The same week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care for Covid-19, two studies came out identifying obesity as a significant risk factor for serious illness and death. It was April 2020, and doctors were scrambling to understand why coronavirus gave some people mild symptoms and left others so sick they were gasping for air.
After Johnson recovered, he became vocal about the role he believed his obesity had played in his brush with the virus: “When I went into ICU, when I was really ill … I was way overweight,” he said.
That summer, Johnson, a conservative who in the past has colorfully railed against “the continuing creep of the nanny state,” launched a new governmentwide obesity strategy, complete with a ban on junk food advertising on TV before 9 p.m., new mandates to label calories in restaurants and a requirement that healthier products be stocked near checkout lines. The prime minister began jogging daily and urged the public to adopt healthier habits.
In Washington, there has been no such wake-up call about the link between diet-related diseases and the pandemic. There is no national strategy. There is no systemswide approach, even as researchers increasingly recognize that obesity is a disease that is driven not by lack of willpower, but a modern society and food system that’s almost perfectly designed to encourage the overeating of empty calories, along with more stress, less sleep and less daily exercise,setting millions on a path to poor health outcomes that is extremely difficult to break from.