You Are What You (Choose To) Eat

The numbers speak for themselves, that the poor are disproportionately suffering infection and death. The poor are disproportionately black and Hispanic. But within the litany of reasons why this is happening is a not insignificant lie:

Leaving Detroit, I thought about the disproportionate number of black folks dying from the coronavirus because they had asthma, diabetes or hypertension. Because they had limited access to affordable, healthy food.

I’ve spent more time uptown than most, and there are stores and bodegas replete with glorious fresh vegetables. There is no problem with “limited access to affordable, healthy food,” but a problem with Whoppers. They’re cheap, effortless and taste delicious.

We eat too much, drink too much, snack too much, sit too much — then rely on the marvels of modern medicine to repair our battered bodies. And that makes us easy prey for a brand-new infection like the novel coronavirus.

The delightfully-named co-morbidities leave us open to worse outcomes from COVID-19, but we didn’t get there by accident. We supersized.

Take cardiovascular disease and stroke. In 2018 the United States shelled out $329 billion to treat them, the American Heart Association calculated. About 80 percent of those cases — $263 billion worth — were caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, alcohol use and obesity. And in any given year, those conditions alone cause upwards of 300,000 premature deaths in the United States.

“Obesity is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke,” said Saphier, a radiologist at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and author of “Make America Healthy Again” (HarperCollins), a new book that examines our floundering health-care system.

“All of those conditions render us susceptible to infectious illnesses — just what we are seeing with COVID-19,” Saphier says.

People who lived on Big Macs weren’t doing all that well before, and are doing even worse now. There’s no guy with a gun forcing you to add fries to your order. As unpleasant as it may be to say aloud, poor people eat poorly, not for lack of the availability of decent food but because that’s a choice they make. And their bodies suffer for it.

Yet, our woke sensitivities have made it a problem to call out obesity.

“It’s very easy to sound like the bad guy,” she admitted. “Doctors are often afraid to call out problems like obesity because we don’t want to be considered prejudiced or mean, or to be accused of ‘fat shaming.’ ”

It’s not shameful to be fat. But then, it’s no fun to die, either.

“We have made it so convenient to eat unhealthily,” Saphier said. “And it’s not that we’re lazy — it’s that we’re working so much and are so busy, even our kids have packed schedules. With home-cooked meals declining, that is when you see more takeout, more fast food.”

Even here, fear of being hurtful is used to Gertrude the truth. Of course people are lazy, except when it comes to making up excuses about why they do self-destructive things like eat fast food rather than make healthy meals (and, I might add, eat them as a family).

“America is sick, and we are all to blame,” Saphier said. “But I think we have proven two things these last few weeks: that our great medical innovations save lives, and that Americans are capable of taking great personal responsibility, in the form of social distancing, to protect each other,” she added.

While it may well be true that too many people of all socioeconomic groups are lazy, take poor care of themselves and put as much garbage in their bodies as excuses allow, the denial that this problem is pervasive in poorer communities doesn’t save anyone. It’s not that all black and Hispanic people eat poorly, live on burgers, fries and shakes, as somebody is buying all those ripe red tomatoes in front of the bodegas, but these co-morbidities aren’t epidemic on Park Avenue for a reason.

For those of us who want people to live, to survive, regardless of their socioeconomic status, their race or national origin, pretending this isn’t happening and turning a blind eye to the lie that “communities of color” lack access to healthy food and thus can’t do better than an Egg McMuffin doesn’t help them any.

When even the docs feel compelled to lie to their patients rather than tell them to drop the Whopper and eat a salad, they stand no chance. No matter how far medicine advances, it’s not going to save us from what we put into our mouths. If you care about what happens to the poor, to black and Hispanic people in America, then start trying to help by not lying to yourself and them.