Fri, Apr-17-20, 10:53
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Senior Member
Posts: 7,582
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Plan: EF/Fung IDM/keto
Stats: 375/225.4/175
BF:
Progress: 75%
Location: NE Florida
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Covid-19 does not discriminate by body weight
Interesting article since many of us here still fall into the overweight or obese category:
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-1...by-body-weight/
Some quotes:
Quote:
In recent weeks, many news outlets—and a few scientific journals—have sent the same frightening message. A study posted on a preprint server last weekend by researchers at New York University provided fodder for the latest round of this reporting: “Obesity appears to be one of the biggest risk factors related to Covid-19 hospitalizations and critical illness,” Newsweek claimed on Tuesday. Yet this rhetoric is based on flawed and limited evidence, which only exacerbates the stigma that larger-bodied people already face in society and our health care system. That stigma is what truly jeopardizes their health, not weight itself—a fact that’s only more important to consider in the midst of this pandemic...
Where did the CDC get the idea that people with a BMI of 40 or above are at greater risk in the first place? It’s unclear. A CDC press contact didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the peer-reviewed evidence that was available at the time the agency made that pronouncement generally indicated weight was not a risk factor. Nearly all published data from China (where Covid-19 has been studied since first being discovered in December 2019) shows that high BMI alone isn’t associated with developing the disease or with having a critical outcome. In most Chinese studies, high BMI doesn’t even make the list of preexisting conditions among Covid-19 patients—despite the fact that one-third of China’s population has a BMI in the “overweight” or “obese" categories,...
Indeed, multiple studies have found that simply reading a news article about the so-called “obesity epidemic” induces weight stigma and increases the expression of anti-fat attitudes among participants. Reports about the pandemic that name body size as a risk factor likely do the same. “I suspect that this news coverage constantly linking weight to Covid-19 risk is also heightening anti-fat bias,” says Jeffrey Hunger, a researcher who studies the effects of weight stigma and other forms of discrimination at Miami University of Ohio. “This constant barrage of media coverage linking weight to Covid-19 might lead to blaming individuals for actually contracting it.” And from my interactions with dozens of higher-weight clients, readers, and podcast listeners, it’s clear that many people are feeling blamed and shamed right now. “In a lot of ways it does make you feel like it’s your fault,” says Cox, who is at a higher weight. That feeling of self-blame just worsens the already difficult situation of living through a global pandemic. “There's an extra mental and emotional toll that it takes,” Cox says.
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