Sun, Nov-15-20, 00:50
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Dame Sally Davies: obesity scourge led to 50,000 Covid death toll
Former health chief claims the failure to address the crisis of overeating and cheap junk food has caused extra fatalities
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-toll-c9r5bsnps
Quote:
Thousands of coronavirus deaths could have been avoided if ministers had tackled the obesity crisis, England’s former chief medical officer says today.
Professor Dame Sally Davies blames the country’s high death toll on “a structural environment” that enabled junk food makers to encourage consumption.
The UK has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world and the second highest in Europe, with nearly one in three adults obese. Obesity, defined as a body mass index greater than 30, raises the risk of dying of Covid-19 by 48%.
Last week Britain became the first country in Europe to pass a grim milestone, reaching more than 50,000 deaths from the coronavirus on official figures.
Davies said: “There is a direct correlation between obesity and a high mortality for Covid, and I’m highlighting that, as a nation, one of the reasons we have a problem with our weight ... is because of our structural environment to which advertising, portion size, and many other things come into play.”
In June, Boris Johnson admitted that Britons were Europe’s fattest people bar the Maltese. He recognised his own need to lose weight after requiring intensive care for Covid in April.
He said: “I have taken a very libertarian stance on obesity but actually when you look at the numbers, when you look at the pressure on the NHS, compare, I’m afraid, this wonderful country of ours to other European countries, we are significantly fatter than most others, apart from the Maltese ... It is an issue.”
Health experts hoped the prime minister’s brush with death would lead to action. A “war against fat” was announced, but with little effect. Last week new government proposals suggested online ads containing food high in fat, sugar and salt could be banned.
Davies today issues a call for the NHS to focus on prevention as much as being “an illness service”.
It includes a demand for food companies to “play or pay”, meaning they must play their part in encouraging healthier eating or pay an annual levy to fund an expanded health service.
During her nine years as chief medical officer, Davies faced criticism for seeking “sin taxes” and laws to clamp down on unhealthy foods and smoking. Ministers acted on some of her appeals.
Davies, who stepped down in October last year — to be succeeded by Chris Whitty — said Covid’s devastating effect on the unhealthy had proved her correct.
She told Times Radio’s G&T programme: “You only have to look at our prime minister, who believes his weight was one of the reasons his episode of Covid was quite serious.
“We know if we were slimmer as a nation, and smoked less, we would have less [Covid] morbidity and mortality.”
She added: “We accept commercial companies nannying people into eating or drinking or smoking unhealthily. But we don’t accept that we as a nation working together should nudge people and put the same effort and money into nudging people for health. We need a structural system where it’s easy to be healthy.”
Davies, who is master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was damning about successive governments’ failure to prepare the NHS properly for a pandemic.
“We have been found wanting. We could and should have done better. We should have maintained the health of our public better, but if [you] look at comparisons, we also have fewer doctors per bed than other comparable countries, fewer intensive care beds, fewer ventilators. Our NHS has delivered really well, but we left it without a resilience. We needed more resilience,” said Davies who has wrritten a book on the problem, Who’s Health Is It Anyway?, co-authored with the epidemiologist Dr Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard and published this week.
Covid had revealed stark health inequalities. “If there’s one thing the British public care about, it’s fairness.”
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