it’s the food, stupid!

By LYNNE MCTAGGART and BRYAN HUBBARD

The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us a couple of things: We cannot take what we hear or read at face value, and it is up to all of us to join the dots for ourselves.

We already know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid, is twice as virulent as seasonal flu, from the same SARS family, which puts its mortality rate at around 0.4 percent. For more than 90 percent who get the virus, it will cause mild symptoms. According to health agencies, 30 percent will not even know they have it, and will be entirely symptom-free, or asymptomatic.

Then start joining the dots, and two studies released this week provide two vital clues.  The first, from Tufts University, discovered that 90 percent of serious Covid cases needing emergency hospital care were escalations of one of four conditions: obesity, type 2 diabetes—often referred to as a ‘lifestyle’ disease—high blood pressure (hypertension) or heart failure.

Of these, obesity was the single biggest risk, accounting for around a third of all hospital cases. The researchers estimate that at least 64 percent of all serious Covid cases might never have happened were people healthier and less obese, or did not have type 2 diabetes, the ‘lifestyle’ disease caused by diet.

These four conditions trump the two usual suspects: age and ethnicity. While those were still a factor, they were secondary. An obese person of any age was likely to suffer serious Covid symptoms, and being elderly was not, on its own, a risk factor.  So much for the current vaccination policy.

As the researchers say, vaccinations are not, on their own, a silver bullet. Instead, the real answer is in eating a healthy diet.

Which brings us to our second clue.

We all get it that processed foods—drenched in fructose and corn syrup (HFCS)—are bad for us. We are constantly told they cause obesity and type 2 diabetes (hint, two of the major factors that cause a Covid infection to escalate into a serious, and life-threatening, illness), and that, of course, is right.

But researchers from the Francis Crick Institute have discovered processed food and drink is far more damaging even than that: They kickstart an inflammatory process in our immune system, essentially putting it on high alert.

The immune system will start producing reactive molecules that damage organs, and eventually cause a complete breakdown of healthy body functioning. Chronic health problems, everything from heart disease to cancer, are the eventual outcome. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are merely the first early-warning signs that the inflammatory process has started.

So, the vast majority of serious Covid cases are not caused by the virus itself but are the consequence of a bad diet. Which we already sort of knew…and yet we still cling to ways of reducing or avoiding infection, our rational minds frozen by a fear that has been generated by more than a year of negative announcements from the mainstream media. 

The Tufts researchers point out that changing to a healthy diet that eliminates processed food can have profound, positive effects in just six weeks. In that time, the rate of serious infections would drop by 60 percent, which immediately takes the burden from hospitals and ICUs, and does wonders for the gloomy Covid statistics we get every day—all without vaccination, mask-wearing or lockdown.

To their discredit, health agencies almost never mention this simple fact or advocate a healthy diet in their guidelines. The kindly take on this is that they listen to scientists and doctors who do not believe diet has anything to do with health; the more sinister would take us down the rabbit-hole of drug company collusion and worse.

Lynne McTaggart and Bryan Hubbard are founders of the magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You. With code “eletter20”, readers of KAMP SOLUTIONS can get a 20 percent discount off any subscription here.