On Friday 15 May 2020, my wife Victoria, nudged me as I was reading to declare excitedly that Chris Evans, host of the Virgin Radio Breakfast Show, had repeated the highlight of the news: the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had declared ‘war on fat’, once the Covid-19 pandemic was under control.
This realisation came about when Johnson recognised that he was at death’s door in an intensive care unit while ill with the coronavirus.
Quoting The Guardian…‘Johnson’s spokesman said “It is critical to understand how factors such as ethnicity, deprivation, age, gender and obesity could be disproportionately impacting how people are affected by coronavirus,” he said.’ Yet despite the PM’s best efforts to jog and to cycle, he remains overweight. Widening pavements and creating emergency cycle lanes is not going to reduce anyone’s waistline.
The science has known for more than 100 years that obesity is a fat accumulation disorder
Obesity is directly related to eating processed foods where foods are stripped down to an unrecognisable state to be then reconstituted with added sugars to make them palatable. Obesity is just one of many symptoms of poor health such as hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases and cancer that make up ‘metabolic syndrome’.
In an article published almost ten years ago on 15 September 2010, the headline in The Guardian read ‘Obesity crisis ‘cannot be solved by exercise alone’’. The research by Prof. John Speakman found that ‘our lives have not become more sedentary in recent decades’.
Dr Thomas Seyfried is a biochemical geneticist and professor of biology who explains clearly that cellular respiration is the fundamental mechanism for healthy cells. Cell respiration is dependent on the many mitochondria within the cell. These mitochondria provide all the energy that we need for life.
The modern industrialised diet creates oxidative stress
This stress damages the mitochondria and life becomes compromised. However, Photobiomodulation reduces the damage of oxidative stress – but it does not act alone – we need to make lifestyle changes and eat wholefoods if we are to stay healthy and live a full and active life.
Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef, has been battling tirelessly for more than 10 years to reduce childhood obesity. Likewise, Michelle Obama initiated the public health campaign ‘Let’s Move!’ in 2010 to allow children to make healthy choices, to provide healthier food in schools, to gain access to quality foods and to ‘get moving’.
Unfortunately, both campaigns have struggled to gain recognition at the political level. There just is not the political will to tackle the food industry and until it does, ill health will continue to rise across the world.
This coronavirus pandemic is not the first nor the last but unless the modern industrialised diet reverts to wholefoods, its disproportionate impact on the obese may be an unwelcome aspect of our future world.
Further information
Prof Thomas Seyfried on Cancer: A Metabolic Disease with a Metabolic Solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEE-oU8_NSU
Prof Robert Lustig on: Sugar, Metabolic Syndrome, and Cancer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpNU72dny2s&t=849s
Edwin A.M. Gale on: The Rise of Childhood Type 1 Diabetes in the 20th Century https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/51/12/3353