Next time you're draining pasta, don't pick up the bits that fall in the sink and put them on your plate. As 50 Shocking Facts About Your Food reminds us - there are more bacteria in your sink that your toilet. Cue a shot of a toilet bowl garnished with spaghetti and sauce.

And if the waiter wants to sprinkle some parmesan on the top, refuse the offer. What he's really asking is: "Would you like some calves' stomach on your spaghetti bolognaise?"

This programme could put you on an instant diet if you take notice of everything they tell you on a "stomach-churning ride through the supermarket aisles".

Salami can legally contain donkey, some breakfast cereals contain more salt than a bag of salted peanuts and one artificial sweetener has 96 side effects.

Japanese sushi is crawling with parasites, too much fruit corrodes your teeth, lettuce leaves make you fat. Even the humble potato causes coma and death.

And pregnant women who eat too much soya could give birth to ladyboys, as it can affect the male reproductive organs.

All this makes you laugh and shocks you at the same time (a combination that could be another way of killing yourself).

Various experts are called upon to provide evidence for the alarming facts and give some scientific veracity to the claims.

Your sink, by the way, isn't the only danger to your health. So is your fridge, where millions of harmful bugs lurk. Keeping food in there is like "playing Russian roulette with your bowels".

Not all the news is bad. There is no such thing as a beer belly, we learn. Alcohol doesn't make you fat but is an appetite stimulant, so it makes you want to eat and that makes you fat.

Too much coffee is bad for you - although you'd have to drink 100 cups in four hours for it to be really bad - but it can strengthen your sperm, and ketchup could prevent prostate cancer.

Sometimes you don't need to give up food that's bad for you as circumstances conspire to put you off it anyway. The woman who found two dead baby mice in a sliced loaf probably didn't eat a sandwich for some time.

As you drink your red wine (could be infected with BSE) and eat your plutonium-polluted seafood accompanied by a bagged salad (washed in 20 times more chlorine than is in a swimming pool), you might want to consider the number one shocking fact: that British kids are full of crap. Literally.

Despite the best efforts of Jamie Oliver, they're still hooked on burgers and chips. More and more young people and teenagers are becoming constipated for, in a few exceptional cases, as long as six weeks.

"Some teenagers are so constipated, they are throwing up their own s**t," says one expert.

Which brings us to Zach, George, Rochel and Gareth. These four youngsters are the guinea pigs on Mind The Fat, a documentary that aims to prove the link between being overweight and being thick. Many children are eating their way to the bottom of the class.

These four take part in a 12-week experiment involving a change of diet, an exercise regime and taking fish oil.

The eating habits of these children were as shocking as anything in the previous show under discussion.

Rochel eats sweets and crisps before breakfast. No wonder, at 11 stone, she's twice the size of the average 11-year-old.

Fries, chicken nuggets and chocolate milkshakes are on the menu for Gareth (another 11 stone 11-year-old). He was consuming the equivalent of 50 teaspoons of sugar a day. Asked what would make him run every day, he replied, "Money".

Zach (aged eight, eight stone) consumes 3,500 calories a day and three times the recommended amount of salt.

Only George (aged 11 and, yes, 11 stone) seemed to want to take the new regime seriously. He lost half a stone.

Before and after brain scans and intelligence tests are used to show if improved diet and more exercise makes them brainier and more attentive. It does in three out of four cases. Annoyingly, we're not told the odd one out.