A Meta Study on Obesity and Health
A while back, a Meta Collegue shared the following article, and asked is this good news or bad news? 🧐😗
Although I do not believe the article is either 'good' nor 'bad' news, I thought I would share my response. But I am also always interested in your thoughts?
Whilst obesity is the primary focus of this study, the advice is relevant FOR ALL DISEASE, as we know!
So in terms of our Meta Perspective of Health, overall it is a good meta study that makes the case for all areas that we know affect health outcomes, albeit focused on only one or two areas.
I would say that obesity itself could be considered a 'chronic dis-ease', indeed, it takes many years of chronic dysfunction (whether behavioural or biological) for a person to become obese. There are often complex emotional and psycho-emotional as well as habitual patterns involved in the journey to obesity.
As such, obesity is no different to many other chronic illnesses, that will also impact the efficiency of the immune system. This is, maybe, why (as the study says) susceptibility of obese people to C-19 can be compared to those of old age. (The study may say “infections” but it’s real focus is on the virus, I’m not sure I saw any proof that we can simply say obesity = susceptibility to infections).
The warning in this study is to avoid shaming those with these issues, but to develop a worldwide approach to counteract the lifestyles that impact these outcomes. In my opinion that requires more than a medical approach, but one that examines our emotions and our society - not just our lifestyle!
This approach would need us to examin the impact of our environment, pollution, toxicity, water supplies, food production, etc on this disease. Literally a deconstruction of how our society is mass producing foods and researching how bio-chemicals that are entering the food chain and our ecosystem are impacting our long-term health.
We have had a century of pesticides and chemicals being prevalent in food production; almost as long in vaccine programs that affect the immune system and build toxicity passed down from mother to child etc.
It is interesting that the increase in Immune Dysfunctions and modern ‘lifestyle’ diseases (for example, think about Diabetes) go hand in hand with such medical and food production advancements.
Whilst the study mentions ‘stress’ as a factor, I don’t believe that the medical world yet understands what stress is in the way that we do! (By 'we' I mean the community of Mind Body Detectives and Meta-Consious practitioners, who understand that SPECIFIC Emotional and the Psycho-emotional connections are foundational to health).
So my/our understanding and interpretation may be different to other peoples.
Obesity is a disease that has roots that go back into the bio-psycho-emotional aspect of being human. However, many people still do not even consider it a disease, but a lifestyle outcome (and some still say a lifestyle choice!) Which is where shaming then begins. So the correlation of highlighting obesity and lifestyle as the focus of this meta study is interesting.
Scientifically - yes.
But also in and of itself in terms of picking out obesity relative to the discussion around lifestyle and the immune system.
However, if the outcome of a study such as this, were to truly begin to address what is happening in a compassionate and multi-pronged approach that really did so in a Meta-Consious way (as I touch on above), it would be a fantastic thing!
Sadly, I have little faith such a study will have such a grand impact, and expect that the focus on any outcome will be much narrower in practice.