If you’re woke, or want to be woke, or support wokeness, chances are you probably congratulate obese people for being “body positive” despite all medical evidence pointing to obesity as a leading cause of cancer and heart disease.
Weird time for @Cosmopolitan to do this cover given the relationship between obesity and death/serious illness from Covid. pic.twitter.com/7HYAktuVeh
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) January 4, 2021
As it turns out, we don’t hear much about the dirty little secret that obesity easily killed as many people as mask avoidance — perhaps more. The Washington Examiner’s Brad Polumbo did a deep dive into the issue of weight and Covid deaths and found some shocking correlations.
COVID-19 is much more deadly for the elderly and those with preexisting conditions that weaken the immune system. One of those conditions is obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Adults with excess weight are at even greater risk during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The CDC said that of the roughly 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations from the start of the outbreak to Nov. 18, 30% were attributed to obesity.
Meanwhile, a new study examining over 150,000 adults across 20 hospitals confirmed that obese people are much more likely to be hospitalized or to die from the virus. Severely obese COVID-19 patients were 61% more likely to die and 33% more likely to face hospitalization than their peers at healthy weights.
This isn’t really “news” in the sense that the CDC had been warning obese people since the beginning of the pandemic that they were at higher risk of serious illness and death. So why did so many obese people ignore the warning?
This alarming pre-pandemic crisis and recent acceleration should be setting off enormous alarm bells. But instead, liberal-leaning media outlets and cultural influencers have glorified obesity and downplayed its health risks.
For example, Cosmopolitan ran a series of magazine covers featuring significantly overweight women under the heading, “This is healthy!”
If we put an anorexic girl on the cover of #Cosmopolitan there would be outrage. Anorexia carries just as many health warnings as obesity. I am all for promoting positive body image but when will the industry starts promoting healthy bodies instead of extremes? This is NOT health pic.twitter.com/muIS2d2uTb
— Ianthe Rose (@IantheRose) September 3, 2018
“Fat shaming” is not only cruel but wrong. But actually promoting the idea that it’s perfectly OK to be unhealthy and to promote the idea that morbidly obese people aren’t at any greater risk to sicken and die from Covid-19 is idiotic — even if it’s woke to do so.
And celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels faced an internet outrage mob and widespread denunciation when she declined to describe overweight singer Lizzo’s body as “healthy” and instead praised her music. Lizzo has gained internet celebrity and media fanfare for not just her musical talents but for being vastly overweight and unabashedly happy about it, declared a “body positivity” queen by the woke Left.
“Fat is not a bad word,” blared Teen Vogue. “Fat is not an indication of value, health, beauty, or performance.” (Emphasis mine.) A cancer charity was lambasted for “fat shaming” when it started an awareness campaign about the link between obesity and cancer.
Irresponsible nonsense. It may not be an indication of someone’s “value” as a human being, but the idea of “beauty” is certainly in the eye of the beholder. And not being able to talk about the link between obesity and death from Covid probably cost tens of thousands of lives.
There are overweight people who are very healthy — they eat healthily, they exercise regularly, they have low cholesterol. It’s just that most of us do not have the “ideal” body type and will never have a “beach body,” or look like fashion models. There’s no shame in that.
The shame is in refusing to acknowledge that a woke shibboleth about “body positivity” could have killed a lot of people.
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