Dr. Michael Mosley, who has died on the Greek island of Symi aged 67, explored health and fitness issues of interest to a mass audience. He was a versatile communicator, whether as a television diet guru, newspaper columnist or podcaster.
He became a household name for diet books that promoted calorie reduction and fasting, including The Fast Diet (2013), written with journalist Mimi Spencer. His work gained popularity thanks to his self-experimentation, which included swallowing tapeworms, magic mushrooms, internal cameras and – most famously – fasting to cure his own type 2 diabetes, diagnosed in 2012. He became a well-known TV and radio celebrity doctor, appearing regularly on The One Show for the BBC and This Morning for ITV. On BBC Radio 4’s Just One Thing podcast, he gave the nation health tips, from the benefits of daily spoonfuls of olive oil to the usefulness of the plank position.
Yet his own medical career was short-lived. Mosley, who studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at New College, Oxford, trained in medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in north London after working as a banker for two years. He wanted to be a psychiatrist and said he found people more interesting than finance, but was disappointed to discover “there were serious limitations to what you could do,” he told the British Medical Journal in 2004.
Choosing to make an impact through the medium of television, he joined the BBC training program as an assistant producer in 1985 and went on to produce documentaries based mainly on science, mathematics and history.
Perhaps his most glorious moment came with the Horizon program Ulcer Wars, which he made in 1994 about the work of Barry Marshall of the University of Western Australia, who was convinced that the bacterium he had identified was Helicobacter pylori was responsible for most stomach cancers and ulcers.
The story appealed to Mosley and inspired his own self-experimentation: Marshall had drunk a solution of it H pylori from a beaker in the 1980s and his stomach was colonized by the bacteria, which disappeared when he took antibiotics.
Marshall was right and later won a Nobel Prize together with his colleague Robin Warren. Mosley received more than 20,000 letters from people who had recovered from their ulcer pain with antibiotics. The film won him awards. “In a funny way, I probably did better with that one program than if I had stayed in medicine for 30 years,” Mosley said in the BMJ.
In 2002, Mosley was nominated for an Emmy as executive producer of the documentary starring John Cleese, The human face. He started hosting the series in 2013 Trust me, I’m a doctor for the BBC. His most recent TV series were for Channel 4: Who Made Britain Fat? (2022) and Secrets of your big store (2024).
The Fast Diet book, which launched the 5:2 diet, also grew out of a Horizon documentary. Eat, Fast and Live Longer (2012) was inspired by Mosley’s own diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to being overweight. The disease ran in the family. His father, Bill, had died of complications at the age of 74. Mosley came across the work of American neuroscientist Mark Mattson on intermittent fasting and adopted the pattern he advocated of eating normally for five days and consuming only 500-600 calories. the other TWO.
He claimed to have lost 20 pounds and reversed his own type 2 diabetes. Mattson appeared in the documentary, which is credited with popularizing the 5:2 diet. In 2021, Mosley published The Fast 800 Keto, which combines fasting with a ketogenic diet, high in fat and low in carbs, but letting carbs back in in the later stages.
Mosley’s diet work was controversial due to its focus on calorie reduction for weight loss. In 2021 the eating disorder charity Beat said of his Channel 4 series Lose a Stone in 21 Days that “the program caused so much stress and anxiety for our beneficiaries that we have expanded our helpline hours to support everyone affected and have seen a 51% increase in contact in that time “.
He said he suffered from chronic insomnia from his late 30s. That became the subject of another BBC documentary and also a book published in 2019 called In deep sleep.
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Born in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, Michael was the son of a banker, Bill Mosley, and his wife, Joan. At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school in Great Britain. Mosley said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald that his mother was heartbroken to send him to school, but his father worked in Hong Kong and the Philippines and wanted Michael and his other son, John, to become bankers like him . and that sending children to boarding school in Britain was part of the culture of the time.
His maternal grandfather was an Anglican bishop. Mosley said he came from a long line of missionaries, but “the closest I come to religion is incorporating fasting into my diet.”
Mosley met Clare Bailey at the Royal Free Hospital’s medical school, now part of UCL’s medical school, and they married in 1987. Bailey, who became a GP, was an active partner in Mosley’s nutritional work, writing recipe books for people suffering from started the Lenten movement. 800 diet and newspaper columns in itself. She told interviewers that she did not fast because she had never had to lose weight, and that she would hide chocolate from Mosley, who had a sweet tooth.
She survives him, along with their three sons, Alex, Jack and Daniel, and a daughter, Kate.