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Whole Body, The (8/8)

This is also part of this series: Don't Die Young (8)

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Subjects: Anatomy, Health Issues, Human Body, Medicine, Nutrition, Science

Grade Level: SrH-Adult
Producer: BBC
Closed Captioned: No

Running Time: 30 mins
Country of Origin: Great Britain
Study Guide: No

Copyright Date: 2008
Available in French: No

Dr Alice explains how all the organs of the body work in unison together, even having a go at conducting an orchestra for the first time to prove her point, and revisits some of the people whose stories were shown in earlier episodes.

Pulling some of the common themes together, she explores the benefits of exercise on the human body. Taking to the treadmill herself in an exercise challenge at Liverpool University’s School of Sport Science, she discovers whether regular exercise can counterbalance the natural deterioration of our fitness levels as our bodies age.

There is also a look at how the latest medical technology, such as 3D scanning, will help doctors to diagnose illness in the future. At St Mary’s Hospital in London, Dr Alice meets Bob Marshall, a retired pilot from Brighton who owes his life to a health check using the new 3D technology. Scans showed up a life-threatening abdominal aortic aneurism (a swelling in the body’s main artery). After an operation to repair the damage, he now returns to the hospital where Dr Alice uses the scans to give him a futurist tour of his whole body in colourful 3D.

Dr Alice pays a visit to Lisa Garrity, the 34-year-old Londoner, to see how she got on with her pledge to give up smoking. The experience of seeing a lung cancer tumour being removed certainly frightened her at the time, but has she stayed off the fags? And there’s some emotional news for the subject of that operation – Christine Aughton from Wolverhampton.

However, Dr Alice insists that medical advances in treatment are only half the story; we also have to look at prevention – and for this, she feels the answers lie in our homo sapiens origins. Visiting the National Museum in Wales to see the oldest human skeleton found in Britain (a 29,000-year-old man), she points out that an analysis of his bones can tell us about his diet: berries, nuts, some fish, plenty of vegetables. “This young man would have had what we’d consider today to be an ideally healthy lifestyle. He would have had to be physically active every day to stay alive. He had a fantastic diet: low fat, low salt, high in fibre. He had no choice but to be healthy. Since then, our bodies haven’t changed, but our lifestyles are dramatically different,” she says.

So to have the best chance of living a long, happy and healthy life, we all have to try to eat a balanced diet and take as much exercise as possible. It’s as simple (and as hard) as that.

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