How food makes us - 2024 Christmas Lectures with Chris van Tulleken 2/3

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Using explosive experiments, Dr Chris van Tulleken reveals how our food not only provides us with energy, but also the construction we need to constantly rebuild our bodies.

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

Watch lecture 1 here:
Watch lecture 3 here:

With thanks to contributors Anthony van Tulleken, Kat Arney, Professor David Ricketts and Indigo van Tulleken.

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In this lecture, Dr Chris van Tulleken 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.

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:

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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.

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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