Obesity: The Post Mortem Page #5

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In order to do this job, you have to be

strong of stomach to start with,

but thats something you either

know or you dont.

I never would have considered

doing this job if I didnt know

I had a strong stomach.

I'm now removing the breast bone

or the breast plate, or sternum,

with upward strokes and this way I

dont damage any of the pericardium,

which is the sack that keeps

the heart safe.

The first time I saw somebody

doing a post-mortem

I think I was just absolutely rapt,

I was fascinated and it is because

the human body is an incredibly

complex machine.

To open a human being, to see all of that

absolutely perfect jigsaw of organs

perfectly in place,

it really did make me feel very awed.

When you do an autopsy on

somebody whos very slim,

the organs are there

and theyre very evident.

Its like a game of Operation or like

one of those anatomical models

that you would use at school.

In a woman this size, a lot of it is

really hidden by this extra yellow fat,

it is making it quite difficult

to see the structures,

much more difficult than it would

if she was a thinner person.

[Vinette] Before Carla removes

the heart and lungs,

Mike wants to take a look at the organs

while theyre still in the body

to see if well discover any early

indications of trauma or damage.

You can see the heart here.

Theres a large amount of fat

around the heart.

Theres more here than you

would see normally,

quite considerably more.

Underneath the heart and lungs,

in this area here,

is what you call the diaphragm,

thats a big muscle

that helps you breathe.

[Carla] Even the diaphragm seems

very fatty to me.

Even on the surface where the heart fat

and the diaphragm are meeting,

there is more fat than usual.

And actually the thing that you can

see most is an extremely enlarged liver.

This is very, very large, and its got

what we call fatty liver change.

So this is a fatty liver.

And a fatty liver is very much associated

with obesity.

You can see, theres a lot of fat

around these organs,

so what would be between my hands now

would be the kidneys.

Now the kidneys always have

fat around them.

I think its important while we are

talking about the fat to realise

fat is a normal thing.

Everybody has fat in them. However

thin you are, there will be some fat

and fat has got very, very important roles

and one of those roles

is to protect things.

Its the too much fat that is the problem.

Fat is made up of cells called adipocytes,

which are fat cells,

and really for a long, long time

until very recently, people thought that

fat was just an inert substance

that just sort of sat there and

didnt really do anything,

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