The 2024 CHRISTMAS LECTURES will be on BBC Four and iPlayer 29, 30 and 31 December at 9pm.
In this year’s Christmas Lectures, 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.
Chris will reveal how what we eat can have a massive effect on both our bodies and our brains. He’ll bring the science to life through a series of fact fuelled demos, special guest appearances, festive food hacks, and a healthy dose of self-experimentation.
From tastebuds to toilet, we’ll find out what happens in the body when we eat. How we eat with our eyes (green eggs and ham anyone?) and how smell and even sound can affect the taste of our food.
Chris will take us on a journey to the centre of his gut as he swallows a camera-pill to unpack the digestion process at every saliva-soaked step. He’ll reveal how we transform food into fuel – and into the building blocks of life – and how our digestive systems match up to those of our animal relatives. We will find out how many stomachs a cow really has, and why platypuses have no stomach at all. Chris will venture into the amazing world of the human gut microbiome and ask who’s really in charge: us or our microbe passengers?
He will lift the lid on our number twos – revelling in the importance of poo and how it offers clues to our health and well-being.
Chris will uncover how the food we eat, and our need for energy, has shaped almost every aspect of human biology and physiology. It’s affected everything, from our manual dexterity to our immune systems, to our tooth and jaw anatomy. As our diets have evolved, human bodies have also evolved to reflect those changes; and are still changing now.
He'll interrogate how our relationship with food has radically transformed in recent years. While humans have historically eaten thousands of species of plants, animals and fungi, the vast majority of our calories now come from just a few species. These are industrially processed into products whose effects on our bodies we’re only just beginning to understand. A typical teen gets around two thirds of their calories from these ultra-processed foods. And, globally, poor diet has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death.
Chris will reveal how he believes we can repair this broken relationship with food – investigating what we should be eating and joining forces with expert chefs and scientists of all kinds to cook up some weird and wonderful sustainable future foods in the Ri Theatre.
Featuring animal, as well as human guests, this year’s lectures will provide plenty of surprises, shocks and some truly gross moments. And there’ll be startling facts to chew over about how our modern food is made and what it’s doing to our bodies.
