Episode 2 The Men Who Made Us Fat

Britain is the grip of an obesity epidemic.

24 million of us are now overweight,

our appetites supersized by big business.

'I'm Jacques Peretti and in this programme I'm going to tell

'the story of the men who trapped us into eating more.'

He realised that if he increase the portions, that he could sell more

because people didn't like the idea of going back for two.

I'll be revealing the decisions taken behind closed doors

that ushered in and era of excess.

They changed the rules because then everyone started running around

thinking, "We've got to make a bigger buck."

This Double Gulp is 64oz of soda and nearly 50 teaspoons of sugar.

How clever marketing persuaded us that more is good...

Did anyone order that just for themselves?

People have done that before too.

..that went too far.

That's probably not in our best health interests

but that's OK, I'm not a doctor, I'm a doughnut salesman.

One of the really quantifiable things

of the last 25 years is the increase in portion size.

MUSIC: "Park Life" by Blur

We live in a world of overabundance, where big is best

and value means more.

I'd like to order a breakfast but I don't know what to order, you've got so much.

I've come to this diner in Great Yarmouth

to find Britain's biggest breakfast.

-How hungry are you?

-Quite hungry.

-Quite hungry?

-Yeah.

-We've got the Big Boy or we've got the Fat Boy.

Or if you really fancy it, we've got the Jester Challenge kid's breakfast.

-The kid's breakfast?

-Yeah, kid's breakfast.

-What's the kid's breakfast?

-It weighs the same as a small child.

-Oh, right. Is that why it's the kid's breakfast?

-Absolutely.

-Round about 9½lbs.

-9½lbs?

-Yeah.

-What does that involve?

-An eight-egg cheese and potato omelette,

12 bacon, 12 sausage, sauteed potatoes, mushrooms,

hash browns, black pudding,

four fried bread, four toast, four bread and butter.

-All on the same plate?

-All on the same plate.

-Wow.

-£15. If you eat it in an hour, you get your money back.

-I have to eat it in an hour?

-Eat it in an hour.

-The whole lot.

By yourself, no help, no-one holding your hand - all you.

-We normally serve about two a day.

-Two a day?

-So two people every. Well.

-Two epic fails every day.

Possibly three today.

There we go, sir.

If you'd like to move your drink. Thank you. One kid's breakfast.

You have one hour. There you go.

There we go.

That is unbelievable. Can I just ask you a question?

How did you come to introduce this breakfast?

Um, well we kept getting told that the Fat Boy wasn't big enough, so.

It wasn't big enough, so you thought you'd introduce this?

We thought we'd sort of blow it out of the water a little bit and go to the excess.

Obviously it's not something you should eat every day. It is a challenge.

'The kid's breakfast would have been unthinkable a few years ago

'but that was before we got an appetite for American style supersizing.'

-How are we doing?

-I'm done.

-You're done?! Shut up!

-Oh, look!

Look how much I've eaten. I haven't even made a dent.

-I'd die of shame first, me. What a baby.

-I'd die of heart disease.

-What a baby.

-Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

'Ours has become a world where food is available day and night,

'24/7, wherever and whenever we want it.

'But this overconsumption is killing us.

'More than 60% of men and women in Britain are overweight or obese,

'yet many of us are still unaware of the hidden dangers of overeating.'

If you want to step up onto there.

'I'm about to have an MRI scan that will reveal

'all the fat inside my body.'

Literally we scan you from the top of your head to your toes.

And we look at both the fat that you can see externally

but also the fat around the organs.

There we go.

-Get you back down to ground. Just get your balance.

-Righto.

-So these are my results?

-These are your results.

You have quite a bit of internal fat, visceral fat, surrounding your organs.

This actually could be quite troublesome for your health.

I would say you have four to five litres of internal fat

that you're carrying around your organs.

-Four to five litres?!

-Yes.

-And is that normal?

Um, we expect someone of your age,

someone who's fit, to have less than two litres of internal fat.

-Wow! So I've twice as much fat inside...

-Inside.

-..than I should have?

-Yes.

MUSIC: "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones

So when did we all start overeating?

And who was it that decided we should eat bigger and bigger portions?

The answer lies not in Britain

but 4,000 miles away across the Atlantic in America.

Here in downtown Chicago is where the story of supersizing began.

Not in a fast-food restaurant and not in a supermarket,

but in this cinema where a man called David Wallerstein

would have a eureka moment that would change the way we eat for ever.

'Wallerstein was the man who created supersizing.

'In 1967, as area manager of the Balaban cinema chain,

'he came up with a novel way of increasing profits...

'..supersize the popcorn.'

Americans were not used to buying multiple

popcorns or drinks

so the idea came to him to increase the size into much larger sizes.

