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D.C. Needs to Take Steps in Addition to Vaccines to Keep Residents Healthy
The District of Columbia has announced that it plans to prioritize overweight and obese residents among its early recipients of the coronavirus vaccine. It’s great to see the District taking the threat of underlying health problems, including overweight and obesity, seriously.
In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has advised that people with underlying health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, chronic lung disease, and hypertension are among those at greater risk of severe outcomes from coronavirus.
As a doctor and certified nutritionist who sees patients in the District, I know that even after patients are vaccinated, we shouldn’t stop there. We must do all we can to help people address these health problems and prevent them from being in high-risk groups in the future.
One way to do that is through a healthy diet. To that end, the Physicians Committee has launched Fight COVID-19 With Food, a free series of online classes open to anyone wishing to improve overall health or underlying conditions for which diet may play a role, including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, in particular.
I am so excited to lead each class with Deitra Dennis, RN, NBC-HWC, and health nonprofit founder Marc Ramirez. We start each class by sharing information about the power of nutrition and then team up with nutrition experts and community leaders to share success stories, practical tips, meal planning advice, grocery shopping tips, interactive Q&A, and much more.
A survey from attendees of a previous version of the class revealed that within eight weeks, 67% of class attendees who had been seeking to lose weight reported weight loss, 53% of those with diabetes reported improvements, and 54% of class attendees with high blood pressure reported improvements.
The classes are not designed to replace masks, distancing, and vaccines, but to shore up our underlying health to the extent we can so as to reduce COVID-19 mortality. Hundreds of people have already benefited from this free 8-week program. A new class series, Tuesdays at 4 p.m., is underway this week and you may join any time, as often as you can. Register today!
