BBC Documentary Films

Documentary about three people with Body Dysmorphic Disorder - a serious psychological illness that makes people think they are grotesquely ugly. They are offered therapy with one of the country's leading BDD experts, Rob Willson, who makes them carry out tasks that force them to confront their deepest fear - the way they look.

Documentary which follows the progress of 12-year-old Natasha and 13-year-old Naomi through their treatment at Rhodes Farm, a residential clinic which treats children with anorexia nervosa.

Filmed over four months, the film intimately depicts their painful struggle to overcome their obsessive relationship with food.

Rachel is just 25, but already she has suffered six miscarriages. She represents the 1% of women who struggle to give birth to a live baby. She is a patient at St Mary's Hospital in London where, in Europe's largest recurrent miscarriage clinic, a team of dedicated scientists offer women like Rachel the hope of a precious new life.

Over a person's lifetime they are likely to be prescribed more than 14,000 pills. Antibiotics, cholesterol lowering tablets, anti-depressants, painkillers, even tablets to extend youth and improve performance in bed. These drugs perform minor miracles day after day, but how much is really known about them? Drug discovery often owes as much to serendipity as to science, and that means much is learnt about how medicines work, or even what they do, when they're taken. By investigating some of the most popular pills people pop, Horizon asks, how much can they be trusted to do what they are supposed to?

Documentary on Eating Disorders (Anorexia and Bulimia) originally aired on the BBC. Deals a lot with the possible Neurobiological causes of Eating Disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa, and the research being done in this area. Features interviews with MD and Researcher, Walter Kaye, as well as insights into the prevalence of Anorexia Nervosa in developing countries.

For thousands of years, what we now think of as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) was the only medicine; now, traditional cures are being treated with a fresh respect. For BBC TWO, scientist Professor Kathy Sykes from Bristol University Kathy Sykes investigates why science is starting to respond to these centuries-old remedies....

Louis meets parents who have turned to medication to keep their children under control.

In these first special programmes (2003), Louis Theroux returned to American themes, working at feature-length, this time with a more serious tone than in his earlier Weird Weekends work.

The story of a special train, the Lifeline Express. It is known as the Magic Train. With two state-of-the-art operating theatres, recovery rooms, offices and accommodation, each project requires a team of volunteer doctors, surgeons and nurses to give their services for free. For four weeks, cameras follow the Mandsor project as operations are carried out on poor rural people while the train is standing in a station in the middle of India. 

This is the truth about the world's most famous, most glamorous and most controversial diet. The Atkins diet says that eating fat can make you thin. It says you don't need to bother watching the calories. Rene Zellweger, Geri Halliwell and a host of other celebrities swear by it. But many scientists think it is scientific nonsense. Some even believe it is dangerous. Horizon cuts through the confusion and provide the answers.

It starts in the 18th century with 28 year-old Dr William Stark. Stark is a little-known hero of nutrition and the first doctor to systematically record the effect of different foods on his health. At the time food was seen simply as a form of fuel, it didn't really matter what you ate. To disprove this, Stark decided to live on nothing but bread and water, then slowly add new foods one at a time. He continued this punishing dietary experiment for nine long months. Tragically, just before adding fruit to his diet, he succumbed to scurvy. Stark died because he didn't know about vitamins and was unable to make the connection between his worsening health and the food he had been consuming. In fact, much of what we know today about which foods contain nutrients essential to our health is knowledge slowly and painfully acquired by self-experimenters.

Investigation series. Alex Riley sets out to find the ultimate nasty fish dish and, amid the cheap, cordless fish fingers and fake prawns, unearths a fishy world of waste.
Britain's Really Disgusting Food - Episode Three: Fish (BBC Documentary)

Alex Riley is on the hunt for the most disgusting dairy product. Along the way he discovers the cheap nasty dairy substitutes and that even milk, the purest dairy product, has its unpalatable side.
Britain's Really Disgusting Food - Episode Two: Dairy (BBC Documentary)

Alex Riley, the BBC's connoisseur of rubbish food, is back on the search for more disgusting fare, and sets out to unearth the horrors that could be in his meaty snacks.
Britain's Really Disgusting Food - Episode One: Meat (BBC Documentary)

Ray Mears is on a voyage of discovery into the lost foods of Britain's Stone Age, a journey that draws on all his bushcraft skills and knowledge of ancient ways of life around the world.
There's no place Ray likes better than woodland, and our hunter gatherer ancestors would have been just the same: making fruit leathers from hawthorn, feasting on wild boar and turning acorns and hazel nuts into caloric staples. Ray visits the site in Scotland of one of the biggest finds of Stone Age foods. 

Ray Mears embarks on a voyage of discovery into the lost foods of Britain's Stone Age, a journey that draws on all his bushcraft skills and knowledge of ancient ways of life around the world. 
Hunter gatherers rely on meat more than any other food, and their lifestyle revolves around the hunt. Ray shows how many meals a single deer can provide, finds seeds that can be made into biscuits for trail snacks, and samples the flavours our ancestors may well have added in their search for new tastes.

Ray Mears embarks on a voyage of discovery into the lost foods of Britain's Stone Age, a journey that draws on all his bushcraft skills and knowledge of ancient ways of life around the world. 
Wetlands were the highways of Stone Age Britain and a habitat rich in wild foods. Ray processes water lily seeds, tries spear fishing from a canoe and tastes plant matter from a pollen core thousands of years old. 

Wild Food - Episode Three: Wetland (BBC Documentary)

Ray Mears embarks on a voyage of discovery into the lost foods of Britain's Stone Age. He tries out the processes they might have used, finds connections with cultures around the world and tastes the foods of our forefathers, starting with those resources found near the coast. These were people who lived very differently, but were physically just like us and faced many of the choices we face today. 

Wild Food - Episode Two: Coast (BBC Documentary)

Ray Mears explores the lost foods of Britain's Stone Age. He travels to Australia to see how food gathering means so much more than just diet to the Australian Aborigine.

Wild Food - Episode One: Australia (BBC Documentary)

Want to know what food really does to your body?

 Forget the headlines, watch our intriguing investigations with 500 volunteers as we expose the real science behind the food we eat.