Covid Contiki Tour Part 1

Not even a global pandemic can stop the feverish hysteria of diet culture! As COVID-19 wreaks havoc across the world, there’s a sh*tload of truly hideous media articles and speculative research editorials proclaiming that higher weight people get sick more often, more severely, and even die at a higher rate than thin people. This narrative is largely being accepted as an unquestioned ‘truth’ by most media outlets. But where did this idea come from, and what does the data say? This week on All Fired Up we’re travelling around the world on a virtual COVID Contiki tour, visiting the COVID-19 hot spots, finding out where these narratives came from, and digging deep into the statistics to see what’s actually going on. I am joined by my fellow tour guides Fiona Willer, anti-diet dietitian and weight science expert, and Jess Campbell, anti-diet nutritionist and medical student, in an intrepid mission to uncover the truth! This is an epic 2-part series which is ESSENTIAL LISTENING. In such challenging times, we need objective and transparent information. It’s simply not OK to keep serving up weight biased BS. But be warned - this is obviously a very distressing topic, and this episode contains multiple uses of the “O” word (there was no way around it), plus we’re going into explicit discussions of disease, death, and BMI. Look after yourself!

Show Notes This week I have multiple guests in an incredible 2 part series! We are super fired up about COVID-19 and the BS weight-related outcomes being speculated about left, right and centre. Fiona Willer, fearless anti-diet dietitian and weight science expert, alongside Jess Campbell, anti-diet nutritionist and medical student join me to unpack the COVID-covert-crap! We’re in the midst of an epidemic, with a terrible virus taking over the world. On the day of recording (26th April 2020) there’s something like 200,000 deaths across the world and so many countries in lockdown and in crisis. And as usual, we’re pissed off - we’re hungry for data, to understand and unpack the fast-moving science behind COVID-19 and what’s making it tick. This whole podcast is about the impact of how weight stigma and weight bias impacts how we understand the world, and it’s clear now how weight bias is shaping how we understand COVID-19. So, I’m so happy we have two of the finest brains on the planet to join me on this massive research rabbit hole that we’ve been in for the last few weeks. Today we’re going to unpack the science and the published data that we’ve come across. Not all of it - there’s mountains of it - but we’ll try and do a bit of a whistle-stop tour around the planet of what kind of data is coming out of different countries, and compare and contrast that with what is being said in some of our media and our journals. What fun! A “COVID Contiki tour!” So, what are we seeing? There are some really hideous media articles around that are basically claiming this idea that higher weight people are at increased risk of catching Coronavirus, that they have more severe symptoms and a higher death rate. So our starting questions were about whether this is true, and what is it based on? I wanted to start with some examples of the really shitty media articles that are coming out that have really damaged and upset people in larger bodies. Two of them came out on April 16th, 2020 - there was an article in European Scientist from Dr Aseem Malhotra called “COVID 19 and the elephant in the room”. Fiona reckons that the use of this idiom is a bit of a litmus test for uninterrogated biases. A warning that this episode will likely mention the ‘o’ word several times, as we discuss these articles. The first page of Dr Malhotra’s hysteria-raising article says in capital letters “OBESITY - THE REAL KILLER BEHIND COVID”. Dreadful. It basically goes on to claim that being in a larger body is a risk factor for catching COVID-19, and then puts the blame straight back on people by claiming that it’s because of poor