Vanita, partner since 2023 (Toronto, Ontario)
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This week’s fun finds
EdgePoint Football Club closes out the regular season undefeated
The squad showed that their chemistry extended outside of the office as they seamlessly integrated two first timers onto the pitch for an 8-2 win. With a 5-0-2 record, they enter the playoffs hungry for more.
Take them out to the ballgame
With the Blue Jays currently holding the last American League Wildcard spot, EdgePointers cheered on the hometown team against the league-leading Baltimore Orioles to a 4-1 win. Looks like the event was a hit!
Drake’s Korean moai
Drake called in a few favours at home and his mom made an amazing Korean meal for his moai (our version of bringing EdgePointers together for a meal). Several partners stated it was the “best they ever had”.
An ultra-processed diet made this doctor sick. Now he's studying why
Amid the global boom in diet-related diseases, including obesity and Type 2 diabetes, Dr. Chris van Tulleken, the author of Ultra-Processed People, made himself a test subject for a brief, one-month experiment.
Van Tulleken, an infectious disease physician in his mid-40s, swapped his normal, healthy diet full of fruits, vegetables, lean proteins and whole grains for foods that mostly came from packages, boxes and bottles.
We spoke to van Tulleken about his book and his research.
“Overall, about 80% of my calories came from ultra-processed foods, and that's very easy to do. Most bread in the supermarket is ultra-processed, almost all of our breakfast cereals and snack foods are ultra-processed, and most of our convenience foods are ultra-processed too.”
“I became very unwell very quickly. I felt terrible. I stopped sleeping, I developed anxiety and became very unhappy. I was the pilot patient in a study I'm running with colleagues at University College London. We found there were effects on my gut hormones. So inside all of our bodies we've got hormones that tell us when to stop eating. They're very well evolved. All animals have them and ultra-processed food interferes with those hormones. So at the end of a meal, my hunger hormones would still be sky high.”
“There is a very reputable scientist, Kevin Hall, in the United States. He ran a clinical trial and found that when people eat an ultra-processed food diet, they eat about 500 calories more per day, compared to people on a whole food diet, eating the same amounts of fat, salt, sugar and fiber. And there's a lot of epidemiological evidence that shows it is the ultra-processed food that interferes with our body's ability to say, "you know what, I can stop eating now."
“There isn't an absolutely clear boundary between traditional food processing and ultra-processed foods. We chop, cook, smoke, pickle, salt, grind, pulverize — we've been doing all that for millennia and we have to do it. So processing is fine. But ultra-processing is where food is made in factories. It's wrapped in plastic. It has strange additives in it that you don't find in kitchens. And the purpose of the food is profit. So, I eat cheese, but I don't eat processed cheese. I eat butter, but I don't eat margarine. I eat traditional flour bread, but I don't eat emulsified, supermarket bread.”
