Mexican lawmaker Hugo Lopez-Gatel said on Saturday that decades of bad food habits in the country have caused an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and other related health problems, and have made the Mexican people more vulnerable to the emerging coronavirus.

To date, the Mexican Ministry of Health has registered 1,890 cases of corona and 79 deaths.

"Unfortunately, these people have chronic diseases or the elderly," Lopez-Gatel told a news conference. He added that Mexico has one of the highest rates of diabetes and obesity.

He said, "This is a result of many years of at least four decades of malnutrition and a diet that resulted from products of low nutritional quality and very high calories, especially in processed foods."

The World Health Organization said that people with diabetes and related health problems were among the people most at risk of severe cases of the highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease caused by the emerging coronavirus.