By making cartons bigger he could charge cinemagoers more -

far more than the cost of the extra popcorn.

Darren Tristano has advised the world's largest food companies,

among them McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Burger King.

Most of the cost is in the bucket. The popcorn is very inexpensive.

It didn't cost very much to increase the size.

Likewise with the soda pop.

A lot of it was syrup based, very low cost associated with it -

water, not very expensive.

'People loved the bigger popcorn buckets and taller drinks.

'Sales and profit soared. The supersize portion was born.

'Wallerstein was hot property and was head-hunted by McDonald's,

'who appointed him to their board.

'Fired up with his brilliant new way of making money,

'Wallerstein was determined to apply it to the burger chain.

'Mike Donahue was vice president of McDonald's for 20 years

'before leaving to open his own burger restaurant.'

David Wallerstein was a creative, brilliant genius

when it came to promotions and other things.

'But Wallerstein faced unlikely opposition from within McDonald's.

'Founder Ray Kroc was fiercely opposed to offering larger portions.

'He simply didn't believe people needed or wanted more food.'

Ray Kroc who at McDonald's had a war room.

It was a padded room so if they had disagreements,

you went up to the war room

and his idea was, "Let's get them out in the open."

So I think they had a bit of a boardroom squabble

with Wallerstein over it because Wallerstein wouldn't let it go.

Wallerstein's persistence paid off.

Kroc reluctantly agreed to let him

test out his theory in a McDonald's in Chicago.

DARREN TRISTANO: What he did was he sat in the restaurant

and he observed behaviour.

So what an American consumer would do is to tip

that carton of French fries way back to get every little bit

of salt granule and every little portion of fry in the bottom of the box.

Wallerstein called this the salt slide.

He argued that it proved customers wanted more

but weren't going to go back for a second helping.

He realised that if he increased the portions, um, that he could sell more.

Um, because people didn't like the idea of going back for two,

or didn't like the idea of looking as if

they were committing one of the deadly sins of gluttony.

Reluctantly Kroc took Wallerstein's advice.

In 1972 a new larger portion of fries was introduced.

The world was never going to be the same again.

And, for the customer, it seemed a great deal.

It was a notion that people would have,

that if we provide more food the price isn't as high as two fries

but somewhere in the middle - that's value for the consumer.

For McDonald's it was a gold mine.

Most of the costs of their business were fixed, like wages and rent.

But the cost of the food was cheap.

Like popcorn, adding a few fries didn't cost much

but it did allow them to charge more

and this generated HUGE additional profits.

Across America, other fast-food chains

started selling bigger portions of foods high in sugar and fat.

This new world of plenty held hidden risks.

And the impact on public health from this change

in eating patterns was still unknown.

-Hot dog, please.

-Want the big one, right?

-Yes, please.

A bit of ketchup, a bit of relish.

Wow, that looks great. That is a proper hot dog.

-It's called a Georgia hot, a little spicy.

-Are your hot dogs the best?

-It's the best in town, right here!

-Wow, are we serious? Are these a dollar?

-These are a dollar.

-A dollar makes me holler.

-Can I get a hot dog?

-Oh, they want a hotdog. OK.

-They're really good.

-I want to get one.

-They're really good.

-Roast and sauerkraut.

-Thank you.

'But one man was about to make a startling discovery.

'In 1974 at City University in New York, a psychology professor -

'Anthony Sclafani - was studying appetite and behaviour.

'For his research he needed laboratory rats to overeat.

'However, on a diet of rat food it was proving a slow process.'

We were looking for rapid weight gain.

So after trying several different high fat diets,

I told my graduate student

to go to the supermarket and get food that people liked to eat.

We got chocolate chip cookies and candy and milk,

and they started to overeat immediately.

And when you saw them overeating, were you surprised? What was your feeling?

We were surprised by how rapid it was, and basically all of the animals were overeating.

And how quickly would the animals gain weight?

They start to gain weight immediately.

Like the next day they start putting on some weight,

and then each day it's increasing

until they reach a new level of body weight.

Given these sugary, fatty foods in abundance,

Sclafani's rats ate until they became obese.

And there's a reason why.

Rats share the same biological drive as humans.

They seek out high-calorie food in times of plenty

to ensure their survival once food becomes scarce.

We are biologically programmed to find foods that provide ready energy.

If we only eat a little bit of these foods,

or they're only occasionally available, there's nothing inherently wrong with sugar or fat.

It's just the abundance of it that makes it every difficult to resist.

It's there at every turn.

Some people refer to it as the toxic food environment.

'Sclafani's research held within it a serious warning,

'the behaviour he observed in rats would be repeated in humans.

'For the food industry it represented a lucrative opportunity.

