometimes have associations between the sounds in a supermarket
and what people will purchase. Lovely piece of research -
he was taking an hour in a supermarket to play French
accordion music, and then an hour to play Bierkeller music in German.
Now, when the French music was on, the sale of French wines went up.
When the German music was on, the sale of German wines went out.
But if you ask people at the tills,
"Was it the music that led you to purchase this wine?"
They sometimes said, "What music?"
So it shows the power of music to have an effect on our purchasing
decisions without us necessarily knowing it's having that effect.
It's extraordinary how much thought goes into designing
our supermarket experience.
Every one of our senses is targeted to subtly influence our decisions
and make us spend more.
Our trip around the Honest Supermarket has really shown
just how different food shopping would be if supermarkets
were a little bit more truthful with us.
If there was a truly honest supermarket that showed me every
single detail on every single thing that I wanted,
I would be your best buyer, without a doubt.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is an approach that's
going to catch on any time soon.
So, perhaps the food industry regulators should be closing
down some of the loopholes that let the supermarkets
play fast and loose with the truth.
In the meantime, it's really up to us to look
more carefully at the food we're eating, and how it's being produced.
But, for now, the Honest Supermarket is closed.