![]() The report, released in March by the World Obesity Federation, found that the overwhelming majority of deaths occurred in countries where more than half the population has an obese or overweight BMI. Neman appended to his LinkedIn post a link to a CNN article that details a report on the global distribution of 2020’s COVID-19 deaths. If you disagree, I’d love to hear your plan for dealing with men, who are much more likely to be hospitalized or die after catching COVID-19 than women. If a bodily variation causes a difference in COVID-19 risk, that doesn’t mean it must be eliminated by force. But it’s far from clear that it’s a major risk factor-the CDC’s own numbers suggest that almost 74 percent of all Americans over the age of 20 fall into that same BMI range, which means that, even if weight had no correlation to or effect on outcomes, you’d still expect about three-quarters of those hospitalized with COVID-19 to have a high BMI.īMI’s uselessness as a proxy for health is a fight for another day, but even if you leave out confounding factors that might help explain the five-point difference-for example, that poor people are more likely to have a high BMI, to delay seeking costly medical treatment, and to work in-person jobs that expose them to the coronavirus-it hardly justifies making cookies illegal. The percentage is alarming in a vacuum, and the CDC does assert that high body weight is a risk factor for severe COVID-19. Speculating that America’s health-care crisis could be solved if everyone just had to eat some salad is not only lazy and wrong it’s perpetuating an attitude that is making health-and the pandemic-worse for millions of people.Īs proof for his idea, Neman offered an argument that’s often cited by people looking to reframe America’s pandemic failures as those of individual responsibility instead of institutional rot: According to one CDC study, 79 percent of people hospitalized with severe COVID-19 in the United States in 2020 had a BMI categorized as overweight or obese. More interesting, though, is how telling Neman’s salvational ramblings are of a harmful conviction about health that America’s wealthiest, most privileged class long ago laundered into common sense: that people who, unlike them, end up sick or poor have simply refused to make the right choices and help themselves. It is, of course, almost hilariously convenient for a man who’s made millions slinging expensive lettuce to believe that the future of the republic might depend on the feds force-feeding people the food he already sells that salad is the ideal medicine for an incredibly contagious respiratory virus might not be a trustworthy argument coming from a literal salad millionaire. ![]() (Sweetgreen did not respond to multiple interview requests for this article.) ![]() And Ongweso has since found evidence that Neman previously advocated similar measures within the company. Even so, Neman defended the intent of the proposal. Salads alone are not going to solve this,” according to a recording obtained by Vice. The CEO apologized to Sweetgreen’s staff in an email, and later, at a town-hall meeting with employees, acknowledged that indeed “Sweetgreen alone is not going to solve this. Neman faced backlash after Vice’s Edward Ongweso Jr. More specifically, he argued, the government could ban or heavily tax some foods, including any kind of processed food, a category so meaninglessly broad, it would wipe out virtually everything stocked on the inner aisles of the average grocery store-not to mention much of what is sold by Sweetgreen’s competitors. He did offer one proposal: The federal government could decide which types of food Americans are allowed to eat. Neman did not go into many specifics about how health should be mandated, or what such mandates would mean for disabled people, though efforts at national improvement that focus on those designated as physiologically undesirable have historically ended poorly for them. (The vaccines, it should be noted, have so far proved to be near-miraculously effective at saving those who get them.) Instead, he lamented that Americans are simply too fat to survive COVID-19, a reality that he says could be addressed with “health mandates.” “No vaccine nor mask will save us,” he wrote. Last week, in a lengthy, now-deleted post on LinkedIn, the CEO and co-founder of the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen expounded on a topic that might seem a little far afield for a restaurant executive: how to end the pandemic. ![]() Jonathan Neman really seemed to think he was onto something.
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