'It now knew what Sclafani knew.'

What we find hardest to resist are foods rich in sugar and fat.

And by the late '70s,

Americans were being offered these foods in ever larger portions.

Back in Britain, the fast-food revolution was yet to take off.

In the 1970s, less than 2% of adults were obese.

Family meals were still eaten at home.

But when Wimpy imported the American diner style restaurant,

with its menu of burgers and fries,

it opened up a whole new way of eating.

As marketing director at Wimpy,

Peter Smale helped pioneer the change.

'We find it is amazing how quickly people get used to'

this new style of food.

They don't need very much educating

and the kids love it straight away, there's no doubt about that.

It's the thing of the future.

In America, all hamburgers are sold in this way.

But it was the arrival of McDonald's in Britain

that was to really transform the way Britons ate.

What happened was that McDonald's, when they first came in,

held the price of the main products, the burgers, for year after year.

And that meant that the food became much more competitive in price

and people could afford to eat out more.

Suddenly it wasn't an expensive experience to take the family

to eat in a fast-food place.

Another huge change was on the way that would boost profits.

It was all to do with speed - counter service.

-Eat in or takeaway?

-Eat in, love.

This is the site where the first Wimpy counter service

was opened in about 1980.

We realised that McDonald's were serious and so we decided

that we had to respond and build our own counter service system.

It was so much faster at serving customers.

It had much higher sales potential

and it allowed us to serve a lot more people.

In a store this sort of size,

you could cope with £1 million worth of sales.

Whereas if it was table service,

£200,000 or £300,000 would be the most you could take.

-That's in a year?

-In a year, yes.

The fact that you were taking five or six times as much money

simply as a result of bringing in counter service,

that was like Fordism or something.

It's like the invention of the motorcar, you know.

It transformed the whole industry.

Pressure to supersize came from an unexpected quarter.

In the 1980s, one of the world's largest suppliers

of fast-food packaging - the Sweetheart Cup Company -

sent out this marketing material to British restaurants.

They said offering larger cup sizes

could be an easy way to boost sales and profits.

The packaging giant urged the fast-food industry to sell customers

the idea that bigger sizes give them more for their money.

They promised that their bigger packaging

would make customers hungry for bigger portions.

They'd realised that companies can make more money

by upselling - offering bigger portions.

Obviously they made more money as a supplier out of selling bigger cups.

So it's kind of a virtual circle

that if they could encourage the caterers in this country, cafe operators,

to use and offer bigger portions, then everybody won.

The idea of having the three sizes would be that it gives the customer

choice and the staff can ask a question like,

"Is that the large size?"

which is much easier for them to do. In those days particularly, people didn't feel

confident about upselling, trying to push people to have something else.

Whereas if it was just a choice of three

and they assumed the large one, that was simple.

You know, it didn't put pressure on the staff.

So was there any sense that this was something that could be bad,

or that, um, this would have any impact? Was there any debate at all?

No. In the '70s, nutrition was about getting more into people, you know.

It was not that long after the war

and there was no concern about obesity.

It was important that people got enough nutrition.

And so when these sort of initiatives were started,

I don't recall there being a single comment

about it being bad for the family or bad for the kids.

Across Britain, the new counter-service restaurants

offered faster food for a faster lifestyle.

People had ready access to cheap food on the go.

When I was small,

people would really frown upon you if you were eating on the streets.

That was really not the thing to do. And now,

I'll sometimes see people having a three-course meal on the train.

Um, it's quite extraordinary the way that social norms have changed.

BIG BEN STRIKES

The irony was that as fast food was taking off in Britain

in the 1980s, in America the market was stagnating.

But Tex-Mex chain Taco Bell had the answer...

..using a form of discounting known in the industry as bundling,

it launched the value meal.

It was an innovation that dramatically increased

the amount of calories being consumed.

Bundling is a way that restaurants are able to bring together

more items from different meal parts, so bringing into it a starter,

a main dish sometimes, a desert

and then a beverage in order to bring the check average up,

get consumers to spend more

and increase sales revenue for the restaurant.

McDonald's didn't want to bring in the value meal,

but by the late '80s food companies were under intense pressure

from shareholders on Wall Street.

With profits down, McDonald's had no choice but to make changes.

Hank Cardello is a former director of marketing at Coca-Cola,

which supply drinks to the burger chain.

When the fast-food restaurants first started

and you would look up on the menu panel,

it was just all individual items up there and it was very inefficient.

People would back up and try and figure out what they wanted

and all of a sudden they started losing customers cos the lines got too long.

Value meals offered a means of speeding up service.

In our effort to try to move people through there quickly,

so they didn't spend a lot of time in lines, we would chase seconds.

That was a big part of it.

