Eat, Drink, and Be Wary

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about disposing of unfinished liquor bottles that had been sitting too long in the cabinet. This apparently has not been a necessary chore for a sizable chunk of the population lately: few bottles have gone unfinished during the pandemic. Psychiatrist William Scott Killgore of University of Arizona's College of Medicine wrote in the February Psychiatry Research, “many people are relying on greater quantities of alcohol to ease their distress.” Indeed. Alcohol consumption by those not affected significantly by the lockdown (for whatever reason) didn’t change. For those who were significantly affected by the lockdown, however, he noted that “hazardous alcohol use” rose from its normal (but high enough) 21% in April 2020 to 40.7% by last September based on answers to the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Severe dependency rose from 4% in April to 17.4% in September. Probable dependency reached 29%. Alcohol consumption rose for much of the remaining affected population, too, even if it didn’t reach hazardous levels.
 
Ironically, this makes drinkers who are locked down more susceptible to Covid. The World Health Organization remarked on its European website, “Alcohol consumption is associated with a range of communicable and noncommunicable diseases and mental health disorders, which can make a person more vulnerable to COVID-19. In particular, alcohol compromises the body’s immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes.”
 
The highest risk comes from combining alcohol abuse with obesity, which also has increased during the pandemic; higher obesity rates in wealthier countries accounts for much of the higher lethality of Covid in those countries. The Abstract of an NIH study states, “Our hypothesis suggests that a combination of alcohol consumption and obesity causes low immunity and makes the individual prone to develop ‘cytokine storm’ and ‘acute respiratory distress syndrome’; the hallmark of COVID-19 mortality and morbidity. Thus, we propose that reducing any one trigger can have a beneficial effect in combating the disease severity.”
 
It may come as no surprise that obesity has soared during the lockdown. While I’ve not increased my tippling during the pandemic, I regret that I have not been immune to raiding the refrigerator. Unlike the liquor cabinet, the fridge has not needed a clean-out of unfinished meals. My bedroom mirror finally frightened me at the beginning of December. Since then I’ve dropped 20 pounds (9 kg) but that’s only halfway toward my (by no means thin) target weight, so there is still a fat guy in the mirror motivating me to stay hungry. The problem with reining in overeating, of course, is that unlike alcohol one cannot simply stop cold turkey. (I could do with some cold turkey – on whole wheat with tomato and mayo.) That makes it trickier, but we do what we can.
 

Cold Turkey

To the extent the lockdown has led to increased obesity, it also has had the unintended consequence of increasing the severity of Covid infections. According to a January 2021 article in Nature, “Furthermore, novel findings indicate that specifically visceral obesity and characteristics of impaired metabolic health such as hyperglycaemia, hypertension and subclinical inflammation are associated with a high risk of severe COVID-19.” Most of us know infected people who shrugged off Covid with nary a sneeze and others who were knocked squarely (perhaps lethally) off their feet. 60 – 90% (yes, that’s a big range of uncertainty) of the severe cases have significant co-morbidities, and obesity (with its common health effects) is definitely a risk factor.
 
Self-reported weight gain among Americans having experienced lockdowns according to one study has averaged 2 pounds (.9 kg) per month. (People tend to lie even on anonymous surveys for some reason [wishful thinking?] so the real number may be higher; we know Americans drink more than they say they do, for instance, because the alcohol tax brings in 50% more than it should if they were telling the truth.) This is in line with my own experience: I needed to lose 20 pounds before the pandemic, so I’m actually back to where I was this time last year but not to where I aim to be.
 
In truth, the pandemic is not a big factor in my ongoing effort to lose pounds. Vanity is a slightly bigger one. Mostly, though, it is just the hope that being fitter will feel better in a more general sense. At my age that might be a fantasy. Nothing will restore me to feeling 18. We all need our fantasies though, and there are worse ones to have. Without it I could all too easily give up and resemble Ella Mae’s Mr. Five by Five.
 
 

Ella Mae Morse – Mr. Five by Five (1942)