From The Royal Institution.

Dr Chris van Tulleken explores the incredible journey food takes through our bodies.

This is the first of the 2024 CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution, supported by CGI, on the theme ‘The Truth about Food’.

Watch lecture 2 here: https://youtu.be/cpIB5ww32gM
Watch lecture 3 here: https://youtu.be/-y0P80W4S-s

With thanks to contributors Dr Xand van Tulleken, Prue Leith, Professor Claire Smith (University of Sussex), Professor Louise Kenny (University of Liverpool) and Indigo van Tulleken.

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Dr Chris van Tulleken 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.

This is the 199th year of the Christmas Lectures. They are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825 when Michael Faraday founded the series for children. They have become the world’s longest-running science television series and promise to inspire children and adults alike each year, through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience. Find out more here: https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures

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Chris van Tulleken is an NHS infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, one of the UK’s leading science presenters and a New York Times bestselling author.

Chris grew up in London and trained in medicine at Oxford University, specialising in infectious disease and tropical medicine. He has a PhD in molecular virology from Greg Towers lab and in 2016 he won the Max Perutz award for his HIV research. He is currently an Associate Professor in the division of Infection and Immunity at UCL, where his research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of child nutrition, and he works with UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.

Chris is one of the UK’s leading science presenters having worked on many flagship Health and Science programmes including: Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, Horizon, The Truth About…, Operation Iceberg, Cloud Lab, Museum of Life, and Blizzard: Race to the Pole, among others.

Operation Ouch, Chris and his brother Xand’s double BAFTA winning series for CBBC, continues to delight audiences around the world, with Series 12 being filmed in 2023. Throughout the series, the twins create fun and often disgusting experiments to help young people learn how the human body works. The programme results in fan mail from around the world from a young audience who want to know, above all, what they need to do to become doctors.

His concerns about antibiotic resistance and over-reliance on prescription drugs led him to create a campaigning series for BBC One in 2017; ‘The Dr Who Gave up Drugs’, and in 2018, he turned the focus of the topic to children with the second series, which received rave reviews.

Following on from the success of ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’, Chris investigated the impact ultra-processed foods has on our children, in ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ for BBC One. In 2023, Chris published ‘Ultra Processed People’, which became an international bestseller.

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