Over the past three weeks, this mad world of ours has taken a lot of good people from us - some well-known, others ordinary, both global (Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, Tim Curry, etc) and closer to home (Dr. Aung Min, Emma Bonino, the victims of the catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet).
All this - plus the latest confirmation that August 2026 was the world’s joint hottest month on record, while ocean warming reached a new high - has made me ruminate, more than usual, about how fragile all of this is.
This issue was planned way before all that, but I’m glad there’s a little bit of serendipity in giving the space to a colleague who fought his way back to life and did a massive public service by taking us along on that journey.
Last week, I gave you a compelling guest post from Thalita Pires, editor of O Joio e O Trigo, laying out the food system governance implications of the upcoming Brazil elections.
This week, we’re staying the course in Brazil, but in a different format: a Q&A with Ed Wanderley, Brasília-based editor for Agência Pública, another great, independent, investigative news agency we partnered with for Big Food vs. The People.
I first met Ed over a blurry computer screen - as many of us do these days - to discuss the investigation. I was instantly struck by two things: his warmth, which exudes from every pore, and his knowledge of the subject matter.
When I met him in person a couple of months later, it was like we were old friends. He was juggling two big projects - ours and a podcast tracing his journey from a near-death experience to getting fitter - on top of his daily responsibilities.
Both are now successfully completed, and I thought his personal journey and its professional aftermath deserved a piece of its own. Besides, I wanted to point my Portuguese-speaking readers to his narrative podcast, A Última Bolacha (translated as “The Last Cookie”).
Ed tells me the name is a popular saying in Brazil with two meanings: it can mean saving the best for last, or it can be a snarky way of describing someone who thinks a little too highly of themselves.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
THIN: Let’s start with how Paul McCartney almost killed you.
ED: I was at a Paul McCartney concert back in November 2023. He’s on the bucket list of artists I want to see and I’d already lost the opportunity to see him live twice before. So I didn’t want to miss it. He was 81!
It was great. But then I started feeling down. I thought it was dehydration because it was really hot and there were a lot of people. I had to go before the encore was over to the medical station, and they checked my blood pressure and it was really high. They gave me a pill, then another pill, but it wouldn’t come down. So they said I had to go to the hospital.
There, some markers in my blood showed there was something going on with my heart, and (the doctors) diagnosed it as a heart attack. Later they described it as myocarditis. My heart’s ejection fraction was at 36%, and they said it couldn’t go any lower than 30, because with my weight and my age, it could be fatal.
(Note from Thin: the UK’s NHS say an ejection fraction of 50% or higher is considered normal)
I spent 15 days in the ICU, and saw a lot of people die next to me. It was really traumatising in some ways. Up until then I hadn’t even broken an arm: I was obese, but I hadn’t had any kind of disease in my life.
I was really reckless - we write about how men don’t take care of their health the way women do, but you don’t really realise that until it happens to you. So I had to change my whole way of life - not just around food, but exercise, sun exposure, regular checkups. It was a whole transformation.
So the bucket list was fulfilled, but one thing that really stood out is that he was 81 and he was in better shape and in better health than I was.
He played for two and a half hours and he was jumping and I was feeling sick!
THIN: When did you start feeling sick?
ED: I started feeling bad about an hour into the show, but I was there with a friend who’d come from out of town just to see McCartney - he’s a really big fan - and I didn’t want to disrupt his experience, so I stayed as long as I could.
It was a huge show, over 40 songs, and when they hit the nine-song encore I said, “I have to go to the medical station”. I didn’t have any classic heart-attack pain - I only discovered what was actually happening once I had the tests done at the hospital.
THIN: What was your weight at the time?
ED: I was 36 years old, weighed 310 pounds, about 153 kilos, and I’m 1.73 metres tall.
THIN: You said you had to change your whole way of life. Tell me about it.
ED: So I spent 15 days in the hospital, and the food isn’t so easy back here, so when I left, I’d already lost like 20 pounds. So that was a jump start to the whole thing.
