Witness History Folgen

In 1977 a US government body first warned Americans that the food they were eating represented as great a threat to their health as smoking. A Senate Select Committee investigating the links between diet and killer diseases, such as Diabetes and Stroke, reported back that Americans should cut back on red meat, eggs,whole milk and refined sugar. Claire Bowes has been speaking to Nick Mottern whose idea it was to launch a set of 6 dietary goals for the United States.

In 1973, the most successful TV spy series ever to be broadcast in the USSR, went on air. The central character was a Soviet secret agent in Nazi Germany, Max Otto von Stierlitz. Dina Newman speaks to actor Eleonora Shashkova who played Stierlitz's wife. Photo: the script-writer Julian Semenov (l) and actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played Stierlitz (r), on set in Moscow in 1972. Credit: courtesy of Julian Semenov Foundation.

In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Economic Zones. The most successful was Shenzhen, which grew from a mainly rural area specialising in pigs and lychees to one of China's biggest cities.Lucy Burns speaks to Yong Ya, a musician who has lived in Shenzhen since the 1980s, and to ethnographer Mary Ann O'Donnell.IMAGE: Pedestrians and cars stream by a giant poster of Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen, the first of China's special economic zones. TOMMY CHENG/AFP/Getty Images