America's high obesity rates made the pandemic deadlier, but Vilsack is only high-level Biden official voicing concern

Percentage of obese adults, 2019 (Politico map, CDC data) 

High rates of diet-related issues such as obesity and diabetes have made the pandemic deadlier in the U.S., especially in rural America, where such diseases are more prevalent. "Yet there has been very little attention to the connection at the highest levels of government," Ximena Bustillo reports for Politico's Weekly Agriculture. "The problem is deeply entrenched and staggering in scale: More than 42 percent of American adults — about 100 million people — had obesity before the pandemic began, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly three-fourths of American adults are overweight or have obesity, and roughly one in five children now have obesity. Researchers estimate that nearly two-thirds of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. were related to obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart failure."

But the federal government has "no national strategy, no systems-wide approach, even as researchers increasingly recognize that obesity is a disease that is driven not by lack of willpower, but by a modern society and food system that’s almost perfectly designed to encourage the overeating of empty calories, along with more stress, less sleep and less daily exercise — setting millions on a path to poor health outcomes that’s extremely difficult to break from," Bustillo reports. "The only high-level Biden administration official who routinely talks about the issue is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — and he brings it up often. Vilsack likes to point out in his speeches, for example, that the government now spends more treating diabetes than the entire budget of the USDA, which is about $150 billion."