Obese Kids Going Under the Knife – for Weight Loss
Children under the age of 18 may now undergo weight-loss surgery in Sweden. In certain cases children as young as 13 will go under the knife!
There is no disease in the stomachs or intestines, which surgeons cut away from the children. They are healthy organs, that are being surgically removed. There’s something extremely sick in our society when methods this radical and extreme are required for children to maintain their weight.
The risks of long-term side effects are great. In adults who undergo weight-loss surgery the need for medical treatment increases long term. We know very little about the long-term consequences for children.
- MailOnline: As more teenagers have weight-loss surgery, a horrifying insight into the terrible price they pay as they grow up
- ABCNews: Obese Kids Going Under the Knife
The ethically bizarre in this is that the healthcare system rarely provides the best lifestyle treatment before resorting to major surgery.
A Swedish government expert committee recently concluded that advice on a low-carb diet provides more weight loss and better health markers than current calorie-obsessed advice does. At least as long as the advice is followed. Several new studies show that a low-carb diet also works better for children and adolescents.
Failing to provide support and advice on the most effective lifestyle therapy, before resorting to irreversible major surgery for children? That should be considered malpractice.
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As long as nutrition science is not really taught in medical school, we will see this kind of aberration as it is an incredible money-making machine.
Another problem is that it is available. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that quite a few people will go for the "easy solution" i.e. pills rather than make the choice to eat healthy food. i recall one patient to whom I was trying to explain dietary treatment of diabetes. His answer was that he was not interested in my "f...ing advice" and wanted the damned pills.
The only way I see this changing is through lobbying. The science is clearly there. The day enough people will say that enough is enough and that this kind of crap in unacceptable, maybe then physicians will have to take nutrition and exercise classes and - hopefully, these classes will not be subsidized by Coca Cola, Mars, MacDonald or Pepsi.
Sad, sick world.
I have many who come to my clinic after weight-loss surgery who have lost the bulk of their weight but who are struggling to lose it all. It appears that being forced to lose 10 or so stone with weight-loss surgery is easy, but losing the last few stone on their own when their surgery no longer helps is near impossible. This is because people adapt to their new situation by eating those high calorie foods that liquefy in the mouth, such as chocolate, crisps, biscuits etc. and therefore they can graze all day on these so called foods and gain weight and become even sicker. Additionally, their stomachs do stretch to a larger size and they can revert to near normal eating if they are determined to do so.
We need to concentrate on psychological healing first, because it doesn’t matter how much advice you give and how convincing your arguments are, if you eat for emotional reasons (trauma in childhood is a huge factor) you will not stick to a diet that will help you become well. Therefore, you are doomed to stay in a situation where food is the cushion you use to protect yourself from emotions you don’t want to feel.
My argument is that it may take years to overcome the emotional factor that is causing you to self-harm and believe me, eating to excess is a form of self-harm. What do we do? Operating on children is appalling and if they are so over-weight that they apparently ‘need’ this surgery then investing in a good psychiatrist first, for the whole family, would be more beneficial than condemning them to a life where their body cannot function to its potential because these operations cause horrendous malabsorption problems (blind loop syndrome). Our Doctors are not trained on nutrition and they are not trained to handle the psychological aspects of obesity either, we need more specialists who deal with both sides and only then will real progress be made.
Stable blood sugar can only happen when people adhere to the diet; what if they don't? What if they can't?
Education is of prime importance, but until we have an environment that does not consist of the packaged garbage that is peddled as food by a money hungry industry, most of those who are obese are doomed.