Why does half our food come out of a packet?
WHEN the Prime Minister was admitted to hospital with symptoms of Covid-19 last month, the whole country feared the worst.
Although it was touch and go at one point, with a 50-50 chance Boris Johnson would need mechanical ventilation, he fortunately avoided it and weeks later appears to have fully recovered.
I had observed that a number of his slim colleagues who had contracted the virus, including chief medical officer Chris Witty, the chief executive of NHS England
Simon Stevens and Health Secretary Matt Hancock, remained relatively well, managing to cope by isolating at home.
But rather than coincidence, looking at the published data it was clear that those people who were significantly overweight were at increased risk of complications and death.
After my comments that the Prime Minister’s more severe illness was likely linked to his weight were published in the news, Mr Hancock asked me for more detailed evidence linking obesity to Covid-19.
I wrote to him explaining more of a risk than being overweight (behind reports that the overwhelming majority of those dying including the elderly have “underlying health conditions”) is excess body fat which even affects up to 40 per cent of those who have so-called normal weight.
This manifests itself as abnormal metabolic health. One needs to have all five of the following in normal range (without medications) to be optimal. Blood pressure, waist circumference, average blood glucose, high HDL (good cholesterol) and low triglycerides (bad cholesterol).
I regularly see heart-attack patients who think they’re OK because they’ve been told their weight is OK when in fact they have excess abdominal and liver fat which is a much stronger predictor of risk than body weight alone.When this is all measured clearly they have far from optimal metabolic health.
In America only one in eight adults is metabolically healthy and it’s estimated a staggering 80 per cent of adults are at risk because of too much body fat.
This general situation is not surprising when one realises that more than half of the British diet comes from ultra-processed food.
How did we allow our population’s health to become so dire?
Despite years of warnings from trusted doctors and scientists that dietary advice had to be updated – and independent from food industry interests – and that drastic action had to be taken by Government to help all members of the public eat healthier, very little has been done or achieved.
An urgent full public inquiry into what went wrong and why is now well overdue.