Building Your Brain • episode "S1E3" • Inside the Human Body

58:46

Maitre d' and Extraordinary Places to Eat host Fred Sirieix and GP Zoe Williams open a restaurant with a difference, welcoming 20 unsuspecting diners for a slap-up meal. It all sounds normal enough, but this restaurant has something unexpected back of house - a functioning gym, where a group of fitness fanatics are poised on exercise bikes, treadmills and rowing machines, ready to burn off every single calorie ordered and consumed by the diners.

Horizon • 2020 • Health

57:44

Fiona Phillips teams up with leading scientists to look at how to eat and drink to good health, and she uncovers some surprising truths. She reveals which cheap, everyday foods can give us all the benefits of so-called superfoods at a fraction of the price and why frying can be the healthiest way to cook. Fiona becomes a human guinea pig to test some of the top-selling health drinks and supplements. She investigates whether antioxidant smoothies really give us the healthy boost we think and discovers why multivitamin pills might do us more harm than good. In a unique experiment with scientists from Aston and Liverpool John Moores universities, she sets out to find the healthiest breakfast, and discovers why we'd be better off with bacon and eggs rather than cereal and fruit. To find out whether we can really detoxify our bodies, she puts some popular detox foods and drinks to the test and reveals why we're better off with fresh foods and the odd glass of wine.

2016 • Health

59:07

Two procedures so formidable, they would not have been attempted even a few years ago. Surgical teams at the Queen Elizabeth are constantly pushing the limits of what is possible. But despite state-of-the-art diagnostic scanning, sometimes cancer surgeons don't know exactly what they are up against until they open the patient up on the operating table. Even with the most meticulous planning, sometimes they must resort to taking critical decisions live in the theatre. 74-year-old Jasmine Harkness has been referred to the specialist sarcoma unit with a vast tumour in her abdomen, weighing more than three stone - a third of her total body weight. It is consuming her, displacing organs including her stomach and liver. Unless it can be removed, she has just four weeks to live. Sarcoma specialists Sam Ford and Professor David Gourevitch can't be sure whether they will be able to save Jasmine until they open her up and inspect her anatomy. Such is the risk of this surgery - five years ago they would not have embarked on this intervention. Sue Sinclair, lead anaesthetist and matriarch of theatre, keeps the others in check - working alongside them as they battle to detach the tumour from Jasmine's organs and blood vessels, and remove it intact. Whenever it presses heavily on vital blood vessels, Jasmine's blood pressure plummets, placing her life in grave danger. It will take unwavering focus to keep her alive. The tumour has grown so invasively that it has crushed and displaced Jasmine's internal organs. Sam and David have a puzzle on their hands to identify what and where everything is. At times, dark humour is the only way to release the tension as they grapple with blood, guts and mind-boggling complexity.

S1E2 • Surgeons: At the Edge of Life • 2018 • Health

59:12

For hundreds of years, psychiatry has treated voices and hallucinations as an enemy - regarding them as 'insanity' or 'madness' and seeing them as something to be quashed and even frightened of. But today, new scientific and psychological insights into how the brain works are leading to a radical rethink on what such experiences are - and how they should be treated. Horizon follows three people living with voices, hallucinations and paranoia, to explore what causes this kind of phenomena. Providing a rare first-hand insight into these experiences, they reveal just what it is like to live with them day to day. They examine the impact of social, biological and environmental influences on conditions traditionally associated with insanity, such as schizophrenia and psychosis, and within the film they look at how new ways of understanding the brain are leading to a dramatic change in treatments and approaches, and examine whether targeting the root causes of psychosis can lead to recovery. Above all, they try to uncover why it happened to them - and whether it could happen to you.

Horizon • 2017 • Health

58:49

In the opening episode, they explore how this chemistry fuels and builds our bodies. Michael begins by trying the first meal most of us enjoyed, human breast milk, which contains everything a baby needs - fats, carbs, vitamins and minerals. As we grow, we continue to seek the same chemistry in our diet but from a wide variety of scrumptious fare as Michael and James discover. In San Francisco, they unravel why sourdough bread is so good for us, in the Philippines, they learn how a river weed - rice - has become a comforting staple food, and in Bulgaria, they discover why letting your mushrooms sunbathe may help you get a calcium boost from your dairy food.

S1E1 • The Secrets of Your Food • 2017 • Health

46:49

Dr Ronx investigates why more men die from Covid-19 than women, a situation that has parallels with many other diseases, including SARS, cancer and HIV. The programme also looks into a dangerous gender data gap that risks undermining how women are treated within the healthcare system, leading to misdiagnoses and deaths.

2021 • Health