Meet The Founder - Ben

I’m Ben, the co-founder of fu:di.

I’m a former academic and for many years I wrote research papers and taught courses in mathematics and statistics at Imperial College London. “How on earth did you end up founding a food company?” I hear you wondering… well, it turns out that the simple question of “what should we eat?” can partly be answered using mathematics - analysing data and looking for patterns can be a very powerful approach. However, it’s not easy with all the noise…

 

I used to travel a lot for work and while I was spending some time at a university in Massachusetts, I became interested in the question of what we should eat to be healthy. In the supermarket I discovered lots of new food brands with unusual ingredients. One in particular kept cropping up: high-fructose corn syrup. It seemed to be everywhere, even in foods that I wouldn’t expect it, such as bread and sausages. Why would so much of this ingredient be used in the US and might it have any impact on people’s health? The answer to this question is a long one, but it is expertly and beautifully explained in the very readable book “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz, which I would highly recommend. In short, it seems sugar is the problem in almost all metabolic diseases.

 

Now of course, a bit of sugar once in a while isn’t going to do us any harm, but when we eat it every day, the repeated spikes and subsequent dips in our blood sugar can, over time, result in insulin resistance and metabolic disease - this includes obesity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimers etc. This was a shocking revelation for me - why aren’t we told this in clear, unambiguous terms? Especially, since 60% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy; a figure we are rapidly approaching in the UK.

 

But I don’t eat sugar everyday…do I? Well, once I began to look more carefully at what I ate, I discovered I was unknowingly consuming hidden sugars in my food all the time - and not just while I was in the US. After all, there are over 80 different words for sugar-containing ingredients, some of which I’d never heard of before, but all of which have very similar effects on blood sugar, and ultimately our health. Furthermore, refined carbohydrates are just sugar molecules joined together and when we eat bread, rice, pasta, these long chains get broken down and spike our blood sugar. Our body reacts in the same way as if we’d just eaten some sugar! No wonder I felt the need for coffee in the early afternoon after a carb heavy lunch.

 

I’m passionate about metabolic health and educating people to eat well and feel great. What better way to try to improve the metabolic health of the world than to start a food brand based on ridiculously tasty recipes created by my best friend Tom, with high quality, nutritious ingredients and the science of metabolic health.