Joe Wicks: 'These foods are damaging our health — we shouldn't accept this as the norm'

Wicks plans to demonstrate how useless the legal limits on additives are by designing, making, advertising and selling a protein bar that is intentionally harmful to the health of those who eat it

Joe Wicks and Dr Chris van Tulleken in Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill. Picture: KEO Films

Well, that’s me never eating a protein bar again. Bars, shakes, powders and snack balls that promise a short-cut to a muscle-building higher protein intake constitute perhaps the biggest food-retail phenomenon of the past decade. And protein bars are at the forefront of the craze: this is doing us good, we tell ourselves, as we struggle to chew through a lump of uncanny matter that resembles a Mars bar from a malfunctioning factory. After watching the bracing campaigning documentary Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill, that illusion will surely, for millions of consumers, be shattered.

You know Joe Wicks, the baby-faced, curly bobbed geezer who popped up during Covid lockdown and became a star through his easy, positive approach to exercise, leading the nation in daily bursts of squats and star jumps. Now, he’s going down the Jamie Oliver route of using his success — we see the country house fame has bought him, and, boy, it’s a whopper — for good by trying to shame the [British] government into tackling a public health emergency.