Covid and obesity

[Alex50]

Interesting article

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/obesity-and-coronavirus-how-can-a-higher-bmi-increase-your-risk

And your point is?

No way they will advise everyone who is obese - ie 25% of the population - to shield, as suggested in the article. It would completely cripple any attempt at economic recovery.

We all knew this didn’t we?

What's interesting about it?

Is this new? I don't think so but this being MN I am waiting for it to kick off. I have been her 15 years and threads about obesity and being fat always take off. They are usually 2/3 full of a mix of fat hating posters mixed with those with with eating and exercising disorders and the rest are those convinced that if you eat more than a lettuce leaf a day you are a morally reprehensable human being

up to 1/3 (if you are lucky) sometimes have something sensible or useful to add .

The comments will fall into

1 - It is a complicated issue that needs a multi solution approach and that it can't just be based on individual action. Action needs to be taken by organisations and governments as well as individuals alongwith either a or b
1a BMI isn't everything
2b BMI is everything.

2 - It is all he fault of fat people, they are disgusting, lazy moral reprobates. (must apply to 2/3 of the UK population them) always along with b

3 . Nothing can be done we all need to be accepting of everyone as they are, usually along with a

Then there will be lots of suggested diets and ways of eating to lose weight

I shall bow out though as they are usually full of annoying posters. Good luck Op

This is not news though. We've pretty much known from the start that the higher your BMI, the lower your chances of recovery from cv are. That's not fat shaming, it's science.

No way they will advise everyone who is obese - ie 25% of the population - to shield, as suggested in the article. It would completely cripple any attempt at economic recovery.

The article says it might make sense to advise the morbidly obese to shield - that's about 3% of the population.

I've been speculating about some kind of risk calculator tool, such as exists for cardiovascular disease. Plug in a person's age, sex, BMI, ethnic background and health conditions and it spits out some sort of estimate of their risk. That would be a much more nuanced way of deciding who needs to be most stringently shielded.

Hopefully, the good that comes out of the pandemic is people will start living a more healthy lifestyle, taking more exercise, out in the fresh air in all weather’s, eating a healthy diet. I see people out exercising now, they probably haven’t exercised in years.

It isn’t news. We’ve known this more or less from the beginning.

I’ve struggled with my weight for all of my adult life. In fact, for as long as I can remember. Being overweight has never been a lifestyle choice. I have a medical condition which was has been at the root of it.

I do hope this won’t become another fat shaming thread.

Oh, and by the way, I already eat fairly healthily and take exercise. I don’t overeat either. The weight stubbornly remains.

I thought they had known this all the way through. Just as it was more dangerous being male.
DH is shielded as he’s diabetic, whenever he goes to clinic he is usually the only person there not overweight. He’s intested to know if the issue is diabetes or the weight most diabetics are.

Perhaps the reason you see more people out exercising now is that gyms, pools and classes are shit. Or that people are furloughed or wfh and have time.

If life returns to normal, people will be time-poor, less able to cook from scratch, more distractions and exercising will take a back seat again.

*Shut

I think the reasons behind obesity are so complex that these warnings about health risks will not make a difference, certainly not long lasting.

Risk calculator tools already exist for doctors to use to assess patients' Covid risk. None of the three I've seen have any separate category for 'obesity'.

Being obese (officially BMI 30+) is a known statistical risk for becoming more ill with some viral diseases. It's know that extra weight can (but that isn't the same as 'will') be inflammatory, may exacerbate immune over-response and is also associated with lower vitamin D levels. This is not uniform in individuals.

But the actual risk of dying or becoming disabled by Covid-19 is overwhelmingly, utterly dominated by, age risk. The other significant distinguishing statistical risks are being male, having cardiovascular disease / metabolic disease e.g. diabetes, especially in combination - and these are often undiagnosed because hypertension and early insulin resistence have no symptoms. Individuals and groups may be predisposed to these conditions. There are specific individual risks of conditions causing / needing immunosuppression.

Obesity is a statistical risk factor for getting these conditions but that does not mean individuals will do or will uniformly. By the time you strip out the other risks, obesity purely on its own is far less of a risk.

But there is an obsessive interest in whether obese people will get more ill with Covid. This might be because it's one of the few aspects of their health profile that people feel they could change, and public health campaigns often emphasise obesity for that reason - because it is one of the few 'health lifestyle' changes people can make, even when obesity is pretty low down the risk list for a disease, and because public health bodies believe that 'lifestyle' patterns which encourage obesity are more likely to be unhealthy at a population level.

This unfortunately leads to a conclusion by some that other people can and therefore should make these changes and stop being obese even when they might struggle to articulate why but examples given might be to stop using NHS resources, in order to somehow change everyone's fortunes. If people are not seen to be losing what's seen as excess weight they are stigmatised and the health advice has the unfortunate side effect of legitimising this.

The disproportionate interest in knowing whether fatness will cause individuals to be more ill with Covid-19 strikes me as a continuation of a long-established cultural and social antipathy to fatness and maybe a way of individuals reassuring themselves in a superstitious way that they won't be affected so badly by Covid-19 because they have done the 'right' thing and not become fat.

Oh yet another thread fat shaming people. It needs to fucking stop on here it's disgusting

@alex50 your hopeful assumption works on the premise that the fat folk are furloughed or have no job.

I'm fat, I'm WFH full time and homeschooling a 6 yr old, errands like food shopping take twice as long as before because of the queuing.

I have less time now for happy go lucky walks in fresh air than I did before CV.

This article is lies written by someone with shameless disregard for facts.

