You Can’t Beat COVID-19 With Diet, No Matter What the Internet Tells You

In the face of so much uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is tempting to look for answers that can help you regain your sense of control over your life. You may, for example, find yourself reading the advice of self-styled “health experts” and social media gurus who like to make hype and often blatantly inaccurate statements about diet use to avoid getting seriously ill with the new coronavirus and spreading it to others. other people.

Their arguments can be summarized as follows: a population full of strong bodies will effectively stop the spread of the pandemic and hasten our return to normalcy. In addition, proper nutrition and strengthening the immune system (with vitamins, etc.) is enough to personally get rid of the worst effects of COVID-19.

As a science, this is bullshit. Worse, focusing on healthy eating above all else is a way to question the need for masks, social distancing, and, in some cases, the effectiveness of vaccines.

This focus on diet is shared by alternative health gurus, medical charlatans, social media scams and at least one famous chef and former presidential candidate. These people often do not deny the existence of Covid or even its virulence. But they often imply that the atmosphere of fear surrounding the pandemic is exaggerated, and that mainstream authorities have deliberately ignored the issue of nutrition in their safety messages. The true pandemic, they say, is America’s long-standing predominance of nutrition-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and obesity.

You may have seen how these ideas are shared by friends on social media, where they tend to spread. Or maybe you’ve seen disinformation emerge at its source: from various influencers or public figures who are promoting these claims online , often to tens of thousands of viewers.

One particularly sassy tweet , devoid of much context, comes from UK cardiologist Asem Malhotra, who calls diet something of a panacea in the fight against COVID.

Nicola Hess, Associate Professor at the University of Westminster and Head of Nutrition at the Dasman Diabetes Institute, told Lifehacker that diet has always been and has been an important aspect of overall health. But there is no evidence to support claims that a healthier diet will protect a person from contracting COVID or its more serious consequences.

She writes in an email:

Eating a healthy diet and … exercise is smart as it protects us from a variety of diseases – in my opinion there is no evidence and no justification for linking healthy eating to COVID-19 (if you have nothing to sell). Should you try to eat healthier foods during a pandemic if there is a chance to protect you from a serious infection? Of course, because there are no downsides to eating less sugar, junk food, etc. Let’s just not pretend that it will prevent COVID-19 infection and even death from it – there are 23-year-old slender athletes who have sadly died. …

Eating healthy, exercising, and taking vitamins when you need them are great ways to ensure your personal health in a general sense – backed by more than a century of scientific research. However, this is not a substitute for a coherent public health policy using traditional epidemiological tools in the midst of a raging pandemic. Here’s what you need to know about the culture of diet fanaticism and how to define it in its many forms.

COVID Diet Pseudoscience Is A Branch Of Pseudoscience About Regular Diet

In recent years, dietary evangelists have gained increasing influence in the public sphere. The craze has been spurred by celebrities such as Gweneth Paltrow, whose wildly popular lifestyle brand Goop has been promoting a raw food diet that experts consider potentially deadly . Podcast host Joe Rogan has also helped fuel the dietary chatter of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who advocates a strictly carnivorous diet (both Peterson and his daughter Michaela claim that the red meat diet cured their longstanding bouts of depression ).

Much of the dietary fundamentalism advocates various methods of increasing overall immunity and thus preventing Covid. Paul Saladino, for example, a physician in Austin, Texas, recommends eating organ meats and steaks. Physician T. Colin Campbell, by contrast, is an advocate of whole foods based on a plant-based diet. This year, he wrote , “I doubt there will be many people happy with repetitive disguises, social distancing and contact tracing when changing our diets can do so much more while protecting social norms, job security and our economy.” Meanwhile, renowned British doctor Asim Malhotra has published a book promising a 21-day path to immunity through a conscious diet, which aims to “prevent, improve, and even potentially reverse” the factors that can cause or worsen COVID-19.

The adherents of this trend are not always doctors. Famed Australian chef Pete Evans was fined $ 25,000 by the FDA this year following outlandish claims on the Internet about a device he invented called the Biocompressor. Evans charged $ 14,000 for a wellness platform that he claimed was “programmed with a thousand different recipes and there is a couple from the Wuhan coronavirus in there.” The idea seeps through YouTube and Instagram echo chambers , but is not limited to social media influencers: former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has also joined.

It just isn’t right

David Gorski, M.D., an oncologist and editor of Science-Based Medicine , says the idea that diet can prevent or treat disease is nothing new. “The idea that diet can somehow magically boost the immune system so that we never (or almost never) get sick is a very old fantasy in alternative medicine that takes a grain of truth and then vastly exaggerates it.”

This dietary dogma is often devoid of the scientific nuances inherent in modern immunology, especially in light of the recent emergence of COVID-19 and our evolving understanding of the virus.

Dr. David Robert Grimes, cancer researcher, physicist and author of The Irrational Monkey , takes this point further by saying, “Dietet fanatics often make vague claims about protecting their immune system, but this is at best a truism and at worst pointless. … “He explained to Lifehacker that this kind of thinking” demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of immunology. “

In the words of Grimes:

Strengthening the immune system is often the last thing you want to do; ask anyone with allergies, such as being attacked by their own immune system. During the Spanish flu, young healthy people died disproportionately due to the overreaction of their immune systems. Not only do diet preachers value the diet’s ability to modulate the immune response too highly, they do not understand any of the intricacies of the diet.

It is important to note that many of those who preach the gospel on nutrition are themselves entrepreneurs or authors. Saladino sells dietary supplements in addition to his book; an anonymous meat evangelist who @KetoAurelius on Twitter sells beef liver strips along with a hyper-masculine mantra praising beef superiority and questioning the severity of the pandemic.

Nothing will make you immune to the virus

The appeal of healthy eating makes sense as a tempting alternative to the uncertainty created by government-sanctioned lockdowns, school closures, and COVID-induced economic disasters in the face of paltry financial stimulus from the federal government. After all, diet change is relatively easy, and would it be great if all it takes is moderate self-discipline to change the world for the better?

There are tempting prospects here. This allows anyone who adheres to this logic to believe that they have a tacit knowledge that the mainstream medical community is actively ignoring. According to Grimes, this concept “gives [people] a sense of strength and well-being: they“ know ”the causes and cures for diseases, and thus they are virtually immune to them. This feeling of control is completely illusory, but it often flatters the believer’s ego. ”

But knowingly or not, there is an implicit level of blame for the victims, which is necessarily accompanied by such an individualistic approach – whoever succumbs to COVID-19 must have done something wrong.

Gorski says there is “a clear“ victim blame ”atmosphere in these statements. They imply that it is the victim’s fault if she dies from COVID-19 because he “didn’t eat right” or “didn’t live right.” Of course, this does not take into account the fact that the biggest risk factors for severe COVID-19 are unchanged: male origin and age. ”

Gorski notes that making individual dietary changes can actually bode hugely positive results in terms of improving overall metabolic health over the long term, but these lifestyle changes often take a huge amount of time.

He tells Lifehacker:

It is possible that by reducing obesity or partially reversing type II diabetes or heart disease through diet, weight loss and exercise, the risk of dying from COVID-19 can be reduced, but NOW it is not helping. Such interventions take months or years, not days or weeks.

While you may not be able to personally root out the spread of misinformation (this is an ongoing job for tech companies), you can arm yourself enough to recognize all of its hallmarks: it often offers an abbreviated approach to quickly fix this multifaceted dilemma, adds value to individual efforts to protect ourselves. sells a variety of lifestyle products and uses inflammatory rhetoric about the current suite of tools used to keep people safe during a pandemic.