What's Really In Our Food?

Chicken makes up a billion dollar industry, but does the way we raise our chickens affect the food we eat? Is there any benefit to buying free range? This episode also investigates whether hormones and antibiotics are used by chicken farmers and what the potential risks are.

Fish is traditionally seen as a healthy food, but today there’s lots of talk of heavy metals and dioxins in our seafood. So what should we believe?

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but the bowl of cereal that we eat every morning could have more salt in it than a bag of chips, and more sugar than a can of coke. Petra swallows a camera which shows us just how our stomachs work, what our intestines do and whether eating cereal for breakfast helps them to function better.

Processed meat can make for a convenient meal, but how much of it is really meat? And what else is in it? Much of our bacon and ham is made from cheap pork injected with growth hormones. How can we tell the good pork from the bad? For the first time, recent research links eating processed meats to increased risks of colon cancer. How much meat is safe to eat, and are there any types we should avoid?

We are supposed to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, but what counts as a serving, and is fresh always best? This episode asks whether we have sacrificed nutritional content and flavor to meet the needs of intensive horticulture and supermarket shelf-life, and finds out whether organic is better than normal fruit and vegetables.

Sugar, fat and salt are the "three big nasties" in our modern diet, and they're lurking in our junk food - those delicious treats we can't resist. And what about the other additives? How do they affect us?This episode presents two people who have paid the ultimate cost for their junk-food diet and follows three guys in their twenties to find out just what they eat. Lab tests find potential carcinogens in our potato chips, and reveal the dangers of additives like artificial sweeteners, phosphoric acid and food colorings.

The packaging around our food protects the food and makes it look good, but sometimes it misleads us, and some plastic packaging contains potentially harmful chemicals that can pass into our food.Just about all of our food is packaged in man-made products - plastic, cardboard, glass, and metal cans. What happens when plastic starts tainting the food we eat? What happens in the microwave? How dangerous are the plastics that can leak from a baby's bottle into the milk? And what really gets into our tinned fish and canned coconut milk?

Carbohydrates have come under fire lately with diets like the Atkins diet suggesting that we should avoid them wherever possible. Are grains like spelt and selba any better than wheat? Are there chemicals in bread that we should be worried about? Then there is that old war: butter versus margarine. To help make the choice, experts explain the different roles of good and bad fats.

Coffee contains caffeine, the most widely consumed drug in the world. So does drinking too much coffee do us any harm, and how much is too much? And what about the pesticides that are sprayed on the plants?We drink coffee to get us up and going - it stimulates us, and raises blood pressure, heart rate and breathing. But can coffee really improve mental performance? This episode puts it to the test with a group of busy financial traders, spilling the beans on instant and decaffeinated coffee.

We eat a huge variety of food from all over the world, but without country-of-origin labeling, we do not always know what conditions it has been grown or manufactured in, or how safe it is. Is imported garlic bleached with chloride? Are our prawns farmed with cancer-causing chemicals? With the huge volume of imported produce crossing our borders, who is checking for quality and contaminants before food gets to our table?