Diet: A Horizon Guide

Overview

Dr Susan Jebb takes a look through nearly fifty years of amazing BBC archive of mankind's relationship with what we eat, charting the shift from the malnutrition of the past to today's obesity epidemic. This is the story of our attempt to control nature through the wholesale industrialisation of food production in our search for enough to eat, and the consequences of that massive shift in our diet on the shape of our bodies, and the diseases that kill us. From the BBC's original eccentric scientist Magnus Pyke comparing the virtues of artificial additives to a Beethoven sonata, to the tragic side effects of diet pills, Horizon and the BBC have covered it all. On her journey through the decades, Dr Jebb explores how scientists have played a crucial role both in transforming the way our food is produced, but also in attempting to understand the biological mechanisms that determine why it is that some of us have become so large.

Episode Information