Better food fight Diet-related disorders increase coronavirus risk, but poor communities lack access to nutritional foods
Of the many heartbreaking stories I’ve read or heard during this ghastly pandemic, one stands out as especially distressing, almost criminal. The headline read: “Empty Shelves, but Farms Put Food to Waste — Milk, Eggs and Produce Buried and Dumped.”
That day I was researching food insecurity and soaring rates of metabolic disease as an often overlooked reason for the high risk of COVID-related illness and death among African Americans, Hispanics and people in poor communities.
The article told of staggering food waste — tens of millions of pounds of fresh food, including 3.7 million gallons of milk a day, that farmers cannot sell because restaurants, hotels and schools were closed in a belated effort to squelch the pandemic. Some of the surplus food was donated to food banks and feeding programs that have been overwhelmed by demands to nourish the needy but have limited ability to store and distribute perishable food.
Despite our nation’s ability to produce so much healthful food, fewer than 1 in 5 American adults is metabolically healthy, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of
Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, had told me the week before. He cited a recent national report describing poor diet as “now the leading cause of poor health in the U.S.” and the cause of more than half a million deaths per year.
Mozaffarian explained that poor metabolic health was the immunity-impairing factor underlying cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesityrelated cancers that left so many nutritionally compromised Americans especially vulnerable to the lethal coronavirus.
“Only 12% of Americans are without high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or prediabetes,” he said in an interview. “The statistics are horrifying, but unlike COVID, they happened gradually enough that people just shrugged their shoulders. However, beyond age, these are the biggest risk factors for illness and death from COVID-19.”
The characteristics of what doctors call the metabolic syndrome — excess fat around the middle, hypertension, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and a poor cholesterol profile — suppress the immune system and increase the risk of infections, pneumonia and cancers. They’re all associated with low-grade, bodywide inflammation, Mozaffarian explained, “and COVID kills by causing an overwhelming inflammatory response that disables the body’s ability to fight off pathogens.”
Alas, the metabolic wellbeing of many Americans is now further endangered by advised limits on shopping trips, an increased reliance on canned and packaged foods high in fat, sugar and salt, and emotional distress that prompts some people to turn to nutritionally questionable “comfort foods.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a glaring light on long-standing costly and life-threatening inequities in American society. Those living in economically challenged communities, and especially people of color, are bearing the heaviest burden of COVID-19 infections. But while diet-related disorders increase vulnerability to the virus, limited national attention has been paid to lack of access to nutritionally wholesome foods that can sustain meta