Poor Diet A Major Cause Behind Covid-19 Deaths In India, Claims UK Doctor

Dr Aseem Malhotra, an Indian origin doctor based in United Kingdom, has suggested that the Indians must urgently cut down on ultra-processed food to build resilience against the deadly coronavirus.

(Representative Image/ Getty)

New Delhi: An Indian origin doctor based in United Kingdom has alerted Indian to take good care of the food we consume as according him, poor diet is a major cause behind the Covid-19 deaths in India. The leading cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra has suggested that the Indians must urgently cut down on ultra-processed food to build resilience against the deadly virus. 42-year-old Malhotra is among the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) frontline medics and also a professor of evidence based medicine. Amid the long-continued coronavirus pandemic across the globe, Dr Malhotra has taken up a mission to spread awareness around lifestyle changes as a major weapon in the fight against the contagious COVID-19. According to the reports, the 42-year-old practitioner stated that "obesity and excess weight was the "elephant in the room" that needs to be addressed as a major factor behind the deaths from the coronavirus. India is particularly vulnerable, having a very high prevalence of lifestyle-related diseases." "Specifically, conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease are three of the major risk factors for death from Covid-19. This is rooted in excess body fat, a cluster of conditions known as a metabolic syndrome," news agency PTI quoted Malhotra as saying. Point out the unhealthy lifestyle of the West, Malhotra told that highest death rates due to Coronavirus around the world can be seen in the western countries. He then correlated the situation with unhealthy food practices followed in US and UK. “The elephant in the room is that the baseline general health in many Western populations was already in a horrendous state to begin with. In the UK and US, more than 60 per cent of adults are overweight or obese,” he pointed out. In the US, less than one in eight people are metabolically healthy, which means having normal blood pressure, having a weight circumference if you are a man less than a 102 cm and less than 88 cm for a woman and healthy levels of blood sugar and good cholesterol. Malhotra said, “There’s no such thing as a healthy weight, only a healthy person. If people try to maintain all these metabolic health parameters through a healthy lifestyle, this could potentially be achieved within a few weeks of just a change of diet.” Going by a recently released report in a science journal "Nature", patients with Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome might have up to 10 times greater risk of death when they contract COVID-19 and called for mandatory glucose and metabolic control of Type 2 diabetes patients to improve outcomes. Malhotra warned that "the medications that are used for Type 2 diabetes and many of the other conditions have very, very marginal effects" in terms of improving lifespan or reducing risk of death, which most people are not made aware of, and they also come with side effects. “This is not to say that medications should be discontinued but the lifestyle changes are considerably more impactful on health and will reduce the need for medication. The positive news is that you can reverse this, but it is not being made aware to patients or practised by the majority of physicians as lifestyle prescriptions in India,” he added. Based on his own clinical experience, the expert, who belongs from New Delhi, recommended Indian on giving up ultra-processed foods, which covers any packaged food that comes with five or more ingredients because usually these are high in sugar, starch, unhealthy oils, additives and preservatives. He suggested to completely cut out these types of food from their diet, make sure that you are cooking from scratch, do not snack. Briefing the food practices following in India and sub-continents, Malhotra said that people in India have a very high intake of refined carbohydrate foods, these are also foods that are particularly harmful in excess because they raise glucose and insulin and therefore rooted in many of these chronic conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease – this involves too much consumption of flour and white rice. “These must be swapped with a variety of wholefoods such as vegetables and fruits and for those who are non-vegetarians, it is completely fine to eat red meat as well as full fat dairy products, eggs, fish etc,” he said. Giving reference of recent data on the higher risk faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities in the UK from coronavirus, the NHS doctor is of the view that disparity is also cultural. “South Asians have been found vulnerable because the prevalence of metabolic syndrome is three-four-fold higher in the population. Indians, therefore, I think have to be extra careful with their diet and what they are consuming and they should also not have the illusion of protection just because they are given a normal body mass index (BMI). Extra body fat, particularly around the waist, is much more detrimental to health than using outdated indices such as BMI to define health risk,” he said. The novel virus has infected more than 3 million people worldwide. Over 2.5 lakh people have died due to Covid-19 across the globe while more than one million patients have recovered from the disease. (With inputs from PTI news agency)