The World"s Very best Diets, Channel four, overview: foods for believed

Is an hour lengthy sufficient to travel the globe? Probably not, the producers of final night’s dispiriting documentary The World’s Very best Diet (Channel 4) should have agreed. Far better make it an hour and a half.

So it was at breakneck tempo that our presenters, jovial Jimmy Doherty and perky Kate Quilton, set off to locate the world’s healthiest cuisines. Experts – off display – had obligingly ranked 50 national diet plans by goodness. Occupying the sinful reduced half were the devotees of cola and corn-syrup: the Marshall Islanders brought up the rear, followed by Mexico, the US and Kuwait. At the end of each small segment, a didactic little voice summed up: “DON’T consume sugar. Don’t forget to consume vegetables. Do not skip breakfast.”

Overweight men and women of all nationalities waddled across the display incessantly until finally we reached the halfway stage at 25 and a trumpet announced the Dietary Equator: henceforth, stock footage would display only gamines.

I was a little sad to see the waddlers go what dispirited me a lot more, however, was the presenters’ cultural commentary, which began to downgrade from just banal to excruciating.

A section in Ethiopia was normally wince-generating. “This used to be a area of famine and Live Help but it is all considerably much better now,” grinned Doherty. The documentary was so “over” Ethiopia’s recurring famines (final critical in 2011) that it wobbled near the territory of that spoof Mariah Carey interview: “I’d enjoy to be skinny like that – but with out all the flies and death and things.”

Doherty challenged his Ethiopian host to eat an entire can of Green Giant sweetcorn with him and examine excretions the next day. The Ethiopian diet program, it turned out, need to be an inspiration to us all. But it did not make for inspiring television.

Our quick immersion in the creating globe turned out to be tokenistic. In the final analysis, it was “clever previous West”: the Mediterranean diet plan came in second. Gold went to Iceland. (Fish, apparently.)

Some of this documentary’s flaws lay in the crass execution, some in the concept. Television can do marvellous factors but if you ask it to tour the globe in 90 minutes, you have to expect to be served scene-setting cliché: the Eiffel Tower, cue accordion Christ above Rio, cue the Macarena rural Italy, cue – illogically, inevitably – Dean Martin.

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The World"s Very best Diets, Channel four, overview: foods for believed