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.
>Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight?
The government has been advocating for exercise and general health for decades. Despite this, we remain one of the least fit countries in the world. If the government cannot convince someone to take a safe, free shot that might save their lives, how can you reasonably expect them to convince someone to exercise?
Great point. Healthy people (or any other life form) do not suddenly get sick and die. I think this is a major issue with the entire system of Western medicine. Instead of focussing on healthy diet, lifestyle, exercise, managing stress, the system just wants to identify certain 'germs' and give pills that are supposed to kill those 'germs'...
As I understand it, licensed physicians in the US, even after like 12 years of higher education, never even study nutrition...what could possibly be more fundamental to human health than the food you eat??
Refreshing to see a comment like jacquesm made here.
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.
How do we stop COVID? Be educating people to be healthy and conscious of their surroundings.
Physical exercise and proper nutrition prevent most diseases, but no one talks about it. Why? Cause big pharma would rather you be sick and pop pills for the rest of your life.
Make sure you take multi vitamins, eat healthy, are not vitamin d deficient, load up on vitamin C in the winter, exercise, meditate, breathe clean air and 90% of diseases wont touch you.
Keep proper distance, practice good hygiene, eat a balanced healthy diet, exercise.
Hey look! Those alone prevent obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. WTF? But what about the pills?
2020 was different, we didn't have all the information that we've now at our finger tips.
I agree with you that diet, exercise and lifestyle choices are all part of caring for your health
Here in Germany there is a general focus on avoiding medical intervention as much as possible unless required. So much so that "Camille tea and hot pack" is a meme for healthcare here.
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.
"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.
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.
Yeah, but if no drug is not realy needed, you can't earn on it. Groceries and gyms does. Sorry, change of lifestyle made very big impact on my health. My immune system works so well cold can't become enough serious even to make me feel bad. I practicaly don't get sick. Moreover I noticed mood lift, better work of brain, no insomnia anymore, I have much more energy.
My body seems to know what is good for it - it prefers healthy food and don't accept stuff are not healthy. It even doesn't want beer anymore. ;) Why the hell nobody told me about that? If science made reserch on that, no flu vaccination or pro-immune drugs would be needed! Even more - there would be less cancers, heart diseases and so on. Nobody deny diet has big impact on those disieses, but noone what to use it. THEY KNOW how to do better, THEY DON'T!
And I'm not the only one. I know guy who treated asthma and alergy, which is in fact possible, in some cases, but no doctor even tried to do that.
And since he found information how to do that and I did - surely there are far more people does better than mainstream medicine. Think about it, some regular guys with no medical knowledge does better then proffesional doctors. Doesn't that mean there's something wrong with healthcare? Is there realy no reason to be sceptical about how it works?
> People already know what they should be doing—but for most, that knowledge doesn’t change behavior. Humans are hard-wired to conserve energy (see “Born to Rest,” September-October 2016, page 9), for example, and to prefer foods that are fatty, salty, and sugary.
This suggests that pharmaceutical interventions that block inflammation may be necessary to check the global epidemic of non-communicable disease.
Really? What about side effects? Why not work on becoming smart instead of telling people to eat pills?
> We have tried appeals to salads and quick walks.
This bit made me laugh, as if public health initiatives have been taken remotely seriously by the past few decades. It seems quite a jump to go from "maybe try a a salad?" to putting millions of people on medication.
We really have figured out health for the majority of people and even people on the fringes have enough options close enough to them to make it possible.
If you dont live next to a grocery store this is a good thing. Because you get to exercise and get fresh food every day.
If we could cure lack of discipline and laziness then we would be good. But we cant (challenge placed) and there will always be people that are looking for a trick rather than putting in the work to be healthy.
When watching Game of Thrones is more important than your health (exercising) then health is not something you get to have. Its not a mystery.
Articles like these suggest you can be healthy without being active. This is false (challenge placed).
Yes. I don't take all those supplements but I have performed most of the eating/sleeping/exercise rituals because it's normal to do that and not normal to not sleep 8 hours, overeat and not exercise. There are endless new markets to be created from telling people how to be healthy that is not: every day do the same healthy things forever. I think it is sad that this implies that we should wait until we have cognitive decline before we do anything.
Nutrition. Exercise. Stress management. I think these are mainstream health practices.
If you have a very serious medical condition, like cancer, and you talk to a doctor about things like taking vitamins, most of them will pooh-pooh it as if any impact it has is merely a placebo effect. Using nutrition, exercise and stress management as part of your defense in the face of something that doctors don't really know how to treat gets dismissed and attacked and basically lumped in with snake oil. In fact, you are basically doing this yourself with your wild misquotes of people here in service of some agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to comprehend anything being said here, as best I can tell.
- None of those were advocated by governments during this pandemic.
- Some measures (lockdowns, etc.) were detrimental to individual health and (imo) contributed to complications we've been seeing.
This is generally backed up by common sense (which - just like the flu - has mysteriously disappeared in the past 2 years)
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