Obesity’s harm goes beyond links to COVID

The medical community has struggled to come up with reasons and answers for long COVID-19, the virus’ sometime lingering, problematic after effect.

But according to a neditorial: Obesity’s harm goes way beyond links to COVIDEW study led by the Harvard

T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the solution to this syndrome is both obvious and challenging.

Simply put, researchers found that a healthy lifestyle — including getting the proper amount of sleep — could lower the risk of long COVID.

Women who followed most aspects of a healthy lifestyle — healthy body weight, not smoking, regular exercise, adequate sleep, high quality diet, and moderate alcohol consumption — had about half the risk of long COVID compared to women without any healthy lifestyle factors, the study found.

“Our findings raise the possibility that adopting more healthy behaviors may reduce the risk of developing long COVID,” said Andrea Roberts, senior research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and senior author of the study.

It’s estimated that 8 million to 23 million Americans suffer from long COVID, defined as having COVID symptoms four weeks or more after the initial infection. Symptoms can include fatigue, fever, and a variety of respiratory, heart, neurological, and digestive symptoms.

The researchers for the study analyzed data from more than 32,000 female nurses in the Nurses’ Health Study II, which had data on their lifestyle from 2015 and 2017 along with their COVID infection history from April 2020 to November 2021.

During that time, more than 1,900 participants contracted COVID, with 44% developing long COVID. Compared to women without any healthy lifestyle factors, those who could count five of six healthy habits had a 49% lower risk of long COVID.

Among the six lifestyle factors, maintaining a healthy body weight and getting adequate sleep were the ones most strongly associated with a lower risk of long COVID.

The results also showed that even among women who developed long COVID, those with a healthier preinfection lifestyle had a 30% lower risk of having symptoms that interfered with their daily life.

So, incorporating a healthy lifestyle seems like a simple solution.

But the data indicate that’s easier said than done.

“… in the U.S. for example, 70% of the population do not have a healthy body weight and 30% do not sleep enough,” said lead author Siwen Wang, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition.

Carrying excess weight has been found to carry a lot of weight in determining those most likely to catch a severe case of COVID, so it’s not surprising that obesity plays a role in contracting long COVID.

In September 2020 — just several months into this pandemic — researchers had linked COVID severity with obesity.

That month Science magazine, a peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reported that many overweight individuals were among the sickest COVID patients.

Larger population studies reinforced that association and also found that even merely overweight people face a higher risk of contracting the most serious COVID infections.

The results of a macro analysis published a month earlier in Obesity Reviews indicated that obese individuals who caught COVID were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.

The study explained that the biology of obesity includes impaired immunity, chronic inflammation, and blood that’s prone to clot, all of which can lead to COVID-19 complications.

That “may be one reason for the devastating impact of COVID-19 in the United States, where 40% of adults are obese,” said Anne Dixon, a physician-scientist who studies obesity and lung disease at the University of Vermont.

People with obesity also have other risk factors for severe COVID-19, including heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes. They are also prone to metabolic syndrome, in which blood sugar levels, fat levels, or both are unhealthy and blood pressure may be high.

Along with demonstrating a strong cause-and-effect relationship between COVID and the morbidly overweight, these conclusions show that in the U.S., obesity constitutes an epidemic within this pandemic.

Aside from one’s own wellbeing and self-esteem, preventing a plethora of serious illnesses or conditions should be reason enough to adopt a healthy lifestyle.