What's Really in Our Food?

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Duration: 45 minutes 
Year: 2007 
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Rating: Exempt

Take a peek at the ingredient list of your favourite snack food and try to pronounce some of those multi-syllabic words. Do you know what soy lecithin, aspartame and sodium benzoate are? Unless you have a chemistry degree, the ingredient list is another language altogether.
Additives and processed foods have radically changed the quality of our food, making it nutritionally cheap. With such massive chemical adulteration of the food we eat, we ask: how safe are these chemical cocktails in our "groceries"? Although we like to adopt the moral high ground and assume food 'bastardisation' is something happening elsewhere and not to the food we produce here in New Zealand, in fact more than 4,000 additives are added to the food we eat on a daily basis. Compare this with the 3,000 added to foods sold throughout North America.
Furthermore, 38% of the food colours allowed in New Zealand are banned overseas. As a result, New Zealanders who eat a diet comprising mostly processed food, consume more than 100 different additives a day.

We hear from Kiwi's whose lives have radically changed by kicking the additives, draw heavily on experts with the most up to date research, conduct our own tests and follow a family as they learn about what they are really tucking into, and discover that New Zealanders are consuming a potentially alarming amount of harmful additives.