TV doctors Chris and Xand Van Tulleken: ‘We had to see a therapist together because we fight so much'

Telegraph

26-03-2025

Doctors Chris and Xand Van Tulleken took themselves off to a therapist a few years ago. The issue was one another. Specifically, working together.
'It's intensely frustrating,' Chris says. 'We're business partners, but if you're twins, you have as your partner someone with all your strengths and all your weaknesses, so you're just a s--t team…We fight. We fight like Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones's Diary.'
Xand, his younger brother by seven minutes, takes issue. 'We bicker like children. We don't physically fight.'
Chris balks. 'We do physically fight!' He turns back to me. 'We get sort of flappy. Anyway, we saw this therapist who deals with people who run big businesses together, like in Succession. We spent quite a lot of money, and her conclusion was that we just needed to spend less time together.' He laughs. 'I was like, well, that's ridiculous.'
And so the Van Tullekens, 46, are left to simply manage their occasional spats. They and their producers on the long-running CBBC medical show Operation Ouch! came up with a plan: if tensions rise, one of them has to leave the room. Today we're ensconced in a tiny meeting pod at some recording studios in North London. So far, so amicable.
'Sorry, we've been talking about the bad things. It's important to say: it's nice being a twin,' Chris makes clear. They each have thoroughly independent lives, as well as impressive solo careers, both in medicine and media – not least Chris as the author of the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People and Xand as the resident doctor on the BBC's Morning Live – but people still blur them into one. This is despite being two of the least identical-looking identical twins around. (Xand, for anyone struggling, always has the beard.)
'Life is a constant nature versus nurture experiment as a twin,' Chris says. 'If you see your twin doing something, you know it's within your genetic reach.' Xand compares it to having an avatar of himself in the world. A readily available control group. 'Like, I wonder what would happen if I took up knitting? Well, if Chris takes it up, then I'll get the answer.'
This can make you lazy, he admits. Chris got a PhD first, so Xand, knowing it was within his capabilities, decided not to bother, yet still occasionally thinks of Chris's PhD as his own. At other times it's a comfort, such as when he spent a decade living and working in America while Chris got married and had children in London.
'I had this question about what would have happened if things had gone differently and I'd settled down in England, but I had my twin brother, who'd married someone great and his family was lovely. I felt he was a great model of how I'd want my family to be, and since he was like me, maybe I could get there. Now that's sort of what's happened.'
Chris's wife of a decade, Dinah, is a stylist and fashion journalist with whom he has three daughters. Xand married Dolly, an epidemiological researcher and policy consultant, last year. They have a one-year-old (he also has a 15-year-old from a previous relationship). But as Chris points out, there are even similarities in their choices of partners.
'Yes, you married someone with the same initials [as his wife], who's the same height, with the same hair colour, who's also one of three sisters, who also went to an all-girls' comprehensive, whose father was also an architect… There's these odd little coincidences. So yeah, he's copying me.'
They both laugh. This is very much their dynamic: sometimes the seven minutes that makes Chris the big brother can seem like seven years. Xand is perkier and prone to thinking aloud; Chris, drier and with a natural authority, tends not to be spoken over. A couple of times he lightly touches Xand's arm to implore him to listen to the question before answering.
They are both charismatic, gifted communicators, and answering our basic questions is the central theme of the Van Tullekens' work. Their next project is arguably the most direct public service yet. What's Up Docs?, a weekly Radio 4 show and BBC Sounds podcast, will see them attempt to clear a path through the mire of contradictory health advice, marketing nonsense and received wisdom to help us understand how to live well and worry less.
The first few episodes cover willpower, 'hangriness', knee pain, fresh breath, microplastics and sleep deprivation, but the idea is that it can run and run, the energy kept up by the twins debating a topic themselves (yes, there will be bickering) before an expert adds a bit of clarity. 'We hope we can resolve a bit of the confusion, or at least understand why things are confusing, and we want people to write in with ideas,' Xand says, working through a banana and a pack of nuts.
Between their TV work and academic roles at University College, London, they're already 'assaulted by questions from people of all ages', Chris says, which has made them realise how necessary a show like this is.
Is that confusion the media's fault, for declaring things panaceas one day, then the work of the devil the next? Yes and no, they say, but the problem really is that scientific journals do the same thing. The first thing they recommend is to look at who paid for the research. 'When you see a headline saying, 'Cherries do this for you', invariably it was funded by the cherry growers' association,' Xand says.
