New study gives the skinny on ineffective gastric bypass
You know by now that I've never been a fan of gastric bypass surgery. It's been marketed so aggressively that people practically look at it as a nose job for your stomach, when really it is serious and potentially deadly surgery.
I see seriously overweight people – often with diabetes – talked into this surgery all the time. They think they'll solve two problems at once – they'll lose a bunch of weight and maybe get rid of their diabetes, too. Well, a new study is showing that many diabetics who get the surgery are in for some serious disappointment.
Researchers found that patients with diabetes did not lose as much weight as non-diabetes patients after having gastric bypass. One explanation might be that diabetes patients are often loaded up on drugs – some of which have weight gain as a side effect. Another explanation is something I've been saying for years: This surgery is not always effective. There are plenty of people who don't become thin or simply put back on whatever weight they lose, because they don't correct lifestyle issues.
There's nothing as drastic as authorizing someone to cut and resize your stomach. I hope these patients and the docs advising them keep in mind that this surgery is a last resort. There are 140,000 of these surgeries performed a year, and I can promise you they are not all medically necessary. And there's no way that, in all these cases, serious efforts at lifestyle changes have been made first.
What kills me about is that the rigorous dieting most gastric bypass programs enforce on patients might have avoided the problem in the first place! I guess that would make too much sense, be too rational, and save the health care system too much money, while depriving too many newly trained gastric bypass surgeons of a living. Just another example of the dysfunctional Johnny-Come-Lately practices that our bankrupting our health care system.
If you want to lose weight, you need to exercise, preferably more than 30 minutes every day. Go for a jog or a power walk. Join a gym. Take up aerobics or yoga. Find the exercise you're most likely to do and then go do it regularly.
Put the brakes on fast foods and processed fake foods loaded with sugar and flour. Concentrate on lean meats, poultry and fish (see www.mbayaq.org for safe list), cut out trans fats, and track the nutritional information of what you eat. And mix in at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
