British politicians blamed soldiers’ sickliness during the Boer War on poor diets. The pandemic has stirred similar concerns about the country’s dining habits
British army was humiliated by a guerrilla force of southern African farmers at the turn of the 20th century, politicians turned to Britain’s diet. A third of men who had appeared at recruiting stations to fight the Boer settlers were rejected on the grounds of being too puny or sickly to fight. The decline of home cooking and a diet of white bread, cheap jam and tea was partly to blame, an official inquiry into the state of the “national physique” later concluded.
The prompt is the country’s covid-19 death rate—the second highest in the world—and the fear that wide waistlines contributed to it. Nearly two-thirds of Britons have a body-mass index above 25, meaning they are overweight; a figure higher than in France, Germany or Italy. A recent paper by Public Health England, a government agency, concludes that overweight covid-19 patients were more likely to experience serious complications and death.
As a newspaper columnist, Boris Johnson ridiculed public-health campaigns, arguing that the “true conservative knows that do-goodery is often far more dangerous than masterly inactivity.” His brush with death has changed his mind. He was, he said, “way overweight” when he was admitted to an intensive-care unit with the virus in April, and has since shed more than a stone thanks to a regime of early-morning dog walking.
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