Countries with high obesity rates from western Europe to the US are struggling to keep people alive in intensive care units. Britain, long described as “the fat man of Europe” also has the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in Europe. Almost 30% of adults in the UK are classed as obese. The figure is nearly 40% in the US, where Covid deaths have topped 100,000.

This implies a correlation but is just some dickhead throwing facts together in a sentence to try and make them stick.

It is striking, experts say, that wealthy countries appear to have higher mortality rates than impoverished ones. Africa so far has not experienced the explosion of deaths that Europe has. There will be many factors, and absence of good data collection will be one. But low rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and the chronic disease of the heart and other organs are likely to play a part.

That's because of age.

In some parts of the country every last care home has been infected with covid-19.

HALF of the excess deaths are in care homes. These people are not dead because they are fat. They are dead because they are old and because they got infected.

Those two things. Both of them. Not their weight.

Take away the old people and no matter if 100% of us were fat, we'd have very few deaths at all.

The White British population of the UK has fallen since 1939. Fewer people. Meanwhile the rest of the world has exploded. There are simply not enough old people in Africa and Asia to die in large numbers.

On top of that covid-19 seems to spread very poorly outdoors.

This is just absolute wishful thinking victim blaming

Absolute barefaced LIES.

Our covid-19 deaths are 90%+ over 60. This is the reality. Not being FAT

LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE.

Obesity was a problem before Covid-19, but this is an infectious disease that hits obese people disproportionately hard, no matter their income.

Bollocks. Utter fucking bollocks. Lies and bollocks. Lawyers and bankers have 1/10 of the death rate of taxi drivers. They are at home happily being fat (those that are fat). They are not dying of covid-19. The fat taxi drivers have no choice, but to go to work, they got infected and now they are dead in large numbers.

Also it's WELL worth noting here that various conditions such as

being fat
smoking
diabetes

are associated with poverty and low-paid work. Teachers, for example, are much healthier than average. The richest quintile of women are NOT overweight on average, which is remarkable considering that most adults are. The poorest are. The same poorest still working and getting infected and dying from covid-19 throughout this.

The people hardest hit are those with uncontrolled diabetes. Not obesity. These people are, guess what, the poorest members of society on average.

According to a yet to be peer-reviewed study of the electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients, the risk of a coronavirus-related hospital death increases from between 1.5 to 2 times for people with a body mass index of 30, which is the lowest level of obesity, to more than 2 for those with a BMI of 40 or more.

No, the study didn't say that. Read it properly.

We showed increasing risk of death with degree of obesity: fully-adjusted HR 1.27 for BMI 30-34.9 kg/m2

A 27% increase is irrelevant. As noted above taxi drivers have 10x (1000%) the death rate of lawyers.

The age gradient, meanwhile, is approximately double (200%) more risk for each 6 or 7 years.

Meanwhile:

Male gender was associated with a doubling of risk (fully adjusted HR 1.99, 1.88-2.10).

So you'd have to be batshit fucking insane to prioritise a obese woman of say 35, over a man of 59, who has at an absolute bare minimum 20x greater risk of dying than she does. Hell, you'd have to be batshit fucking insane to prioritise an obese woman of 35 over an obese woman of 55.

YES, it's true that on a population level it would be good to be less obese, to do more exercise, etc. It would also be good on a population level to drink less alcohol.

That doesn't mean however that otherwise healthy obese adults, particularly younger ones, need 'shielding', or that if you are an obese adult then you are likely to die from covid-19, even if infected. This is Daily Express quality scaremongering.

Would note, btw, that the author of this piece has a book to sell on how 'junk food is killing us'.

There are simply not enough old people in Africa and Asia to die in large numbers.

i.e. because they hadn't been born 80 years ago.

@TorysSuckRevokeArticle50 that is your lifestyle choice, no matter how busy you are, you need to fit in exercise in your daily routine, take care of yourself or you won’t be able to care of others.

I have gotten my bmi down from 42 to 36 since lockdown started. Which is a very good thing obviously but I will say that the excessive focus on obesity vs other risk factors for covid has absolutely terrified me. I suffer from health anxiety and it's debilitating at the moment

@Alex50 are you really that obtuse? Or just generally a sanctimonious idiot?

Which bit of 'my choice' should I drop. Working 40-50 hours a week to earn money for food, house, bills...

Or looking after my 6 yr old while schools are closed because of the pandemic?

Or buying food so we can eat?

Cos that currently takes up Monday - Friday 6am - 9pm (at least, often pick up work late to catch up).

I'm taking a quick coffee break now, 10 mins. I don't even have time for an hours lunch break, I eat while I work.

Oh FFS OP not again.

@DishingOutDone here we go again.

@TorysSuckRevokeArticle50 yourhealth, your life, your choices. There’s so many things you can do. It makes no difference to me how you live your life.

ShootsFruitAndLeaves, there is a lot of heart disease across Africa, but the difference is that people don't live with chronic heart disease/asthma etc, they die younger from it. In poorer countries there eldery are in relatively good health, they don't live with the level of poor health that the Western World does.
It will take months to notice a drop in their populations because globally there's the same amount of people who have died from Covid, as do of malaria in Nigeria, alone. There's no autopsies done, unless the family pay privately, but that rarely happens, they listen to their Pastor's explanation.

On the diet forums I'm on, most people are using Covid as motivation.

WotnoPasta, we now understand how Covid attacks the vascular system and makes the blood clot excessively. Most obese people will have vascular issues, a lot of normal weight diabetics also will, anyway, so it's primarily diabetes and then they have a double co-morbidity in Obesity.