An interesting if macabre statistic has emerged from countries hit hard by COVID-19: if you have Metabolic Syndrome, you have a much, much higher risk of dying.
The statistics I can find are a bit vague. As far as I can tell, if you die from COVID-19, there's a 97-99% probability that you were wheeled into hospital with one of a small number of serious chronic conditions. Said "chronic condition" is often (about half the time?) recorded as hypertension, diabetes, or CVD.
The implication is that if you're overweight, unfit, and (pre)diabetic, you'd better lock yourself in your room and have your meals slid through a hole in the door.
While deaths among (say) people with lung disease are understandable, it's not immediately obvious why Metabolic Syndrome places you in such jeopardy, but for some reason it does. And what causes Metabolic Syndrome?
Most of us here are pretty confident about the answer: loads of processed carbs, and low-fat diets are inevitably full of carbs, simply because fat+protein+carbs must add up to 100%.
And how it is that virtually everyone is eating processed carbs and zero fat? Why, because it's healthy. It's so healthy, in fact, that GPs spend much of their time prescribing boatloads of statins, blood-pressure medication, diabetes medications, "weight loss" drugs (eg., orlistat), and who-knows-what else in pursuit of ... erm, better health among their disastrously-ill and overweight patients.
Despite all this in-your-face evidence that high-carb low-fat diets aren't very good for you, the health authorities continue to recommend that we should all eat this way, based on some stuff that they've been told by Qualified Nutritionists. Supermarket shelves are stacked up with processed wheat-based products (all low in fat, naturally) and the great unwashed are told to buy lots of them. Which they do - often because they're subsidized by government and used as loss-leaders by supermarkets.
While the victims of this misguided policy have hitherto been dying slowly - in a way that gives the dieticians plausible deniability - we've now got COVID-19. And now they're dying quickly.
LCHF evangelists are accused of spreading dangerous misinformation when we tell diabetic people that they don't have to remain diabetic, or that heart disease and obesity are not caused by too much dietary fat. We've been told that there's "not enough evidence" to drop the EatWell plate and instead just let people eat ... well, normal, healthy food.
Not so long ago, we had a consultant cardiac surgeon - whose name completely escapes me - frothing at the mouth and denouncing anti-statin campaigners with the ringing exhortation that statins "save lives", and if we stop prescribing them then "people are going to die".
Well, people are certainly dying now. And statins don't seem to be helping much with that, do they, doctor?
So here's a suggestion for the nutritionists. Just stop it already. You've had your fun - and I've got to hand it to you, in the entire history of bunkum and snake-oil salesmanship, you've done incredibly well. Now go and get a proper job. The statistics will pile up along with the corpses, and no doubt you'll spin it backwards and forwards to prove that the dead simply didn't eat enough carbs, or eliminate enough fat. Please don't. I've spent many months here poking fun at you, but it's simply not funny anymore.
A tale of four hormones