Every 15 seconds that you reduce

in the time of delivery of that meal to the consumer...

..adds 1% growth to the company.

Those 15 seconds would equate

to an extra £290 million of profits in today's figures.

It was a win/win for fast-food chains.

Customers had an incentive to buy more food, and profits soared.

We might offer a combo meal where we had a hamburger, some fries,

a beverage.

And let's say it cost me an extra quarter

and maybe I only charge an extra 50 cents for it,

so you get a great deal -

you get three things for just an extra 50 cents.

But now they have this tray in front of them

that has three items, and I just paid for this, I'm going to eat it.

Even if I don't necessarily need to eat it all.

So if I'm looking at all these extra French fries,

which maybe I might not have ordered, it's in front of me.

SULTRY MUSIC

the value meal was rolled out globally.

'You know you want the luscious taste of McDonald's big Mac...'

Within three years it accounted for almost half of all meals sold.

'The Colonel's crazy combo from just 2.95 -

'choose from three different combos, burger, chips and a drink from 2.95

'or chicken, chips and a drink for 2.95.'

Three, two, one, go!

And still the meals got bigger.

'Wendy's super value menu has lots of delicious food, fries, drink...'

under constant pressure from Wall Street to produce more profits,

McDonald's rolled out a new super-size menu.

In 1993 when Jurassic Park the movie came out

and it was introduced with McDonald's and co-marketed...

'In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are on the loose,

'but in McDonald's you can find them...'

they actually came out with what they called dino sizes,

which was an early introduction of super sizing.

'Six Jurassic Park collector cups, get one free

'when you buy are large drink or dino-sized extra value meal.'

The promotion was so successful that super sizing became a fixture

on the menu and was rapidly adopted by other restaurant chains.

Big Mac meal and a chocolate shake please.

People over-consume,

some husbands say their wife over-consumes jewellery.

Others say they over-consume alcohol,

drugs, food, clothing, cars.

Over-consumption is a proud part of being an American.

Today, in his own restaurant, Donahue serves what he calls

right-sized portions of healthy food, each just 600 calories.

But he is constant in his defence of McDonald's.

Value is good.

Most people really respect value,

most people are looking for value in everything they do,

so we thought we were doing a great service for our consumer.

We knew that a family on a budget with appreciate the value.

When buying a meal, customers of McDonald's were now asked,

"Do you want to super-size that?"

-Here you are, sir, a two-door spec.

-Spec?

Corporate America's drive for profit

was creating ever-larger portions.

McDonald's would later drop the super-sized meal

blaming poor sales.

-Super-size me.

-Sure, what would you like?

I don't care, just super-size me.

We had big changes in the environment.

It was a time when people were becoming increasingly conscious

of super-sizing, and seeing that often the larger portion

was offered at a proportionally lower cost.

It was often a good deal to go large.

People fooled themselves that that was good value for money

because if they ate a big deal now and paid relatively little,

they would need less food later.

This is the Super Big Gulp, also known as the double gulp.

It used to be the big gulp,

but that wasn't big enough so now we have a double gulp.

It's nearly two litres of Coke in here.

That's a third of a man's daily calorie intake.

More calories in here than in a meal.

This is the American snack.

That's a bucket, I can hardly hold the thing.

And to go with it, a packet of crisps.

As drinks sizes got bigger,

more and more sugar poured into the American diet.

Portion sizes have more than doubled.

In fact they are about 2 to 5 times larger than they were in the 1950s.

To get you a couple of examples, taking McDonalds

which is the largest fast-food chain, a typical soda was seven ounces,

this is eight ounces so it was a little bit smaller than this.

That was an adult size?

This was an adult size, and it was the only size they had available.

And then, this is a small,

which is double, this is the medium,

and then we have this is the large.

So this 32 ounce fits about a quart of soda.

And so, in the 50s, this was pretty much the only size available?

Exactly.

But you can, not necessarily with McDonald's, but you can buy this.

Yes, this double gulp is 64 ounces of soda, and without too much ice,

it is about 800 calories and nearly 50 teaspoons of sugar.

-Wow.

-Yeah.

-So, we have travelled from this in the '50s, to this.

-Yes, exactly.

If we compensated for eating larger portions by consuming less later,

it wouldn't matter how much we eat or drink in a sitting.

It was this assumption that exonerated the food industry

from selling larger portion sizes.

But controlled studies show the exact reverse to be true.

-So, is this for both of us?

-I think this is just one portion.

-Oh, OK.

Good luck. I hope you're hungry!

In the late 1990s, Professor Barbara Rolls was the first nutritionist

to analyse how portion size contributed to obesity.

We did a study in my lab where we increased the portions

of everything everyone was served by 50 percent over 11 days.

