The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/01/19 at 07:00 EST

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/01/19 at 07:00 EST

Bankman Freed's entire house of cards started to crumble as crypto asset prices plummeted in May. This morning we unsealed an eight count indictment charging Samuel Bankman Freed. I'm Jacob Silverman, host of the new podcast, The Naked Emperor. I'm going to explain how Sam Bankman Freed built and destroyed a multi-billion dollar crypto empire. Available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. Canadians living with an eating disorder, that's according to Statistics Canada. Most experts believe the numbers are much higher. Many people don't realize that their relationship with food and with their body might be unhealthy

to the point that they need help. And we live in a culture where our social media feeds are just flooded with fitness models promoting food trends, miracle workouts, and there are so many false beliefs about eating disorders that they only affect thin white affluent girls when actually anyone can end up with an eating disorder. So we're going to spend the next hour busting a few myths and really talking about what eating disorders are, what you can do if you think you have one, and how to help someone that you love. Gina Dimitropoulos is a professor of social work at the University of Calgary and a research lead of the Calgary Eating Disorders Program. Amanda Raffoul is an assistant professor in the

University of Toronto's Department of Nutritional Sciences, where she researches eating disorders. Amanda and Gina, hello. Hi there. Amanda, I'm gonna come to you first. Let's just begin by figuring out exactly what an eating disorder is. Most people have probably heard of anorexia or bulimia, but maybe you could give us that fuller picture.

Sure, and thanks for having me again today. Eating disorders are really severe, life-altering, psychiatric illnesses. So for someone to have an eating disorder, they have to meet a pretty specific and well-established set of criteria. You've mentioned a couple of the more common eating disorders that people are aware of, which include anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. But there are also a few other types of eating disorders, including two that are more common, binge eating disorder and other specified feeding or eating disorder, which is a bit more of a catch-all term for really harmful thoughts and behaviors related to food and weight, but might not meet the criteria for the other types

of disorders as well. Gina, when you're trying to assess whether or not food might, your relationship with food might be something that you need to talk to somebody about, what are the signs of that? Well, thank you again for inviting me to be part of this important discussion as well. I think that when we're

we are looking at whether young people have body image distortions, whether they perceive themselves to be at a lower or a higher body when indeed they might be at a lower weight. We're also asking many questions about their relationship to food and eating, the level of rigidity that they may have around what they eat, how much they eat, and what kinds of changes they've experienced with food over a period of time. Are they starting to eliminate foods that they previously enjoyed? Do they have very rigid ideas about what's considered to be normal, healthy food. Do they have very rigid rules about when they're able to eat? We're also running tests to make sure that they're about their health and they're to make sure they're medically safe. And then we're also conducting assessments to determine if there's other mental health

comorbidities. We know that eating disorders co-occur with many other mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse and OCD. So eating disorders can be very complex and as Amanda shared a few minutes ago, they often are accompanied by many

medical consequences as well. So usually the assessment is conducted by a multidisciplinary team. So there's usually a nutritionist, a social worker who might meet with the whole family to also get collaborative, cooperative information from others who may have also witnessed behaviors that may be difficult for the person with the eating disorder to share with a clinician. When you're talking about those rules or a certain rigidity around eating, what like internally when people are really listening for the language in their brain, what are the kind of rules that people might set down for themselves that might have you thinking

twice that somebody might need to start this conversation?