Public health agencies have been encouraging people to lose weight and exercise more for decades. I doubt that COVID-19 is going to motivate people where diabetes and heart disease have failed.
I don’t know why you’ve gotten downvotes, but it’s true. For example one of the strongest predictors of severe COVID-19 is obesity, but not a peep about maintaining a healthy diet or regular exercise from our top doctors during the entire pandemic.
If the CDC launched a national effort to get Americans outdoors to exercise (Surely a lot cheaper than the stimulus we spent money on) hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, not only from COVID but from diabetes and heart disease.
There is no push to do what we KNOW reduces the risk of Covid 19 and that is to get healthy. By now everybody could have lost a bunch of weight and shed their type 2 diabetes and could now be in a much lower risk profile for all causes of death…not just Covid. But almost nowhere do you see the government or anyone else saying one should do that. Probably because there isn’t any money in it and people are lazy.
"Why aren't they telling people to exercise and eat better?"
Hasn't the government been telling people this for decades? And more specifically 'they' have been making clear the connection between Covid morbidity and obesity since almost day 1.
How can someone honestly and in good faith argue that 'they' aren't telling people to exercise and eat better? The problem is that the government telling people to exercise and eat better doesn't really move the needle when it comes to actually getting people to exercise and eat better.
Assuming this is a genuine effort and not some kind of corruption, this potentially sounds great.
But as far as bang for the healthcare buck goes, why not advocate a serious national physical fitness campaign? Many people have gained weight and lost their fitness during the last 2 years, and we're doubling down on doing counterproductive things in cities like introducing friction and barriers for people to get to the gym in the name of defending them from Covid which is completely backwards. Losing weight is probably the single best thing the nation could do for not only better Covid outcomes, but also improving a bunch of other health issues from diabetes to heart disease and possibly cancer as well, if I remember right.
My stance might be very different if the state and the mainstream decided to encourage the public to not only get vaccinated but also do things to be healthy. Losing weight, restricting calories, choosing to eat lentils instead of Macaroni and Cheese, going on daily/nightly walks, getting sun exposure, all shouldn't be ignored or treated as obsolete. What exactly is the reason, other than keeping the junk food industry afloat, that we not all be encouraging ourselves? Do we really need a bunch of studies to be performed to conclude that being generally healthy is either helpful against infection or at least won't make infection worse?
If we had a campaign of "do your part, eat right, get some walking in, and help the fight against COVID", I'd be like "Hell yeah! Now's our chance to see if we can beat this thing! Get the vaccines, get healthy, and join the fight!"
I've come across some data supposedly contesting the idea that obesity is a big driver in hospitalizations, but I'm not sure how much I buy it yet, and it certainly doesn't seem like a good reason to just do nothing at all.
"Lose weight, get in shape" is good advice that would lower all cause mortality if it reliably resulted in such a change. The advice that we ought be perfect to avoid mortality doesn't take into account reality.
I agree with your statement in the small (yes, get fit, try to motivate friends and family to do the same), but it's not useful to moralize about what-if on a population level in my opinion, and it is tantamount to blaming the victims of the pandemic for bad outcomes. Especially before the vaccines, many young and healthy people died or experienced very bad outcomes, and it still happens, though the vaccines have helped a ton in this regard.
And do you think that scummy and often fraudulent weight loss pill ads are going to solve that problem?
We are dealing with COVID by methods that have been tested for efficacy with significant scientific rigor. If the same rigor were applied to products shilled by weight loss ads, I don't think anyone would have an issue with them.
It's not, though. Nobody goes to jail if their weight loss pills don't work, or put people in the hospital, or are just placebo sugar capsules.
Governments have been telling people to eat healthier since roughly World War 2.
The status of people going to hospital is largely irrelevant; the goal should be to ensure that fewer people do. We know that the government telling people to lose weight is not particularly effective, because, again, governments in the developed world have been trying for decades without much success. More direct methods (eg the sugar taxes/minimum pricing that some European countries have introduced) are looking to be a bit more effective, but you're looking at a slow. However, covid vaccines are known to be very effective, and can be given quickly, so encouraging people to get those is appropriate.
If COVID has proven anything, it's that political messaging is far better than all other types of messaging combined.
Either way, telling people to change their lifestyles falls on deaf ears as a group. People know, for example, that being obese in your 50s and 60s puts you at a great deal of risk, yet most people who are obese at the beginning of their 50s are still obese at the end of their 60s, provided that they are still alive.
I think, in the context of possibly dying of Covid-19, it could be effective though. If the messaging was there that you could greatly reduce your risk by loosing weight, at least the group of people who were both obese and seriously frightened of Covid could be engaged to make positive changes. That would save lives.
Unfortunately, suggesting that people eat less and exercise more doesn’t seem to actually work that well. We’ve been trying that for decades and the obesity epidemic just keeps getting worse.
Researchers and doctors don't have a simple method to make people lose weight. They can make recommendations for diet and exercise but at the end of the day, most people won't follow them. And forcing millions to stick to a diet and exercise program would require extreme, authoritarian logistics, much more so than requiring vaccines for employees. Coordinating millions of people to get a shot in the arm is way simpler.
A great deal of burden on the health care system -- perhaps even more than completely eliminating COVID -- could be alleviated by people dedicating themselves to better diet and exercise. Why not mandate that?
This view is both boorish and ignorant. There are many types of coronaviruses, including MERS and SARS. They can't be mitigated through "diet and exercise". These diseases often occur in parts of the world with much lower obesity rates than the West
Further, the idea that you won't get a serious respiratory virus if you just exercise and diet is offensive. You're just trying to reduce something that is incredibly complex into a bumper sticker slogan that you can wrap your mind around with the least amount of effort.
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