What Nutritional Science Doctors Have to Say About COVID-19

Here's a stat you’ll know well – 1 in 3 Australians are obese.

Here’s another stat you might not have heard of – being overweight is one of the top risk factors for worse outcomes from COVID-19.

We’re seeing research from all over the world showing that the sickest COVID patients have been those with diet-related diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Take Boris Johnson as an example - with a BMI of 36 (obese), the UK Prime Minister had a severe COVID infection and near-death experience. If you’re healthy, the virus is just like a bad flu. Sorry Boris, but your scare has provided people with the wake-up call we needed.

COVID has revealed the vulnerability that obesity creates for your body. The virus is like a heat-seeking missile for poor metabolic health. Scientists have known this from the earliest stages of the pandemic, so why hasn’t it revamped public health efforts to address diet-related diseases?

COVID has been described as the largest global health scare of the century. It has generated more public concern, political action and scientific research than any other recent health issue – and rightly so. But it’s not the only global health crisis we’re experiencing.

The virus is a fast pandemic sitting atop a slow pandemic – global diabetes and obesity, which have been worsening over the last 40 years. They may not cause immediate health problems like the virus does, but diet-related diseases are just as concerning as COVID-19, if not more.

And the slow pandemic all begins with a poor diet.

How many of us have admitted, “I gained an extra few kilos during COVID”? It seems we prioritised healthy eating even less during this stressful period – and by doing that, increased our risk for a bad case of the virus.

There has been a major missed opportunity in the last 9 months to prioritise a healthy diet. We were at home more, had time to cook and grow food, and were itching for things to do and new skills to learn!

While governments were focused on keeping people apart, they failed to think how they could have rapidly improved the diet of the population. Because believe or not, you can see major health gains in only 4 - 6 weeks of eating healthy. That correlates to about the average time of lockdown, right?

It was the perfect time to educate people on these rapid health improvements - ‘now is the time to switch to a healthy diet: you’ll see a difference when lockdown is over.’ Or governments could have subsidised home delivery fruit and veggie boxes to help people take the first step towards healthy cooking. The possibilities were endless.

And by improving metabolic health, we could have bent the curve for COVID much quicker. It would have saved the dollars that states have lost through public spending healthcare for hospitalised COVID patients.

Imagine if we'd been encouraged to use this time to prioritise a good diet and exercise. We would have seen people emerging from lockdown the fittest they had ever been, seen diabetics whose metabolic markers dropped down to healthy levels, and prevented thousands of cases of heart disease.

The pandemic was the trigger we needed to take action on obesity, and it was a trigger completely overlooked.

So while we reflect on this missed opportunity, there is a lesson to be learnt: don’t forget the slow pandemic. Don’t allow the massive warning sign over the last year – that obesity is killing us in more ways than one – to be forgotten as we move forward.

When we come out the other side of COVID and our public health focus slowly shifts away from trying to control the outbreak of a virus, let’s recentre it with renewed effort on diet-related diseases. They have been the true killer in this fast pandemic, and will continue to be the number one global health concern for years to come.

And the solution? Eating a healthy, balanced diet – its the be all and end all to a long, happy life. There are no shortcuts or hacks or vaccines. Food is medicine, if you let it be.

Let me know your thoughts below!