Michael Hugh Mosley (22 March 1957 – 5 June 2024) was a British television and radio journalist, producer, presenter and writer who worked for the BBC from 1985 until his death. He presented television programmes on biology and medicine and regularly appeared on The One Show. Mosley was an advocate of intermittent fasting and low-carbohydrate diets who wrote books promoting the ketogenic diet. He died on the Greek island of Symi on 5 June 2024 at the age of 67.
Early life and education Michael Hugh Mosley was born in Calcutta, India, on 22 March 1957, the son of Arthur Daryl Alexander George "Bill" Mosley and Joan Stewart. He had an older brother and a younger brother and sister. His father was a banker born in George Town, Penang, of partly Armenian descent. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Dudley Stewart, was an Anglican priest and Principal of St. Paul's College, Hong Kong, born to Irish missionary parents in China. Mosley's maternal great-grandfather, Gerard Lander, was Anglican Bishop of Victoria (Hong Kong). Mosley attended boarding school in England from the age of seven. After attending Haileybury College, a boarding and day public school (at the time for boys only), at Hertford Heath in Hertfordshire, he read Philosophy, politics and economics at New College, Oxford, including investment banking, before working for two years as a banker in the City of London. He then decided to move into medicine, intending to become a psychiatrist, and studied at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School (now part of UCL Medical School). He became disillusioned with psychiatry after a placement in the specialty during his degree course, and decided not to practise medicine after passing his final examinations in 1985. Mosley described himself as "quite religious" until around the age of 20 and considered becoming a priest.
Career After graduating in medicine, Mosley elected not to pursue a career as a doctor, but instead joined a trainee assistant producer scheme at the BBC in 1985. Mosley was a joint executive producer for a number of science programmes, including programmes with Robert Winston, The Human Face presented by John Cleese, and the 2004 BBC Two engineering series Inventions That Changed the World hosted by Jeremy Clarkson. His career in front of the camera began in 2007, when he pitched a series for BBC television titled Medical Mavericks and, unable to find a suitable host, offered to present it himself. He went on to present numerous programmes for TV, including Blood and Guts, The Story of Science, Make Me, and Trust Me, I'm a Doctor. In 2011, Mosley made a series titled The Brain: A Secret History on the history of psychology and neuroscience. During the series, while describing the methods that are being employed to identify the anomalies in brain structure associated with psychopathy, his personal test results revealed he himself had these candidate brain characteristics. Mosley presented a two-part documentary, Frontline Medicine, in 2011, with episodes titled "Survival" and "Rebuilding Lives". These programmes described the recent medical advancements that allowed for improved treatment of military personnel injured in battle in Afghanistan, and examined how these new techniques were being used in emergency medicine in civilian casualties in the United States and Great Britain. Mosley's documentary The Truth About Exercise, first broadcast in 2012, highlighted how different patterns of exercise might help achieve health benefits, the danger of sitting for prolonged periods and revealed how certain genotypes are unable to gain significant improvements in aerobic fitness (VO2 max) by following endurance exercise programmes. His own genetic type can gain many of the benefits of exercise, primarily improved insulin response, through short, high-intensity training sessions as suggested by the research of James Timmons. In January 2013, Mosley presented The Genius of Invention. In the documentary named The Truth About Personality, which first aired on 10 July 2013, Mosley explored what science can tell people about optimism and pessimism and whether people can change their outlook.
In 2016 he presented the BBC Four documentary Inside Porton Down: Britain's Secret Weapons Research Facility. Mosley, along with a group of medical specialists, presented a BBC Two documentary series titled The Diagnostic Detectives which aired in 2020. In the series, each programme is centred around the group of doctors who choose to tackle a patient's problem. In 2021, Mosley presented a three-part series, Lose a Stone in 21 Days, for Channel 4. On the programme Mosley suggested that people could lose a stone (14 lb; 6.4 kg) in 21 days by calorie restriction to only 800 calories a day. This advice was considered dangerous by some medical experts and the programme received criticism on social media platforms. Beat, a UK charity supporting those affected by eating disorders, wrote the following day that "the programme caused enough stress and anxiety to our beneficiaries that we extended our Helpline hours to support anyone affected and received 51% more contact during that time". Mosley presented the series Just One Thing on BBC Radio 4, in which each episode explored a single action a person could take to improve their health. Suggestions covered a wide range including reading poetry out loud, taking hot baths in the evening, playing a musical instrument, Nordic walking, and cooking tomatoes to increase their health benefits. The series launched in March 2021; as of 9 June 2024, 102 episodes had been broadcast with three more, sharing the title "Exercise Clever", scheduled for 13, 20 and 27 June 2024. These were later pulled. An interview he recorded at the Hay Festival less than a fortnight before his death was broadcast as part of the series and as a tribute to him. In it, he was praised as "one of the most important broadcasters of recent decades" and he confessed that he found it challenging to practise many of the health tips he had advocated on his programmes and that he had found the results of a personality test confronting.
Intermittent fasting and low-carbohydrate diet advocacy Mosley promoted intermittent fasting and was a low-carbohydrate diet advocate.
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