I could not believe the results,

the people just kept overheating day after day by about 400 calories.

Over the 11 days the accumulated almost 5,000 extra calories.

That is enough to put on over one pound of body weight.

And most of them didn't even notice that they were getting

the bigger portions, that is the really scary thing.

-So, the bigger portion, the more you will need as a result of having a bigger portion?

-Right.

Professor Rolls found that people were even more likely to eat

larger portions if the food was rich in calories,

so-called energy-dense foods like chocolate.

Energy density is the calories that are packed into each bite,

so it is calorie-dense - it is the same as energy dense.

When you are eating big portions of calorie-dense foods,

you are really at huge risk of overheating.

What we found is that people tend to eat a very consistent weight

or volume of food, so if you're packing more calories

into that weight or volume,

you're overeating without even knowing

-So there is a double whammy there?

-A double whammy, yes.

The two influences independently combine to jack up your intake,

so, calorie-dense foods and big portions mean your sunk.

You're going to be overheating.

But as rival food companies vied to offer consumers better value

and more food, these warnings were ignored.

Everything was getting bigger in America.

Super-sizing was being implemented everywhere,

in restaurants and in supermarkets.

Big hadn't come to Britain yet, but it was about to.

Britain had got a taste

for the American style of eating outside the home.

But it was a new marketing concept

that would push up our calorie intake.

The agency I worked at,

we advertised Cadbury

and we created the commercial,

a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat.

# A finger of fudge is just enough...#

Advertising creatives like Brian Watson

began to persuade families that giving their children

fattening snacks between meals was a good thing to do.

One ad in particular for a brand-new chocolate bar

did for Britain what super sizing popcorn

had done for fast food in America.

It proved to be an opening salvo in a battle between

chocolate manufacturers to upsize chocolate bars.

Suddenly, Yorkie changed the game plan.

They change the rules because everyone started

running around thinking we've got to make a bigger bar.

We've got to make a bigger bar that looks more like one of those

bars that people eat all to themselves.

# Good rich and thick, a milk chocolate brick... #

Which is what they did. Cadbury then it came out with Cadbury's chunky,

but suddenly the market was for something much chunkier, much bigger.

That was the outcome of the advertising.

What's amazing is that when you watch the Yorkie ads today,

the Yorkie bar looks small.

Yes, because they've gone bigger and bigger and bigger.

It didn't stop there.

In 1985 Mars launched its 100g bar.

'Even more milk, more glucose, more sugar...'

Twix and Snickers also put on weight and calories.

But these bars targeted adults.

Through advertisers,

food manufacturers like Cadburys were finding new ways of

increasing the amount of chocolate children ate during the day.

They had this very successful box of chocolate biscuits,

Cadbury's fingers, so, OK, how do you sell more of those?

How do we get kids to eat more?

The ad campaign that we did

was based on giving kids the excuse to eat one.

It was called Harry the spider's coming out party.

My mum always gets the Cadbury's fingers out

when there's a birthday in the house.

There's been a lot of birthdays lately.

Yesterday was Napoleon's birthday...

And, he says, "All of my soldiers had a birthday last week."

Even the Fifth Battalion have had birthdays lately.

The whole lot of them!

And that culminates in the very last thing, another excuse for him

to have more Cadbury fingers, is he opens a matchbox

and he just sneakily says to the camera...

And today is Harry the spider's coming out party!

So, what we were doing was giving those kids the excuse

to have a treat much more often than they would have done.

There was now an excuse to eat them every day, at any time.

and they became part of the school lunchbox.

Was there an intention to target the lunchbox by advertising?

The psychology there was to plant that thought into Mum's head,

Put it in the lunchbox.

As we came to see snacks as a normal part of a children's diet,

sales rose and so did their weight.

By the mid-'90s, more than 1 in 10 children were obese.

Back in the '80s, Professor Philip James has been one of the first

to identify obesity as a growing health risk.

By 1996, the Government could no longer ignore the problem.

Tessa Jowell, Minister for Public health,

asked Professor James to produce a report on childhood obesity.

He studied the food that British children were eating and buying.

The results were startling.

I suddenly discovered that actually, children were in a very new world.

They were actually coming to school,

and we could document that they spent,

from memory I think it was £136 million a year,

buying confectionery and soft drinks and so on,

on their way to and from schools.

And I was horrified by what they were actually eating.

Professor James produced a list of proposals.

He urged government to look at the effect of advertising

on the food children were eating.

We had unanimous approval.

I took it to the deputy chief medical office of health

and the chief medical office of health, and it went to Tessa Jowell.

What did she say?

Complete silence, and then suddenly I was asked to come to see her

and I thought, at last we are going to get going.

And she said, "Thank you for your report,

"it's really an extreme document, isn't it?"