I immediately went to doctors and nutritionists and we came up with a plan I could follow. I started at the gym and changed my whole diet.
There are two landmark timestamps here.
The first two years I was an A student, doing everything right. In one year or so, I lost 120 pounds. I went back to playing volleyball and hitting the gym every single day. Almost a year without drinking and without any added sugar in my body.
Then November last year - it’s always November. I’m really scared about November (laughs) - I broke my ankle in two places. And I spent two months in a wheelchair, and I had to spend another six months doing physical therapy.
I wasn’t really able to do a lot of stuff. And when you break your routine, everything comes crumbling down. I have a stress eating habit. I lost track of dieting and exercising and everything, and I regained a lot of weight.
That really has been stressful ‘cause I’m trying to get back on track and it’s really hard. 2026 has been a struggle.
THIN: Oh Ed, I hope you don’t beat yourself up too much! I can only imagine how difficult it must be. And I remember when you broke your ankle!
ED: Yeah, it’s one of those things that you know the right way to do it, but you really can’t do it right.
Even with the podcast, I had to record the whole narration with a broken ankle and while gaining weight. It was a bittersweet experience.
But people seemed to really enjoy the podcast. They supported the whole conversation around obesity, because a lot of people struggle with it, and it’s different for each person. Not all bodies respond the same way.
THIN: So let’s talk about the podcast. When was it that you thought your experience might make for a compelling investigation into food, health, and power?
ED: To tell you the truth, I didn’t come up with it myself. It was my boss, Natália. She approached me and said I had to tell my story, that we’d keep investigating the food industry and lobbying in Brasília, but that I had a story of my own too.
When you go through something like (the heart attack), you go a little crazy reading labels and making choices, so I’d already started doing my own investigation for myself. She said I had to share it with others.
I was really reluctant, because I’m on the side that believes reporters should never become the story. I’d always turned my nose up at people trying to be influencers and inserting themselves into the conversation.
THIN: Yeah, that was one of my questions. As journalists, we’re often told not to become the story. But audiences love stories they can relate to. How did you find the right balance between personal story and hard-hitting journalism?
ED: It wasn’t a comfortable place for me. But the argument that convinced me was that this was a true story, and that instead of telling it through someone else’s eyes, the way we normally do, I could tell it through my own.
So I decided to do it, but using myself as seasoning, you know. My story seasoned the whole conversation across five episodes. I shared things about myself, my family, and recordings I’d made - like the first time I was in an ambulance, when I recorded myself giggling and joking, even with a heart condition, because I always fight everything with humour.
I had a lot of material like that: the sounds of the ICU, voice notes with reflections I’d sent to people while I was in the hospital. All of that helped me tell the story and make people travel through it with me.
What I really had to tell was how ultra-processed industries work, how the history of sugar cane is tied to our culture, how it shapes our tastes and habits, and to address the shortcuts people take, like skinny jabs or bypass surgery.
THIN: For those of us who don’t speak Portuguese, explain the podcast and why you structured it the way you did.
ED: The podcast is only in Portuguese, and it has five episodes. The first is about the heart attack and ultra-processed foods, because that was the first thing I had to take out of my life.
The second is about sugar, which I’m genuinely addicted to. I come from Pernambuco, which has been the main sugar-cane region in Brazil since the 18th century, so everything there speaks to the colonial history and the sugar trade. Sugar farms became neighbourhoods and gave them their names.
People used to put sugar in babies’ milk, and if you were feeling nervous, people would offer you sugar water to calm you down. It’s really about culture, so we had to explore how the place I’m from shaped my habits.
The third is about bariatric bypass surgery, and why it hasn’t been my path. Almost 20 years ago, as a young reporter, I was assigned to follow the first patient to undergo a new kind of bypass surgery to Brazil’s public health system.
I met Orlando, a patient who weighed 600 pounds, and I followed him for months. I got really scared of how invasive the surgery was, and decided not to go through it myself. I knew that would be a question for listeners, so we built an episode around access to the surgery and how it’s evolved since my experience.
