Michael Werner looks normal enough. He's six foot tall, grey and bespectacled, weighs in at 12-and-a-half stone and enjoys playing tennis, socialising and jogging - three brisk miles before breakfast with his wife Angelica, a nice fry-up for her and a quick coffee for him.
All very ordinary. It's just that Michael doesn't eat. At all.
In fact, the last item of food that passed his lips was a huge helping of potato salad and a slice of cake on New Year's Eve 2001.
Michael Werner claims he gets all the sustenance he needs from the sun
Extraordinarily, the 58-year-old doctor of chemistry and father of three from Brunswick, northern Germany, claims he gets all the sustenance he needs from the sun. Oh, and the occasional coffee, fruit juice or a glass of wine if he and Angelica are enjoying a night out.
"I call it light nutrition," he explains. "But one can also talk of ethereal, Prana, Chi or cosmic energy ... it's all the same thing."
It's also known as Breatharianism, or the belief that the elements contained in air - nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen - can sustain a body.
So far, so daft. But Dr Werner isn't your average nutter. He's a bright, well spoken scientist who was so surprised at the consequences of his bizarre diet - just four coffees and two fruit juices every day for six-and-a-half years, plus that occasional glass of wine - that he's written a book about it called Life From Light.
"I'm actually a really normal person," he insists. "Not a freak, or someone with some amazing phenomenon - just a Joe Normal."
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