Shortly after the pandemic began a year ago, Americans made a joke about the dreaded ‘Quarantine 15’, worrying they would gain weight while locked in homes with food supplies, glued to computer screens and watching Netflix.
The concern is real, but assessing the extent of the problem was a challenge. Surveys asking people simply about their weight are notoriously unreliable, and many medical visits have been virtual.
Now, a very small study using objective metrics – weight measurements of Bluetooth-linked smart scales – indicates that adults under shelter-in-place orders earn more than half a pound every 10 days.
This amounts to about two kilograms per month, said dr. Gregory M. Marcus, senior author of the research letter, which was published Monday in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open, said. Americans who maintained their closing habits could easily pick up 20 pounds in the course of a year, he added.
“We know that weight gain in the US is already a public health problem, and therefore anything that makes it worse is definitely important, and orders at the shelter are so ubiquitous that the large number of people affected by it makes it extremely relevant. , “says dr. Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Although it is almost impossible to make generalizations based on the study – which includes less than 300 people spread across the United States – all participants monitor their weight regularly.
Many of these people lost weight before shelters were issued in their states, Dr. Marcus remarked. “It is reasonable to assume that these individuals are more concerned with their health in general, and more disciplined and on top of things,” he said. “It indicates that we can underestimate – that this is the tip of the iceberg.”
Overweight has been linked to a greater risk of developing Covid-19 disease worse, and the United States already has one of the highest overweight and obesity in the world. About 42 percent of American adults older than 20 have obesity, as defined by the body mass index, while another 32 percent of Americans are simply overweight.
The risk of serious illness has also been documented among young adults who are overweight or obese. Many states prefer people who are overweight or obese for vaccination, along with those with other chronic conditions such as diabetes or hypertension.
The new study analyzed the data obtained from 269 participants involved in an ongoing cardiology study, the Health eHeart Study. They volunteered to report weight measurements from Bluetooth-connected smart scales and weighed themselves regularly; the researchers collected 7444 weight measurements over a four-month period, an average of 28 weight measurements from each participant.
The group was by no means nationally representative, so the results were not generalized: about three-quarters were white and only 3.5 percent identified as black or African-American; about 3 percent identified as Asian-American. The average age was 51 and they were almost equal among men and women.
The participants were from 37 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers analyzed weight measurements taken between February 1, 2020 and June 1, 2020, to look at weight changes before and after assignments were issued for each state.
Although participants mostly lost pounds before the orders were issued, their weights gradually increased to about six-tenths of a pound every ten days after the orders were issued, regardless of where they were in the country and regardless of the chronic medical conditions.
The exclusions certainly had an impact on the dietary patterns, on what people eat and how often they eat. But the constraints also limited the moody physical activity that is part of daily life.
“If you think about commuting people, even running to the metro or bus stop, or coming into the post office to post a letter or stop by the store – we burn a lot of calories in our daily lifestyle,” says Leanne Redman, a professor of clinical physiology at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of Louisiana State University.
Her research has found that people eat a healthier diet during the first days of downtime, but that they are more sedentary.
An earlier study by UCSF researchers looked at daily walking counts, followed by smartphones, among nearly half a million people in nearly 200 countries. The number of steps people took decreased by 27 percent a month after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic.
The worry about exercise also applies to children, who are known to pack unhealthy pounds during the summer holidays when they are not at school. The risk is even greater for Hispanic and Black children than for white children, said Andrew G. Rundle, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. health differences.
“We argued that the school holidays, which we thought would last six months and last longer, would be like the summer recess, but even worse, because everyone would load up with calorie-laden food, stay indoors and not go out.” he said. “Everything that makes summer dangerous for children can be magnified by exclusion.”