The Truth about Food (BBC)

From DocuWiki

1 General Information
2 Cover
3 Information
4 Screenshots
5 Technical Specs
6 Links

[edit] General Information

Science Documentary hosted by Chris van Tulleken, published by BBC broadcasted as part of BBC RICL series in 2024 - English narration

[edit] Cover

[edit] Information

Dr Chris van Tulleken delves deep into our guts – to reveal the revolutionary latest science around what happens inside our bodies when we eat. He investigates how food has fundamentally shaped human evolution, uncovers the importance of our microbiome – as the extra 'organ' we didn’t know we had – and asks how we can all eat better in future, for the sake of our own health and the health of the planet.

[edit] From Taste Buds to Toilet

Chris follows the extraordinary journey food takes through our bodies – from the very first moment we see and smell a potential meal... until it finally emerges at the other end of our digestive tract. Be prepared for plenty of gross moments in this one-hour lecture! Prue Leith, the nation's favourite baker, drops by with some very confusing Christmas foods to help Chris crack the mysterious science of taste, and Chris's baby daughter Indigo is on hand as an expert food taster, to find out if we are born with the concept of disgust, or if we learn it as we grow up. To get a really personal view of the journey our food takes, Chris's twin brother, Dr Xand van Tulleken, uses an endoscope inside his own body. Chris then straps Xand to the spinning 'wheel of doom', to test whether it's possible to eat upside down. He inflates a stomach to discover how much food it can hold, before revealing that the small intestine is really very big, as he spills his guts right across the lecture theatre. He meets a goat that's powered by trillions of microscopic bugs in its stomach, and finally, Chris enlists members of the audience to find the right ingredients for a perfect poo.

[edit] How Food Makes Us

Chris investigates how we get energy from our food and how what we eat makes us who we are. He reveals how combustion engines get their energy in a series of controlled explosions – which he demonstrates using a kitchen cupboard of different foods. As the bangs get bigger, it becomes clear that our bodies can't get their energy in the same way. Luckily, Chris shows us our bodies are much cleverer than even the most advanced engine. He takes us inside a cell in the human body, to explore the most remarkable power station on the planet: the mitochondria. This extraordinary piece of biological engineering extracts energy from food we eat and turns it into fuel for all the organs in our body. Shockingly, we discover how this process generates an electrical charge equivalent to lightning, inside our bodies! Our food does more than fuel us – it also builds and repairs us, providing construction material we can use to regenerate almost every cell in our body. Chris attempts to compile all the ingredients that make up a human body – including some rare elements known to be vital, such as the teaspoon of iron that makes our blood red and our snot green. We source many of these elements from our food, so Chris explores what can go wrong with our bodies when our diets don't supply what we need. Eating the right things is a delicate balancing act. Experiments show that animals, when given a broad selection of foods to eat, are very good at choosing what their bodies need. Using the results of a unique 100-year-old experiment, Chris asks if we humans might be able to do the same. He ends his lecture with an important question for many of us: why are humans getting bigger as a species? Is it the food we eat? Or the more sedentary lifestyle we are leading compared to our ancestors? In the best Christmas Lectures tradition, Chris will use gunpowder to demonstrate the surprising answers to these questions.

[edit] The Big Food Hack

What did the very first meal on earth look like? To begin his third and final Christmas Lecture in an explosive fashion, Chris takes us back more than four billion years, to the beginnings of life. This was when microscopic bugs first began eating gases and metal, marking the start of an incredible food web which, billions of years later, humans have learned to master. For tens of thousands of years, we've improved and hacked our foods, resulting in an extraordinary range of things we can eat. Chris reveals that we are the only species that processes and cooks our food – and he explores why this has given us more than one evolutionary advantage over other mammals. Using some ingenious experiments – including making unmeltable ice cream - Chris demonstrates why a drive to make cheaper and more accessible meals has led to a new age of industrially produced foods, including some which can confuse our bodies' feedback mechanisms. But the modern science of food processing hasn't only created problems – it also offers solutions. To explore ways to improve our food system, and to wrap up this year's Christmas Lectures, Chris assembles an expert panel of scientists. With the help of the Royal Institution's young audience, together they set about finding ways to rediscover just how amazing our food really is.