The fourth episode is about skinny jabs [weight-loss injections]. It was a real challenge because it’s become almost a religion right now - people are crazy about it. Even people who just want to lose three pounds are using it. I discovered a lot of things that hadn’t been reported in Brazil, particularly about Novo Nordisk.
There are 65 deaths under investigation here in Brazil linked to the use of skinny jabs, and nobody was really talking about it. Before the podcast came out, Folha de São Paulo, our main newspaper, ran a piece exposing six deaths linked to pancreatic issues. I found the real number was 65 - almost 11 times higher.
For comparison: there’s a dengue vaccine here that was linked to three deaths out of 20 million people vaccinated, and the health authorities stopped the vaccination programme to investigate. But with skinny jabs, there are 65 deaths being investigated over two years, and nothing has been stopped.
We also covered a lot of other risks people don’t talk about, like blindness.
The fifth and last episode is about mental health, and about how people’s relationship with food has changed. Now we don’t eat food, we eat “protein” and “carbs”.
We close the podcast with me reuniting with the doctor who looked after me in the ICU. I got to go back and thank him, and that made a lot of listeners emotional.
THIN: We also worked together on the Big Food vs. The People investigation. Did the investigations help shape each other? What are the similarities and differences?
ED: One thing that really helped is that I was in touch with a lot of sources at Anvisa [Brazil’s health regulator] across two completely different subjects, and they came together. So it made information flow more easily.
There are a lot of similarities when you look at health companies on the podcast and the food industry in the Big Food investigation, because they act the same way. They don’t put people first. They neglect to tell the whole story, they hide information, and they prioritise making their products cheaper for themselves, even when the real cost comes with people’s health.
With skinny jabs, they say the drug is only meant for a few patients, but they’re not really concerned about all the other people using it. And they make it more appealing: they make it seem like magic, and they even run sales promotions and loyalty programmes for it.
Food does the same thing, smoking does the same thing, medicine and drugs do the same thing - they all end up in people’s bodies and there are consequences. But money doesn’t really care about that.
THIN: What were some of the most shocking findings in your podcast?
ED: There was the death toll, and how under-communicated the risks are, like blindness and pancreatitis. Even doctors here in Brazil aren’t discussing these risks with their patients. That really stood out to me.
I also had to look into Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer that held the patent for semaglutide. There’s a lot about how they’ve behaved that hasn’t been discussed here in Brazil: they were banned for two years in the United Kingdom over ethical issues (THIN: read about the more recent transgressions here), and in the United States the FDA fined them for failing to disclose cancer risks on their label.
Here in Brazil, that information isn’t on the label either, because Anvisa, our health agency, doesn’t require it. When I asked them how that could be, given they know the risks, their answer was that it’s a regulatory issue.
The company was already making a lot of money, but they wanted more, and they wanted to protect their patent, which expired in Brazil back in March. They tried to influence the Supreme Court and the health agency to get an extension. Nobody was talking about the company side of this - doctors only ever call it a revolution, a miracle - but there are a lot of ethical issues that needed to be addressed.
THIN: Take us back to your childhood and the kind of food and diets you grew up with.
ED: It was always unhealthy. I was really thin until I was about two, and my mum gave me drugs to increase my appetite. I think she regrets it now. By the age of seven and a half, I was already fat.
Back then, poverty was a lot more widespread here in Brazil, and my parents were middle class. One of the things that showed middle-class families had “made it” was food. My dad was really proud to bring home cookies and snacks every month, so there were always a lot of processed, sugary things in the house alongside beans and rice, plus homemade desserts.
Having a diverse spread of food in the house was their way of telling themselves they’d made it - it was a status symbol, and so was hosting people at home, right down to the drinks.
In Pernambuco, where I lived, it mattered whether you had whiskey at home to serve guests, because not everyone could afford it. I was really drawn into all of that because my parents were part of it - it’s psychological, it’s cultural, it’s a lot of things.
