Queen Latifah just opened up about her cousin’s death while navigating her own challenges with obesity.
For the unversed, the 55-year-old American rapper and singer has been collaborating with the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk since 2021 to raise awareness for people facing obesity and how it becomes a reason for cardiovascular diseases.
In a talk with PEOPLE magazine, Latifah shared that the journey to raise awareness for obesity is personal to her, as she herself has been facing struggles related to weight loss.
She said, “Having lost a cousin who was living with morbid obesity and watching what she had to go through and how she fought for her life, why would I not want to be a part of it?”
The Equalizer star explained, “I watched her fight for her life for years, dealing with cardiovascular issues and blood clots and different kinds of things that were happening to her body, and fighting back and then falling back, and just the challenges because there’s a lot of mental challenges she was facing as well…”
She added, “She probably had gone through it the most severely, but I was looking at various big members of my family, including myself, and we all need this information. We all need this. It’s relative to each one of us. And so, if there’s anyone that could be helped through this, why not?”
Latifah went on to quip that the primary cause of her partnership with Novo Nordisk is “to make sure that people understand that obesity is a disease, not some kind of character flaw.”
The It’s Alright crooner emphasised that it is “an epidemic” in the United States and two American citizens out of five get affected by it, saying, “That’s a lot of people and it disproportionately affects people of color.”
“It’s a chronic disease, but it’s a manageable disease, and so what we would like for people to do is go to the TruthAboutWeight.com, get more information about it, and really just talk to their physicians,” Queen Latifah noted.
