Jean-Claude is what we call a force of nature: 1.96 m for 100 kg of muscles sculpted “in the gym”.
But when the Covid-19 surprised him in March in his 74th year, the taxi driver turned into a colossus with feet of clay.
Emergency hospitalization, two months in a coma, rehabilitation… when he finally returns home to Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis), he has lost more than thirty kilos!
And if he is just now starting to regain his healthy weight by concocting “normal” meals again, Jean-Claude has forgotten during his entire period of care what the word “eat” meant.
Examples like his, Professor Eric Fontaine has seen every day since the first wave of the coronavirus swept through France.
According to a study he conducted on 403 patients, "70% of people hospitalized due to Covid-19 emerged in a state of undernutrition with an average of 6.5 kg less", estimates this nutritionist doctor who officiates at Grenoble University Hospital (Isère).
More slender then, could we conclude.
Except that for the president of the collective to fight against undernutrition, losing weight to this point in record time is not at all good news.
And on the occasion of the launch of the week against malnutrition, which begins this Thursday, the professor has decided to launch an SOS: “any rapid weight loss is evidence of muscle destruction and the older you are, the more c 'it's hard to regain muscle'.
Jean-Claude knows something about it: “When I came out of the coma, I was a corpse and the doctors told me that I was a miracle worker, the taxi driver remembers.
I had mainly lost muscle, I could not walk and even today I do not feel well because I did not find my body before.
"
"For the same disease, undernourished patients die more often"
At the Bichat hospital (Paris XVIII) where she is head of the geriatric service, Professor Agathe Raynaud-Simon has seen patients with Covid-19 wasting away visibly.
To the point of allowing the relatives of a nonagenarian who no longer ate to cook "homemade" dishes for her to regain her appetite and weight.
"When very sick patients have difficulty breathing, are placed on oxygen, find themselves isolated in their room and do not benefit from sufficient nutritional support, they lose weight enormously, alarms the doctor, who is also president of the French Nutrition Federation.
However, it is estimated that with equal disease, undernourished patients die more often.
Conversely, when they are well nourished, they have fewer postoperative complications ”.
But holding a fork, salivating over the aroma of a good meal or savoring the taste of fruit are all pleasures that can quickly disappear.
When the Covid-19 mowed down Colette, 88, she lost in a few days all the little things that make the pleasure of good food.
She also lost hair, sense of balance and walking.
Lost the breath too.
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If the nonagenarian, in a state of malnutrition when she was hospitalized at the Bichat hospital (Paris XVIIIth), has recovered, it is partly thanks to the food.
The one that his son cook concocted for him every day and that his daughter-in-law Delphine and her grandson Morgan brought him on his hospital bed.
“Colette had no appetite, refused to eat and had no more strength even though she was always a fighter,” says her daughter-in-law.
One day, the doctors were alarmist: they did not want to intubate her but said that her condition would get worse if she did not eat.
"
Colette now lives in a service residence for seniors in Val-d'Oise.
/ DR
The retiree is losing weight visibly: she loses at least 10 kg.
Several meetings are organized with the medical profession and in particular the professor of geriatrics Agathe Raynaud-Simon.
The decision was taken to exceptionally authorize the family to bring him home-made dishes in addition to a treatment based on food supplements.
“Really, I wasn't hungry,” she tells us.
It was my grandson who forced me to eat at first.
"
The lack of taste and smell didn't help her.
“She told me that the fish, meat and eggs served at the hospital tasted the same,” recalls her stepdaughter Delphine.
So we brought him dishes that were sometimes a little spicy, sometimes lemony or with strong tastes.
And it saved her by participating in her reconstruction.
"
“This Covid demolished me at the respiratory level and I walk today with a walker,” says the old lady who now lives in a service residence for seniors in Val-d'Oise.
“But I gained weight, regained my appetite and morale!
"
Rethinking the quality of meals in hospitals and nursing homes
“Undernutrition is a silent disease not taken into account enough in the hospital and it has obviously become a collateral damage of the first wave of Covid”, summarizes Jérôme Guedj.
Director of the Observatory of Social Policies at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, he claims this is the result of an online survey conducted from October 29 to 30, 2020 by Ifop among 1,028 people, aged 18 and over. , which shows that 7% of French people lost more than 5 kg during confinement.
Alarming figures in his eyes, especially when they affect the elderly.
"First of all those who live at home and who, without being infected by Covid, have experienced weight loss linked to social isolation, the fear of going out to do their shopping, the impossibility of eating. outside.
This undernutrition is also linked to a forced sedentary lifestyle, because the fact of not moving from home melts muscles and alters appetite.
"
Jérôme Guedj pleads for "rethinking the quality of meals in hospitals and nursing homes" by "increasing the staff dedicated to nutrition".
He also calls for symbolically rehabilitating the scale which should constitute, according to him, a "simple screening tool", and to meditate on this Hippocratic maxim: "May your food be your first medicine".