One thing they never did was worry about health, because for them, feeding us generously was a kind of tenderness, a way of showing how much they cared through what they provided, and (those products weren’t) cheap back in the 1990s.
I had lunch every day - beans, rice, meat - but every afternoon we had snacks, and by night, ice cream. On weekends it was always pizza or hamburgers.
THIN: How and when did that change? And how widespread was the change?
ED: On the second episode we talk about exactly this - sugar was an elite thing here in Brazil, and really in the whole world, and only rich people could get it. Years later, rich people were the first to distance themselves from it, to cut it out of their diets.
It’s the same with ultra-processed food today: people assume it’s still something only rich people have access to, but the rich people with genuinely healthy diets are the first to abandon it.
It’s a cycle, because history shows that the wealthy get access to things first, and then step away once they realise it isn’t healthy, while everyone below them doesn’t see that. They just want access to it. That’s the sugar and ultra-processed cycle here in Brazil, and I think it’s still going.
THIN: You have high-stakes elections coming up. As a citizen who has suffered a health crisis and navigated food systems challenges, and also as a journalist who has investigated power and accountability issues, what are your concerns?
ED: Candidates really aren’t worried about food or health. I recently wrote a piece showing that across the publications and programmes of the 14 candidates here in Brazil, only 2% of the mentions relate to childhood or child health.
Politicians frequently associate these issues with “protecting childhood” specifically, without going further. It’s really not a priority; here we mostly talk about security and violence. On health, people mostly think about our public health system - the queues, the specialities - so food itself ends up far from what people imagine as a priority.
One candidate, the current president, does address things that are already the default now, like school meals coming from local farms rather than industry and being free of ultra-processed food. But even he doesn’t want to push that agenda forward, because subsidiaries of companies like Coca-Cola have been among the major campaign supporters here for the past 20 years.
I think the food industry here works like the police: you don’t mess with them because you need their support.
I’m not particularly hopeful about the incoming Congress, because the one we’re getting rid of was one of the worst in our history. I don’t want to get my hopes up, though I’d like to be proven wrong.
THIN: Anything else you’d like to add?
ED: I just wish people didn’t have to go through what I did, and that they could make changes in their lives without having to get scared into it.
And if you are a journalist, I hope you actually live what you write, because for years I wrote about these issues before they became a reality for me.
Thin’s Pickings
(Un)intended consequences of mass-prescribing GLP-1s - Science
Timely warning from Luc L. Hagenaars and Laura A. Schmidt that “the Ozempic era could recalibrate power and profit across the food, pharmaceutical, and wellness industries in ways that suppress access to both GLP-1s and healthier food environments”.I read the new UN climate report so you don’t have to. - What If We Get It Right?
If, like me, you haven’t had the time to read the latest UNEP report on how we’re overshooting the 1.5°C target of temperature increase, then this summary by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a must-read. I appreciate her giving space to agriculture too.
Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92 - The New York Times
A fine portrait of the man who, for decades, fought for agrarian justice and warned of the consolidation of farmland and power, and who helped launch the modern movement for sustainable farming.
It’s also a good time to re-read this beautiful piece from Dec, 2023, by Landon Frye about finally meeting his hero.Vanishing forests: Why is the Philippines failing at reforestation? - Al Jazeera English
This 101 East Documentary uses findings from our Forest Fraud investigation to highlight problems with the country’s flagship reforestation programme, and features some truly inspiring locals who continue to protect the forests despite the danger to their lives.
Malbouffe: quand l’agroalimentaire attaque les États en justice - RTS
A thoughtful 9-minute radio piece about Big Food’s lawsuits featuring interviews, including with yours truly. In French.Coca-Cola Sued Mexico - Macakiux
A 10-minute YouTube video from Mexican content creator Miguel Hernández about our investigation and findings. A good option if you've got Spanish-speaking family who'd rather watch than read.
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