The rampant spread of COVID-19 has exposed the global public health problem we are facing. I had not seen it addressed in government measures at the time. Nor did I hear much in the media about the elephant in the room: the overfat pandemic.
Millions of people die each year from diet-related chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer. Many of these conditions are associated with insulin resistance, chronic inflammation and metabolic syndrome, with excess body fat often playing a role. Many cases may be preventable through improved diet and body composition.
These same issues may also contribute to Coronavirus risk. Poor metabolic health may impair immunity and leave some people especially vulnerable to the virus.
Older people can be hit hard as health problems accumulate over time and have a huge compound effect. Other underlying medical conditions can oftentimes also be attributed to poor health habits.
https://twitter.com/bigfatsurprise/status/1264647429665763329
When we rightly call the thousands of Coronavirus deaths an incalculable loss, we might also start doing that for the millions of people we lose every year due to the overfat pandemic.
Only 12% of adults is metabolically healthy. The rest may have metabolic risk factors, sometimes associated with excess body fat and too many calories. This is not always visible from the outside, as your personal fat threshold, or how fat you are capable of getting before things go haywire, is genetic.
This is about body composition rather than about body weight. 10% to 15% of body fat is healthy for men and 20% to 24% for women. An increased waist size is a sign of being overfat, as are hypertension and a resting heart rate higher than 60. It is also visible in your blood work in the form of high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol or high blood sugar.
If more of us were lean and fit, we might have been better prepared for a pandemic. Measures with major long-term consequences, such as lockdowns, might have faced less pressure.
It's disappointing that we refuse to talk about this, or how people consume food, as diet is a far bigger threat for health than COVID in the first place and supports the immune system as well. The statistics are horrifying, but unlike COVID-19 they accumulated gradually enough for many people to shrug them off.
The positive side of this virus might be that we all finally wake up and start questioning the nutritional guidelines, eating clean, sleeping more and lifting weights, as these all help to fix the problem. I hope so, though I remain skeptical .
https://twitter.com/Mangan150/status/1245132323458183169
Health authorities and governments have spent several decades vilifying the foods that keep people healthy, based, in my view, on research shaped by the food and pharmaceutical industries. Recommendations to consume vegetable oils instead of animal fat and to make carbohydrates the majority of our calories are ludicrous.
Now people are sick and these same authorities are facing the consequences with a gigantic economic crisis coming up. Focusing on whole, nutrient dense foods like our ancestors did, in combination with lifting weights to optimize body composition and prioritizing sleep would have been a powerful way to improve our health.