Do Your Part to be Healthy
According to experts in the field, nutrition is the biggest coronavirus risk factor that not enough people are talking about.
"According to experts in the field, nutrition is the biggest coronavirus risk factor that not enough people are talking about."
“We have two epidemics: obesity and COVID-19,” said Dr. Mariela Glandt, a Harvard University and Columbia University trained endocrinologist and nutritionist who now lives in Israel and runs a clinic for diabetics in Ramat Aviv.
She said, “As long as the pandemic is still going on, anyone who cares about their health should do everything they can to improve the risk factors that they control” – among them diet.
That’s because “good nutrition and maintenance of a healthy body weight is essential for adequate immune function, supporting resistance to infectious disease and reducing adverse outcomes in the event of illness,” according to Prof. Mona Boaz of the Department of Nutrition Sciences in the School of Health Sciences at Ariel University.
“A poor diet, like the modern American diet, with its junk food, ultra-processed starches and cheap fats, causes metabolic dysfunction that can be a disaster when it’s combined with the coronavirus,” Glandt wrote in an eBook titled How to Eat in the Time of COVID-19 that she recently published with Ross Wollen and Jessica Apple.
“This particular pandemic highlighted the impact that obesity can have on the immune system,” Boaz said.
She stressed that public health policy should be directed at improving diet quality, especially among youths who are much more likely to follow healthful practices if taught from an early age.
“Logic would tell you,” Boaz said, “being adequately nourished and maintaining a healthy diet is always to your benefit.”
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/can-what-you-eat-save-you-from-covid-19-analysis-677426