Medical guinea pig for our health
Michael Mosley has been prodded, poked and scanned. He's fasted, exercised, dieted and put his body on the line in the name of science over and over again.
But after years of experimenting on himself in front of the camera in the quest to unlock the mysteries surrounding health, Mosley is still amazed by how little we know about our bodies.
The popular medical journalist will front BBC Knowledge's month-long season, What's Your Body Hiding?, offering his own unique perspective into health and the human body.
The trained doctor said he was always fascinated by what made people tick but it was meeting WA's own famous self-experimenter, Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall, who proved stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection by drinking a solution containing the bacteria, which put Mosley on the path to becoming a human guinea pig.
"Barry (Marshall) was fantastic because he was saying something that had a lot of science behind it but was not believed by the scientific community, he did it to himself, which shows a level of courage and commitment, which is fantastic," Mosley said.
"Until I met him I had not realised how many people in the long history of medicine had been self-experimenters and that fired me up and got me reading the literature.
"I realised that a lot of the anaesthetics had been discovered by people snorting and sniffing stuff and a lot of the breakthroughs in nutrition came from people trying different things, often with quite disastrous results. It was a colourful story and I love colourful stories."
The What's Your Body Hiding? season airs Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays from October 6 at 6.30pm on BBC Knowledge.
It begins with the Australian premiere of The Men Who Made Us Fat, and includes documentaries Supermarket Sleuth, India's Supersize Kids, Junk Food Mums and several of Mosley's programs.
Mosley said some of his results over the years had left him "gobsmacked". He swallowed a mini-camera for Guts, which airs as part of the season on October 22, and changed his diet and exercise habits for documentaries The Truth About Exercise, and Eat, Fast and Live Longer, which helped popularise the idea of intermittent fasting and the 5:2 diet.
"I think there is a huge gap between what scientists know, what doctors know and what the audience knows," Mosley said. "Health is the second most-searched topic on the internet. There is something like 50,000 diets out and most of them are garbage."
"It is important to find websites you can trust and if it sounds too good to be true then it almost certainly is."
