A picture so often in life can speak a thousand words. I share with you this graph, which shows America’s soaring obesity rates over the last few decades. Take a moment to look at it, because it’s more than just a graph. This has enormous implications for chronic diseases including diabetes and heart disease. Similar trends have been witnessed across the western world and represent trillions of dollars of healthcare costs. It would be amiss to not also talk about this in light of our current main challenge: COVID-19. Data suggests that after age and chronic illness, being overweight or obese may be the THIRD biggest risk factor for getting seriously ill from coronavirus. Yet there’s been minimal discussion about this in the media. The medical community, too, needs to get our act together. If doctors and nurses aren’t reinforcing this message, nobody else will be. This can easily be done sensitively and in a motivational way.

The radio silence on this issue is crazy if we are really serious about fighting not just COVID-19, but other illnesses too. In sheer numbers and health consequences, obesity is actually a bigger preventable epidemic than coronavirus. Always better to deal with a root cause, not just an effect. It’s the one major risk factor that’s in our control, and is widely believed to be a major reason why countries like Japan, have extremely low rates of mortality and major complications from COVID-19.

Friends, if this pandemic in 2020 is not a good time to get serious about the obesity crisis, there never will be.

You can view my YouTube video about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjt95Ovqz3Q&t=112s

Feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts on the graph.

Suneel Dhand is a physician, writer, and YouTuber. He is Co-Founder at DocsDox. His two main passions are preventive/lifestyle medicine and personal & professional development. Follow him on YouTube and Instagram.