Red wine is 'the best example of something that can apparently be terribly bad for you and very very good for you, every day there will be two articles arguing each way on red wine. There is no lecture about it at medical school. But I have a degree in public health, Chris is more of a molecular biologist, and between the two of us, we can find some experts and attack it.'
Chris holds up a finger. 'Just to resolve the red wine thing: red wine is not good for you in any way. Drinking alcohol has some small social benefits that are best understood anthropologically, but in terms of its physical effects, it's purely harmful.' He sighs.
'But it's also important to say that on this show, we're not going to be saying, 'Eat your greens, don't drink red wine…' I think we're both somewhat libertarian in that sense of 'do what you please', but our only ambition is that you understand how that discourse is shaped.'
If you have knee pain, then, the Van Tullekens know your first instinct might be to reach for painkillers rather than start doing knee exercises, but they intend to explain why you might have been led towards the former. In fact, Chris says, that's another myth they're keen to bust: that running is bad for your knees.
'If you want good knees, you need to use them, and running will pump nutrients in and out of the cartilage. It will not wear your joints out, there's no evidence you'll have higher risk of osteoarthritis, you're probably making your knees stronger and healthier in the long term.'
I admit to them that, as a runner, I had swallowed this lie. I imagined myself pivoting to swimming in 20 years, hobbling to the leisure centre cursing every mile I ever ran.
'No!' Xand exclaims, 'swimming's a non-weight-bearing exercise. Everyone, but particularly women, need to do weight-bearing exercises, so weight-lifting, walking, running, this stuff builds bone density. Swimming's great, but it's not going to build your bone density.'
' Fasting is another good one,' Chris says. 'It's either really good for you [for weight loss], or really bad for you, because it loses you muscle and muscle loss is the main determinant of how fast you age. So you've got this extreme debate, but most people aren't able to fast enough to lose muscle, and aren't building enough muscle to have to worry about losing it.
'So it's the wrong argument to be having. In the UK, most of us are eating a huge quantity of ultra-processed food, and our health is more determined by that than our ability to fast between eating it.'
They are warming up nicely now. The good-point-making is almost competitive. Xand's turn. 'My wife, who's a massive expert in food policy, will say to me, 'What's the perfect healthy breakfast? What should a human eat for breakfast?' I'm like, I don't know. Chris doesn't know. We're doing to ourselves what the internet does to you, believing there's an idea of a perfect breakfast, and that's not the right way of thinking about it, but we can't help it.'
Look at continuous glucose monitors, Chris says. 'It intuitively feels like the right thing to do. We know people with diabetes benefit from maintaining healthy blood sugar and not letting it get too high, so it would seem obvious that the rest of us should stop glucose spikes.'
For a long time, Xand was one of those people eating too many UPFs. Throughout the twins' childhood and adolescence in west London, they were identically lean, with healthy and hearty appetites. Then, after his decade in the US, Xand ballooned to 19 stone, making him clinically obese. Tim Spector even called him 'a disgrace to [his] genes'.
Chris was judgemental throughout. Eventually, a therapist told them Chris needs to leave Xand alone. 'That set me free to change, and it helped Chris be less annoying,' Xand says, cheerfully.
Chris tries not to intervene. 'I work very very hard never to tell anybody what to eat. I have no food advice for anyone, and certainly not for anyone I love. But we used to argue a lot about food.'
Xand is sympathetic. 'We used to argue a lot about food because I was eating terribly unhealthily, and your family worries about you when you're doing something self-destructive. All that was very difficult for Chris.'
That's all behind them now. And they may not always agree when it comes to health and wellness, Chris says, but they do share the same basic thesis.
'The state of your health is broadly determined by the country you live in, then the city, then the borough, then the exact street, then which house.,' Chris elaborates. 'Also where you were born, your income, your friends…
'You're trapped between the genetic hand you're dealt and the structure of the world around you. And you've got this tiny bit of wiggle room in the middle where, if you play these cards a bit better, if you understand how these forces control you, you can manipulate them and avoid them.'
Unless the BBC halts them, then, they'll keep the new show going until they run out of health-related subjects they feel people could do with understanding better – if only to take more control of their lives. On that basis, it may go on forever.
'That's the dream,' Xand says, with a wide grin. 'I mean, Melvin Bragg's still going. Has he ever done the same topic twice? Probably.'
Chris weighs this up. 'Until death do us part.'