Michael Mosley obituary: television doctor whose work changed thousands of lives (2024)

Michael Mosley, who has died in Greece aged 67, was one of Britain's "most recognisable TV doctors", said The Times, known for his cheerful willingness to use himself as a guinea pig in an effort to make scientific topics engaging and accessible.

Although he said that his wife had vetoed "the idea of infesting myself with pubic lice", he consumed tapeworm eggs for the BBC documentary "Infested!", ate a black pudding made with his own blood for "The Wonderful World of Blood", and swallowed a camera for "Inside the Human Body", giving viewers "a never-to-be-forgotten close-up of his inner workings".

But, arguably, his most significant legacy was his popularisation of the 5:2 diet. In 2012, Mosley had gone to his own doctor, thinking he might have a cancerous mole, and was instead diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which is linked to excess weight. Declining drug treatments, he started to research the potential benefits of intermittent fasting. He found a scientific paper about the 5:2 diet – and persuaded the BBC to let him make a film about his efforts to cure himself of diabetes by following the diet, which involves eating normally on five days of the week, and consuming only 500-600 calories on the other two. By the end, he'd lost 9kg and his blood sugar levels were back to normal.

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The documentary was watched by three million people, and he followed it up with a book, "The Fast Diet", co-written with the journalist Mimi Spencer, which sold 1.4 million copies. As The New York Times put it, this sent Britain into a "fasting frenzy". Everyone from the food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to the then Tory chancellor George Osborne were said to have managed to shed pounds by following the diet. But the book was not without its critics: other scientists noted that there were no studies showing that 5:2 led to long-term weight loss; the NHS highlighted "gaps in the evidence".

Michael Mosley was born in Calcutta, the son of Bill, a banker working in Hong Kong, and his wife Joan. Sent back to England aged seven to go to boarding school, he read PPE at New College, Oxford. He started training as a banker but, after a couple of years, he decided that he was more interested in people than in money and enrolled in medical school, where he met his future wife, Clare, who became a GP and founded the website Parenting Matters. They would go on to have four children.

Mosley had planned to go into psychiatry, but after graduating, he became disillusioned by its limitations and, on a whim, responded to an advert he had seen for a trainee scheme at the BBC. His first full-length programme, "Horizon: Ulcer Wars", examined the possibility, mooted by the Australian scientist Barry Marshall, that stomach ulcers were caused not by stress, but by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Marshall was right, said The Guardian. He later shared a Nobel Prize, while Mosley received 20,000 letters from people whose ulcers had been cured by antibiotics, and was named journalist of the year by the BMA. "I probably did, in a funny way, more good with that one programme than if I had stayed in medicine for 30 years," he reflected.

In other documentaries, he looked into everything from cancer vaccines to the fate of those who died at Pompeii. More recently, he had made regular appearances on "The One Show", and hosted a BBC podcast, "Just One Thing", in which he dispensed health tips.

Mosley was on holiday on the Greek island of Symi last week when he went missing. On a searingly hot afternoon, he had left his wife on a beach and gone for a walk without his phone. It seems that while walking across the island to their hotel, he got lost, and that he then collapsed in the 40°C heat as he clambered down a rocky hillside towards a coastal resort.