Michael Mosley

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.

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. 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, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College, Oxford, 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 TV called 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 called "Survival" and "Rebuilding Lives". These programmes described the recent medical advancements that allowed for improved treatment of military personnel injured during 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 lbs) 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;, 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.

5:2 diet
Mosley was credited with popularising a form of intermittent fasting called the 5:2 diet through an episode of the BBC documentary series Horizon called "Eat, Fast and Live Longer".

It was through this documentary that he learned about the 5:2 diet from neuroscientist Mark Mattson who published a paper on the diet with Michelle Harvie and 14 other scientists in 2011. In the original trials, the 5:2 diet does not follow a particular food pattern, but instead focuses entirely on calorie content.

In early 2013 his book The Fast Diet, written with Mimi Spencer, was published by Short Books.

The Fast 800 diet
Mosley advocated The Fast 800 Diet, a low-carbohydrate Mediterranean diet with intermittent fasting that follows a daily 800-calorie eating plan. His book The Fast 800 Keto combines a ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting.

Mosley's The Fast 800 Keto advises a three-stage diet plan for weight loss: stage 1, a very low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet; stage 2, a reintroduction of carbohydrates with intermittent fasting; stage 3, a low-carbohydrate Mediterranean diet.

Red Pen Reviews gave Mosley's book The Fast 800 Keto a score of 58% for scientific accuracy, but concluded that the diet "should cause weight loss and improve health in most people who have extra weight and/or type 2 diabetes, but some aspects of the diet may be unnecessary and make it harder to follow". The review also noted that Mosley's Fast 800 Keto is not a long-term ketogenic diet and the insistence on a low-carbohydrate intake for the long-term Mediterranean diet is not necessary.

Awards and honours
Mosley's 1994 Horizon documentary "Ulcer Wars" reported the link between Helicobacter pylori and gastric ulcers, discovered in 1983 by Australian scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall. He was named Medical Journalist of the Year in 1995 by the British Medical Association. In 1996 the programme was noted as one of the most important factors to influence British general practitioners' prescribing habits.

In 2002, Mosley was nominated for an Emmy as an executive producer for The Human Face with John Cleese. In 2017, Mosley was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science by the University of Edinburgh.

Personal life
Mosley married Clare Bailey Mosley in 1987. She was a general practitioner until 2022; they had met at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School and had four children.

In a 2019 BBC documentary on sleep, Mosley revealed he had chronic insomnia. His book Fast Asleep, on the subject, was published by Atria that same year.

Death
On 5 June 2024, Mosley went missing on the Greek island of Symi while on holiday with his wife. He left St. Nikolas beach to walk to Symi Town, approximately 2 mi away, where they were staying. His body was found on 9 June, on the rocky slope outside the wall of a private resort called Agia Marina. It appeared that he had taken the wrong path after leaving the town of Pedi. It was reported that his body was found after being spotted by a British journalist who was on a boat with the mayor and ERT TV journalists. The body was located 100 yd from a restaurant and 150 yd from an area earlier searched by his four children, who had all flown out to support the search.

An initial post-mortem established that, based on the position of his body and the lack of any fatal injury, Mosley had likely died from natural causes at around 4 pm on the day he disappeared. Toxicology and histology reports were anticipated.

Television
There are at least two projects that Mosley had either completed or was working on at the time of his death. The airdate of Wonders of the Human Body has not yet been decided by Channel 5, and it is unknown what progress had been made on a televised adaptation of Mosley's BBC Radio 4 series Just One Thing for BBC Two.