I said, "What?"

And she said, "I think the Food

"and Drink Federation is anxious to talk to you."

The next day Professor James says he was invited to dinner with

the Food and Drink Federation - the body representing the food industry.

And I was suddenly confronted by,

I think 14 chief executives of British business,

and I was harangued for four hours

as to why on Earth I would even think about limiting

advertising to children

when it was the parents' duty to work out what was required,

and they had a basic right to advertise to children.

What happened to your report?

The report was never published by the Department of Health, it was shelved.

Tessa Jowell says she doesn't agree that the report was widely

welcomed by officials,

adding that it was not unusual for a report to remain unpublished.

As minister for public health, she was later instrumental

in restricting adverts for junk food during children's TV programmes.

But Professor James was right to be concerned.

Six years later, in 2003,

the country's chief medical officer warned of an obesity timebomb

and called on food manufacturers to behave responsibly.

With the spotlight on the food industry,

the Parliamentary Health Committee called an inquiry.

Former Labour MP David Hinchcliffe chaired the committee.

I don't think I appreciated,

until we got into the detail of this inquiry, quite how powerful the food

industry is in this country and quite how big a challenge we've got

to get them to take responsibility

for what they actually do sell to people.

Super-sizing was high on the agenda, but under cross-examination,

food companies including McDonald's, Pepsico and Cadburys were defensive.

The regular comment was there is no such thing as bad food.

But the committee demanded changes to protect public health.

David, what were your recommendations?

well, we felt that the industry should look at ending

the policy of super-sizing.

I think our mistake was to suggest this was a voluntary

arrangement that could be agreed with the industry.

Left to police itself,

the food industry was unlikely

to restrict the sale of super-size products,

which were, after all, among its most profitable.

The message we got from several of the companies was that

they felt we were looking at the wrong issues in interviewing them

as food producers and manufacturers.

Their argument, very clearly, was that it was inactivity, personal inactivity,

that was responsible for the significant increase in overweight and obesity in the UK.

Suddenly, the food industry faced an attack on another front.

In the city, investment bank JP Morgan

was concerned about how the obesity crisis would impact on investments.

The bank warned clients that legislation was coming,

and the food industry marshalled its defence.

Manufacturers fought legislation,

and there was an argument they came back to again and again:

We don't do enough exercise. We're a nation of couch potatoes.

But the idea that children were getting fat simply because they were lazy was about to be challenged.

At Derriford Hospital in Plymouth,

endocrinologist Terry Wilkin has carried out ground-breaking research.

It demonstrates that physical inactivity is not the main cause of obesity in children.

People believe that children's physical activity has gone down.

Everyone believes that. People who watch this programme will believe that.

Is that what you found from your study?

No. The assumption is that it is the inactivity

that is the cause of the fatness.

We've studied this very carefully, and we cannot find that.

But what we can find, is the reverse.

That the fatness, due perhaps to eating inappropriately,

reduces physical activity.

Professor Wilkin came to this startling conclusion after setting out to discover

why so many children were becoming dangerously overweight.

And worse, some were going on to develop type II diabetes,

a disease not previously seen in children.

-28 exactly.

-28 exactly.

Type II diabetes was something you got in middle age or beyond.

In fact, it was known as maturity onset diabetes.

And then by the 1990s, the Americans were reporting children with a condition

that only 30 years previously had been confined to late or middle age.

300 children were recruited for the study.

Each was fitted with an electronic device called an accelerometer.

This accurately measured their activity levels at every minute of the day.

It's got a little chip inside, a piezo electric chip inside it, which is sensitive to movement.

Now, don't forget, five school days and two weekend days.

-Take it off before I go to sleep?

-Yes, please.

And it will sample movement 10 times every second, 600 times a minute.

The vast majority of physical activity that a child does is unstructured.

Never gets recorded on a questionnaire or observations of this kind,

but it doesn't fool the accelerometer. It knows what's happening all of the time.

Each year, the information was collected and analysed.

A startling pattern began to emerge.

Children were no less active than they were 30 years ago.

But if children's activity levels had not fallen away,

why were so many of them becoming obese?

Nowadays, much of what children eat is processed

or comes from a fast-food outlet of some kind or another.

Added to which, they eat a lot more of it.

It's one of the really quantifiable things of the last 25 years, is the increase in portion size.

People don't talk about it enough.

There has been a huge increase in portion size.

Professor Wilkin's research challenged the assumption

that childhood obesity was caused by laziness.

But when he resented his findings to the Department of Health, they were ignored.

In 2005, the study lost its funding from government.

I think objectively it must be easier for any political system

to deal with physical activity as the possible cause,

because it's relatively apolitical and, in any case,

you can put it to the individual that you're not doing enough physical activity.

