TV review: Message in a bottle

Petra finds out what's really in our juice. Photo / Supplied

Petra did juice on the first episode of the new season of What's Really In Our Food? (Tuesdays, TV3) which might sound dull, but no! Because juice is such terrible stuff you might as well be giving your kids crack cocaine, or Coke.

I can't remember how many teaspoons of sugar there are in a can of Coke, but not as many as the 12 teaspoons in the can with the pictures of healthy fruit. As the demon Coke is much better for hangovers, I was very glad to hear it.

I don't think that was supposed to be the message. I'm not sure who the message is supposed to be for. Even I knew that sucking juice all day out of those silly bottles is bad for kid's teeth. And if even I know that, you'd think the only parents who don't would be the ones giving their kids crack cocaine, or Coke. And so who are unlikely to be watching programmes like What's Really In Our Food?

At the very real risk of sounding like Pat And Elvie, who had a cup of tea with Petra and talked about the old days when you could only get orange or lemon juice, in my day there was a craze for freezing what we called juice (powdered, coloured sugar dissolved in water) overnight then taking it to school. By lunchtime you had a lovely, half-frozen, slushy drink which was also good for squirting at boys. No doubt we all nearly died and should be able to sue our parents.

We also had pies for lunch, once a week. To be a pie monitor was a reward for being good. I was a pie monitor only once. I dropped the pies in the gravel (gravel! How dangerous), scooped the pie innards, and gravel bits back into the pastry shell and arranged the lids back on the top.

I still don't know what all the fuss was about. A bit of gravel never killed anyone. I used to make other kids eat dirt all the time. Which might or might not be proof that all the sugar water didn't do me any harm.

I liked the kid on What's Really In Our Food? who, given a choice of drinks went for the most sugary, because: "It's bad for my teeth and I like having bad teeth because I want to get all my teeth out to get money." He'll probably grow up to be the prime minister.

What's Really In Our Food? is very informative. Petra put on her cycling gear and took a swig of some sports drink. She'd have to cycle for an hour to work off the calories. This was good information. But I think I already knew, too, that unless you are a serious athlete, you just look like a tosser, probably a fat tosser, if you swig that stuff.

I can tell you that there will be no juice in our house. We don't need another addiction and I am swearing off one of mine. I've had it with America's Next Top Model. Tyra as fairy godmother, handing out makeovers while waving a wand was the final straw. Or having a transsexual as a gimmick was. She couldn't model and looked like a horse that had been rescued from the knacker's yard. This is exploitation of gimmicks and I hope people complained. I would make a complaint about Petra using those kids as cute gimmicky guinea pigs - giving them sugar water, tsk, tsk - but I'm in a hurry to get to the vending machine to get a health-giving Coke.