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Medical Advice as Theater of the Absurd

By now, it should be clear that doctors' admonitions to lose weight and exercise more have little impact on our long-term, day-to-day behavior.  We all know this already from sad personal experience.  But we also know it from many studies, and from the multi-decade worsening in Americans' obesity and other chronic conditions.  The medical profession has been begging us for countless years to improve our health behavior--to almost no avail.

Yet the fantastical headlines persist, even in publications like the Washington Post: 

"Losing 13 percent of your weight could lead to big improvements in your health"  

It is hard enough for adults to lose even 5 pounds and to keep it off--much less the 15-30+ pounds implied by "13%".  It is very rare to pull off sustained weight loss of this magnitude.  

In fact, the only proven way currently to achieve this much permanent weight loss, on a whole-population scale, is the last resort, when all else has failed--bariatric surgery.  Permanently re-engineering a morbidly obese person's gastrointestinal system--with resulting lifelong nutrient deficiencies & numerous other potentially serious side effects.

We continue to stand by, while obese children become severely obese teens (>75 lbs. overweight) and then morbidly obese (>100 lbs. overweight) adults.  We are heading rapidly toward 24% of all adults being severely obese by 2030--"with high predictive accuracy", according to the well-respected New England Journal of Medicine.  

So as MDs' admonitions to lose a lot of weight continue to fail, are we going to perform bariatric surgery on 10-20% of all adults?!  (This assumes people will even agree to the surgery, even though only 1% of those eligible choose bariatric surgery currently.)

That last-resort prospect is deeply disturbing, as well as unethical--given that we have never even implemented the "first resort".  Unless we do much more to develop healthy habits in children, which can only realistically be done in K-12 settings, we are destining an increasing percentage of Americans to an unhealthy life. 





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