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What a surprise! Of the 12-17 year olds hospitalized for COVID, 61 percent were obese.
And, 78 percent of all COVID patients were obese and suffering from underlying conditions.
Keeping the eating unhealthy trend moving forward, Americans are still filling up their bodies with crap-level food.
We’re #1
America is a world leader in many categories, but one of those categories is unhealthy eating which gives rise to obesity; the developed nations of the world lead the field in accounting for the more than 2 billion people worldwide (nearly one-third of the world’s population) who are obese or overweight, and America is the world’s heavyweight champion; see “READY TO EXPLODE” (11 Dec 2018) and “READY TO EXPLODE, READY TO IMPLODE” (15 Oct 2019).
What the COVID War did, at least at first, was to confine many people to their homes. And people stuck at home turned more attention to cooking. As reported on 4 January by CNN Business, baking sales boomed as people pursued “dreams of being a celebrity chef” and even posted photos on social media of the elaborate dishes they’d prepared.
But now, the same report tells us, the pendulum has swung back; people are “fatigued from cooking at home and prepping for complicated meals,” and, as they also return to work and school, are bringing quick lunches and breakfasts on-the-go (often eaten in the car or on the train), snacks, food from convenience stores, and microwavable foods back to their former levels.
Convenience stores, for example, suffered a big slowdown in traffic during 2020 and early 2021, but that traffic is now coming back. And the CNN report notes that beef jerky and popcorn are among those foods enjoying a sales increase.
Even people who cook dinner at home (who still outnumber those from before the COVID War) seem to no longer enjoy cutting up and measuring ingredients, opting instead for pre-packaged ingredients that permit them to feel like they’re cooking but without the extra time and extra trips to the store.
They no longer enjoy the abundance of free time they had in 2020, and no longer find cooking an escape; they now want meals they can prepare easily at home in 18 minutes or less.
TRENDPOST: “Quick food,” “fast food,” “snacks” and “frozen dinners” all translate to “unhealthy foods.”
The two Trends Journal articles cited above point out the impact of Americans’ eating habits on the health of the nation, not just in the epidemic of obesity but in other social costs: lowered life expectancy, the cost of treating diseases and conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) brought on or exacerbated by poor diets, and the cost of lowered productivity; see “FAT CHANCE FOR GOOD HEALTH” (11 Aug 2020).
And now, in the age of COVID, we see that being overweight/obese is one of the primary “pre-existing conditions” that make people particularly vulnerable to COVID-19; see “COVID-19 & OBESITY: THE MORE YOU WEIGH, THE WORSE OFF YOU ARE” (9 Mar 2021) and “JUNK FOOD VS. COVID-19: THE WINNER IS?” (26 Jan 2021).