The food industry continued to market its oversized portions of sugary, fatty food.

By 2005, Britons were spending £8 billion a year on unhealthy snacks,

and more money on takeaways than on fresh fruit and vegetables.

Research in the US and the UK was mounting

that large portions encouraged overeating.

Once the evidence really strengthened,

I think we started to increase the intensity of discussions

with the food industry about how we could really turn round this culture of super-sizing.

The Food And Drink Federation drew up a manifesto

to encourage its members to be more health conscious.

It included pledges to reduce portion size and the levels of fat and sugar in foods.

King-size bars of Snickers and Mars where phased out.

Cadbury's, too, promised to make changes.

I met with the chairman of one of the big companies,

and we had a very intense discussion about food and obesity,

and particularly around portion size.

And by the end of the meeting, he absolutely promised me that they would take action on portion size,

and they would rule out some of their extra large or king-size bars.

And I came away feeling quite elated.

But there was a catch.

Hello, I'm here today to tell you about the new Wispa Duo bar.

The Wispa Duo bar is a perfect combination of right and left bar in one pack.

They did get rid of the king-size bars, but introduced a duo or a twin bar,

which was marketed as being designed for sharing.

Some people have found that they have a right bar where a left bar should be,

and a left bar where there should be a right bar.

I have to say, it isn't really as good as I had hoped for,

because I think that once people do have an opened packet,

I'm not sure how many of those do get saved for another day.

See, that's definitely a left bar. You can tell straight off.

You know? This is... That's a right.

Sharing was the new marketing buzzword.

Manufacturers insist the re-sealable bags were brought out in response

to consumer demand for larger portions that could be shared with friends.

But research clearly demonstrates that the larger bars and bags

lead us to eat more.

Does that look like a portion size to you?

Yeah, that is what a single-serve

bag of crisps should look like.

It's about 100 to 150 calories.

So we did a study where we actually use the typical sizes of bags

that are available, starting with a little single-serve,

up to family size.

Had five different package sizes,

starting with this size, the littlest,

and pretty much everybody ate all of that.

And we went up incrementally to big family-size bags.

As the bags got bigger, people ate more and more and more.

30, 40% more, 150 calories more, on average.

Then we looked at dinner to see if people ate less at dinner

to make up for the bigger intake of crisps,

and they did not compensate at dinner, they just ate the same amount.

Overeating at snack time is particularly dangerous.

It's likely to add calories to your day.

So snacking is a really key part of obesity, isn't it?

It's just added calories.

I think the bag gives you a certain cue that it's appropriate to eat that amount.

And people just keep going.

These kinds of foods are very moreish, too - once you get started, it's hard to stop.

But the battleground on obesity is shifting.

It's not just food manufacturers that continue to upsize the food in our shopping baskets.

Three quarters of everything we buy comes from the big four supermarkets -

Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury's.

The battle for our loyalty is fiercely fought,

and one of the weapons they use to get us through the door is multi-buy promotions.

So I wanted to see what you could actually get on promotion at the supermarkets on these deals.

And the first thing that strikes you is just the sheer amount of food that you can buy cheaply.

All the supermarkets are on multi-buy deals.

these are what the promotions are about.

So you might go in just wanting one thing,

but you end up just buying so much more because it appears to be great value.

Everything is about super-sizing by any other name.

I go in for one can of Coke, what do I end up with?

16 cans of Coke, because one can, if you buy 16, will cost you 25p.

I go in for one bag of crisps but what do I get?

16 bags of crisps, because if I buy 16, I get one for 14p.

This is what you find over and over again in all of the supermarkets.

Crisps, chocolates and sweets, fizzy drinks on promotion.

This is across the board at all the supermarkets,

and what they are doing is using super-sizing as a weapon in the price war.

Giles Quick is a leading adviser to the food industry,

and has monitored exactly how the supermarkets use multi-buy promotions.

Originally it was about shifting volume.

So you had access stock, and you want to get rid of it.

Now it's used very much as a tactical weapon in the battle for brand supremacy,

and indeed supermarket supremacy.

Supermarkets soon discovered that when on promotion, snacks, sweets and crisps sold rapidly.

In marketing terms, these products are called expandables.

Some product are more expandable than others.

What that means is, the capacity to consume them is greater.

If we think about a category like fresh meat,

if you buy more poultry, you'll probably buy less beef and lamb.

Overall, fresh meat is not terribly expandable as a category.

There are some categories that aren't associated with particular meals

and particular rules, if you like.

You can consume them any time, anywhere.

And those sorts of products, often snack food items, tend to be more expandable.

You can consume more of them.

There are fewer rules and rituals around them.

