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In this lecture, Dr Chris van Tulleken investigates how we get energy from our food and how what we eat makes us who we are. He reveals how combustion engines get their energy in a series of controlled explosions – which he demonstrates using a kitchen cupboard of different foods. As the bangs get bigger, it becomes clear that our bodies can’t get their energy in the same way. Luckily, Chris shows us our bodies are much cleverer than even the most advanced engine.

He takes us inside a cell in the human body, to explore the most remarkable power station on the planet: the mitochondria. This extraordinary piece of biological engineering extracts energy from food we eat and turns it into fuel for all the organs in our body. Shockingly, we discover how this process generates an electrical charge equivalent to lightning, inside our bodies!

Our food does more than fuel us – it also builds and repairs us, providing construction material we can use to regenerate almost every cell in our body. Chris attempts to compile all the ingredients that make up a human body – including some rare elements known to be vital, such as the teaspoon of iron that makes our blood red and our snot green. We source many of these elements from our food, so Chris explores what can go wrong with our bodies when our diets don’t supply what we need.

Eating the right things is a delicate balancing act. Experiments show that animals, when given a broad selection of foods to eat, are very good at choosing what their bodies need. Using the results of a unique 100-year-old experiment, Chris asks if we humans might be able to do the same.

He ends his lecture with an important question for many of us: why are humans getting bigger as a species? Is it the food we eat? Or the more sedentary lifestyle we are leading compared to our ancestors? In the best Christmas Lectures tradition, Chris will use gunpowder to demonstrate the surprising answers to these questions.

This is the 199th year of the Christmas Lectures. They are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825 when Michael Faraday founded the series for children. They have become the world’s longest-running science television series and promise to inspire children and adults alike each year, through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.