“Blockbuster injections such as Wegovy have revolutionised the treatment of obesity, and recently been approved for use in other areas of medicine, including reducing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular-related deaths. Now experts say they increasingly believe weight-loss drugs could play a big role in preventing and treating cancer, the second leading cause of deaths globally,” reports The Guardian:
A study presented at the world’s largest cancer conference found patients taking the drugs were 19% less likely to develop 13 obesity-related cancers, including ovarian, liver, colorectal, pancreatic, bowel and breast cancer. The research involving 34,000 people, led by the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, also found patients were half as likely to die over 15 years compared with patients not taking the jabs, also known as GLP-1 receptor agonists (RA)…..
“Obesity is a risk factor for nearly all cancers, in both men and women. Thus the revolution in the medical treatment of obesity has enormous potential to prevent new cancers, reduce the severity and growth rate of existing tumours, and synergise with new cancer-specific therapies.”
Although obesity is bad for your health, progressive fat-acceptance activists oppose efforts to reduce obesity as “fat-shaming.” The Washington Free Beacon reported that:
Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”
Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.
Government lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic spawned obesity through things like “canceled soccer practices” and “shuttered dance rehearsals,” noted CNN.
Many children became fatter when schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Childhood obesity rose at the fastest annual rate ever. “Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic,” reported the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Skyrocketing obesity made suffering from the coronavirus worse. “The evidence linking obesity to adverse COVID-19 outcomes is ‘overwhelmingly clear,’” say medical experts. Most people hospitalized for the coronavirus were obese.
Shutting schools actually increases COVID-19 deaths, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. Moreover, “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” said Brown University Professor Emily Oster. There is “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to community transmission,” according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
Under the Trump administration, the CDC had pointed out that closing schools “can lead to severe learning loss,” and that school closures kill more children than COVID. Moreover, “extended closures can be harmful to children’s mental health and can increase the likelihood that children engage in unhealthy behaviors.”
In the U.S., officials’ school-closing decisions were driven mainly by teachers “union influence and politics, not safety,” reported Reason Magazine. Jon Valant, a researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, found that decisions to keep schools closed were driven by politics, not levels of “COVID-19 risk.” Leftist teachers unions repeatedly thwarted school reopenings. Some used “sick-outs” to shut down schools and force school boards to delay school openings.
By driving up obesity rates, school closings harmed students’ health. Obese people have higher death rates from the coronavirus, and higher rates of severe illness and complications. That may be because fat cells are literally “targets” of the coronavirus. As a journalist noted, “A study by primarily Stanford researches examines why obesity produces such bad COVID outcomes. It finds that COVID can infect fat cells, which means it not only causes severe illness but also *long COVID*.” As the study explains, fat cells are “targets of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” and support “pathogenic inflammation,” which “may explain the link between obesity and severe COVID-19.”
Yet, during the pandemic, government officials fostered obesity, by closing schools, gyms, parks, and other places where people could exercise and lose weight. In 2021, U.S. News reported on the big increase in obesity in America:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the nation’s obesity epidemic, according to a new report. In 2020, 16 states had adult obesity rates at or above 35%, up from 12 states the previous year….Since the pandemic began, 42% of adults in the U.S. reported gaining an undesired amount of weight, according to a Harris Poll conducted in February 2021. U.S. adults reported gaining an average of 29 pounds.
