I get treating obesity like a disease, I understand why the medical community is taking this stance and I get that the educational gambits they are taking, hammering on parents and individuals to get into shape and to shed those excess pounds (they don’t even bother to call them unwanted anymore) and I get that this campaign against obesity is designed to do what the campaign against smoking did — but there’s a problem here.
It’s been a few centuries since people considered big to be beautiful and obese and overweight individuals are hardly ever considered sexy. Previous campaigns against smoking worked because those campaigns worked to lift the mystique built by the popular culture around smoking and to further educate everyone to the dangers of it. It made smokers the modern leper, consigning them outdoors to smoke if they wanted to smoke and segregated them from the non-smokers.
Fat kids and overweight kids and teenagers and adults have been segregated from the modern concept of beauty for a long time. It’s one of the reasons that obesity is linked with depression and poor self-image, so that type of campaign is only going to further polarize an already polarized viewpoint.
Disturbing Trend
What all this concern and promotion and education on obesity in our kids and the warnings that have poured into our email, our Internet newspapers, our magazines and our schools send home to parents has led to what I believe is one of the most profound and disturbing trends in modern fitness. You’ve likely heard of stomach surgery including gastric bypass and banding. The popularity of these surgeries with obese adults is skyrocketing – but there are more and more doctors and parents who are exploring the options these surgeries offer our children.
Obesity surgery to correct an obesity problem in your child? Can you imagine telling your 9 year old that you are electing for them to have a surgery like gastric bypass or banding which will require that they stay on a very specific diet afterwards? Previously, the surgery was deemed far too risky for our children with 1 child in 50 dying during the procedure. But thanks to advances in surgical techniques and the spotlight being placed on obese children – some physicians are changing their minds.
Research Studies
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center will be leading a group of four hospitals in studying how children respond to different types of weight loss surgery. They will be investigating gastric bypass as well as gastric banding. The FDA has given them tacit approval to test lapraoscopic gastric banding on teenagers, but they are still hesitant to approve of it in young children.
New York University performed a study on 53 teenagers (boys and girls) between 13 and 17 who underwent the gastric banding procedure and they have all shed over half their excess weight in the 18 months since their surgeries with only minor complications. There have been similar studies done at the University of Illinois Medical Center and the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York.
According to these studies, children may only be considered a candidate if they have spent at least six months trying to lose weight with supervision by the hospital. Ultimately, if these kids spend six months and don’t lose the pounds, they may become more likely candidates for obesity surgery.
In 2006, more than 177,000 adults had some form of obesity surgery and that’s compared to just around 47,000 in 2001. The idea that we’re going to result to a knife to change our kids if they can’t lose their weight in six months is not an answer. For one, none of us knows what the long-term affects of altering their digestive tract can have on them as they age. What happens to a girl who’s altered very young and then grows through puberty and matures – what happens when she gets pregnant? How does she address her special nutritional concerns?
In the New York University study, reports indicated that 2 of the 53 needed more surgery to fix their slipping bands. Other complications included:
- 2 developed hernias
- 5 developed infections
- 5 suffered from mild hair loss
- 4 suffered from iron deficiencies due to their new diet
- 1 participant wanted the band removed because of discomfort
There are some who would say that these complications are a good trade-off versus heart problems, diabetes and other health related risks associated with obesity. More and more, I hear it from adults all the time, they are willing to undergo an expensive and risky procedure as a quick fix to being overweight. What worries me about this trend is that I can see plenty of parents willing to do the same for their children — fixing them without attempting to correct the lifestyle issues that may have lead to the problem in the first place.
Personally, I think this is too aggressive a step to take where our kids are concerned. Too often we’re falling back on surgery to fix what we don’t like from pre-selecting gender before a child is born to correcting their physical bodies because it’s easier to do it with surgery.
Would you consider this type of surgery for your child or teenager?
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