Should I Worry About...

Richard Hammond, the presenter of Should I Worry About...?, loves his takeaways and eats them at least twice a week. The average family will eat up to 10,000 of them over a lifetime. But what exactly is in them? Should we worry about curries, chow meins, burgers, kebabs and pizzas?

After the last series, we received hundreds of emails from people telling us about things they were worried about, and food additives were top of the list. People wanted to know what additives are and what they could be doing to us.

We are constantly bombarded by images of beautiful bodies and exhortations to sign up to the latest exercise fad. But what does it mean to be fit? And how much exercise do we really need to do?

It's hard to miss news reports about the three-in-one Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which has some parents worried. The media is saturated with stories about a controversial study, which links the MMR jab with autism and a bowel disorder, and anecdotal evidence from parents who say their children became ill after they were immunised.

In the UK, we drink nearly twice as much as we did in the 1950s, according to a report by the Academy of Medical Sciences. The price of alcohol has fallen and there are more places to buy alcohol, at any time of day, than ever before. What effect is all this extra booze having on our health?

We live in an age that is obsessed with youth culture, so the prospect of ageing fills us with fear. Should we worry about ageing? Richard gets worried about ageing when he sees photos from his mother's 60th birthday party. He embarks on a journey to see if we should worry about getting older and to find out what provision we can make for our old age and why society tends to undervalue the over-60s.