Why weight loss surgery is not the solution

Weight loss surgery is hot. A lot of people are starting to see it as the only effective treatment we have for obesity. That’s just insane.
Here are some slides from a lecture at the obesity conference last weekend. The slide above shows the magnitude of the obesity problem. Bariatric (weight loss) surgery will hopefully never have to be used on more than a small minority of obese patients.
Why not operate on everyone? Here’s why:
Removing healthy organs
Here’s the three most common surgical procedures today. All of them are about stopping the normal function of the digestive system. The more effective surgeries (like Gastric Bypass) actually disconnect or remove healthy organs.
We live in a sick world when we need to surgically adapt our bodies to our industrial processed food.
Complications
The bigger the surgery the more effective it is, with a higher percentage of EWL (Excess Weight Loss). But at the same time the risk of compications increase.
What kind of complications? Here’s one list:
Vitamin deficiencies are common after weight loss surgery, but here they don’t tell us how common. I love how they instead claim that “Vitamin/Protein malnutrition is a result of non-compliance with vitamin recommendations and food sources”. Really?
Another explanation could be that vitamin / protein malnutrition is a result of removing or disconnecting the organs that absorb vitamins and protein. But of course then doctors couldn’t just blame the fat patient.
Bottom line
Why isn’t weight loss surgery the solution to the obesity epidemic? There’s a simple answer:
Removing healthy organs is not the solution to bad food.
And it's cash money – no discounts.
Things might be different in Sweden, but over here it's all about cash money.
"You've just described an eating disorder."
No, I've described a disordered endocrine system. When insulin levels are high, it is perfectly natural to eat more and more because an energy deficit has been created as calories are shunted to fat storage instead of to energy. What would be an "eating disorder" in that situation would be to ignore the hunger signals and not eat. That's not what we evolved to do. We evolved to seek food when the body signals an energy deficit, and the problem is that the standard "healthy" diet unbalances things so that the hunger signal is being sent out all the time. The signal is there in the hormones, not in the imagination, and we have a powerful biological, not psychological, drive to heed its directives.
Michelle, you say you would have tried LCHF - but you don't know what would have happened. It's quite possible that the novel freedom from constant hunger would have been enough to keep you on the diet, with weight loss as a secondary benefit.
And that's the true "miracle" of LCHF: as miserable as people are being overweight, I'm sure the constant hunger of a high carb diet is even worse. LCHF fixes that.
If the surgery changed your life, Michelle, I'm glad about that. But I'd much rather see people - especially kids - try a LCHF approach and discover that they don't have to be hungry all the time. If that doesn't work (but I'm sure that it would), surgery might be an option.