Before and after picture above. Kudos to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for leading the charge against obesity, intentionally losing a lot of weight since he recovered from COVID, and now launching a big (no pun intended) public health initiative. President Trump should do the same here, and start posting pictures of himself cycling and on a treadmill. Back in April, several high-level UK government figures, and even Prince Charles, got COVID-19. Every single one of them recovered at home in a few days, apart from Boris Johnson, who went to the ICU. British doctors openly said that it was his excess weight that was his only major risk factor.
Data shows that being overweight or obese is right up there alongside advanced age and comorbidities for getting seriously ill with COVID (obesity places an additional unnatural stress on the lungs). As a physician who works in a preventive medicine clinic, this is a topic close to my heart. I must say I am quite ashamed of the medical community for not collectively addressing this more…what a perfect time it would have been to address soaring obesity rates over the last 30 years, and do something to seriously help the nation’s health. Literal radio silence, when advice and encouragement to eat less junk food, exercise, and get to a healthy body weight— should be taped next to every news story on COVID. It’s something anyone can do to drastically lower their chances of being affected by the virus, and the one thing that’s most in our control.
It’s tragic that physicians in the United States have missed a golden opportunity to really help their country—with a myriad of other health conditions too—if they went all out promoting the healthy living message over the last few months. Since hardly any doctors are saying it, I can only do it as much as possible on my public platform. Here’s the core message:
Eating a nutritious well-balanced calorie-controlled diet; rich in vegetables and fruits (vitamins and anti-oxidants), and low in saturated fats, red meats and processed foods—while engaging in regular physical activity and maintaining your Body Mass Index (BMI) between 20 and 25— is one of the best natural health and immunity boosts you can give yourself.
A true but perhaps controversial statement (to some) is this: if most people in America did the above, it would actually do more good than the entire population living in lockdown, or society haplessly waiting years for a vaccine that may or may not come. Not just for COVID-19—which likely has a total mortality rate less than 1 percent—but for conditions such as heart disease, lung disease and diabetes—which kill millions every year.
The sad unfortunate reality is that we have normalized being overweight and obese in the United States. But it’s far from normal, and neither does the human cardiovascular or respiratory system think it is. Go back and look at old group photos of your parents and grandparents’ generations from the 1930s to 1970s, and you will see how much more in shape people generally were back then compared to group photos of people now. We’ve gone somewhere drastically wrong over the last 40 years for 2 reasons only; (i) consuming excess calories to our needs, (ii) being overly sedentary.
This isn’t about fat shaming or being harsh. Yes, this message can be delivered sensitively and with positive reinforcement! If avoiding this topic is about some misguided sense of political correctness or not wanting to offend a large segment of the population, that is not only foolish, but dangerous too. Because again, it’s the job of any doctor to tell people what’s healthy and what’s not.
But back to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s anti-obesity initiative. The US actually has much higher overweight and obesity rates than the UK. The graph below tells you where America is, and tragically it’s likely got even worse over the last few months with inevitably deteriorating lifestyle habits during the lockdown. Feel free to go online and search mortality rates by country from COVID-19, and compare what the mortality rates are in high obesity rate western countries, compared with low ones such as Japan. Of course, lowering or even eliminating obesity won’t take away COVID-19. That’s not the message of this article. But it will make a hell of a difference to people getting very sick from it. I’m glad that my home country of Britain at least, is now pushing this public health message urgently.
Suneel Dhand is a physician, writer, and YouTuber. He is Co-Founder at