So if you have more in your home at one time,

you tend to eat them faster.

How many sales would a promotion like that add?

It varies enormously, but the figures can be truly dramatic.

Two, three, four, five, six-fold increase

in the number of sales during the period of that promotion.

And the promotion may often last only a couple of weeks.

The supermarkets have promised to help tackle the obesity epidemic,

yet at the same time they're offering calorie-rich foods on discount.

Last year, the number of multi-buy promotions

on crisps, sweets and chocolates rose by 138%.

Could you tell me what you consider to be super-sizing?

We will sell multi-packs of products, for example,

in stores to offer people value when they want to buy...

Do you consider that to be super sizing?

No, I think that's offering people value for money by

taking the opportunity to buy a number of products for a discount.

My point is that all the signing up to voluntary obesity charters is lip service,

that the reality, the hard reality in a recession for supermarkets,

is they need people through the door,

and they do that through products that are discounted

and therefore, would you not consider that a little bit hypocritical?

No, not at all, because actually, you know, we're offering people

the chance to eat a very healthy diet, which could include confectionery,

or could include crisps, with all the clear labelling, all the clear information

to eat a perfectly healthy diet, and that's what we do.

In the pursuit of profit, restaurants, retailers and manufacturers

have helped to trap us in a spiral of upsizing

that has us weighing in just behind our American cousins.

Back in the US, the land where super-sizing began,

one in three people are obese, and still they keep eating.

-Hi.

-Hi, how you doing?

-Good, thanks.

-What can I get for you?

-A doughnut, please.

-Doughnut? Sure. What would you like?

We have a sugar-glazed and half-chocolate one,

or just all-glazed one.

-Those tend to be the most popular flavours.

-They're the most popular?

What about, you've got peanut...

We got peanuts, we got coconut, we have crullers.

-I'll go for the big one.

-The big one? All right.

Did you want the glaze, or the half-chocolate, half-glaze?

-Half-and-half, please.

-Half-and-half? Sure, you got it.

-Would anyone actually order that just for themselves?

-People have done that before.

If they want to challenge themselves,

I've seen it done before.

But that's probably not in their best health interests.

But that's OK, I'm not a doctor. I'm a doughnut salesman.

-How much do I owe you?

-6.90.

-There you go. Thanks very much.

-Have a nice day. Thank you.

-Take care. Bye-bye.

-See you soon.

With America's annual medical bill for obesity

reaching almost 150 billion, there's growing pressure

for the food industry to shoulder some of the responsibility.

It's a sign of the severity of the problem that a nation

that prides itself on its free-market policies

is willing to consider taxation as a remedy.

Professor Stefani did all these tests with rats, you know...

'Yale University's Professor Kelly Brownell is a world-renowned expert in nutrition and appetite.'

Every business tries to maximise how desirable their products are

and they change the qualities of those products

to make people buy and consume as much as they can.

But at some point there has to be a responsibility clock that began ticking for the industry,

because it's been many years now that we've known that these foods

high in sugar, fat and salt are creating multiple health problems,

that if you intentionally manipulate these things

you'll maximise the desirability of them and therefore consumption.

And I do think it's time for industry to be held responsible for these.

In 2009, Professor Brownell led demands for a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks.

Sales of these drinks are falling, but health campaigners argue

that continued over-consumption of soft drinks leads to obesity.

The economic estimates are quite clear that this would decrease consumption of those beverages.

It would generate a lot of money and if that money were then used

for anti-obesity programs, you could have a very positive impact.

But soft drink manufacturers fought back, spending almost 40 million

on lobbying politicians to vote against the introduction of a soda tax.

My feeling is that we'll be replaying the tobacco industry experience,

where the industry wins the first few skirmishes,

and then attacks will pass somewhere.

I expect that within the next year or two,

and then there will be a lot of other places that will follow suit very quickly.

And my belief is that the industry knows this will occur,

and is just trying to fight it off as long as they can.

That battle has been partly won in Denmark and France

where taxes have been imposed on some unhealthy foods and drinks.

But in Britain, sales of super-sized portions of sugary, fatty foods are still on the rise.

What started out with a bucket full of popcorn, ended with an obesity epidemic.

History shows us that a handful of men

gave us an insatiable appetite for unhealthy food,

ever bigger, sweeter, and more available.

But one in four of us is now obese...

..And that figure is set to rise unless the food industry

and the nation learns to curb its appetite.

Next week I'll be revealing how the food industry sold us fattening food

while all the time claiming it was healthy.

If you live on organic chocolate, organic ice cream and organic oven chips,

you will get fat.

This is something I call the health halo.

It's the idea that when a food is marketed as being healthy, people think that it has less calories.

And as a result, they think they can eat more of it without getting fat.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd