Sara L.
Irony. . .
Apr 17, 2013
I read an interesting article a few days ago:
Please read the article on your own, but here's the nutshell version: researchers took 2 groups of obese mice. They performed RNY surgery on one set and a fake RNY on the others (made the incisions, but reconnected everything as it was originally). Then they took 2 more sets of obese mice and introduced microbes (bacteria) from the guts of both surgical groups. They found that the non-surgical mice who received gut microbes from the RNY mice lost weight; non-surgical mice who received microbes from the "sham" RNY mice did not experience a change in weight. Furthermore, follow-up tests revealed that the non-surgical RNY mice kept relatively more of the slimming microbes in their gut than the other non-surgical mice.
Researchers are calling this a breakthrough, saying that obese patients may eventually be able to receive "transplants" of microbes that are found in naturally lean people -- the kind that seem to proliferate in post-RNY patients -- and experience the benefits of RNY without the surgical risks. What remains to be seen is how effective this would be long-term, and how diet and other factors play a role in the population of gut bacteria. Would someone who received microbe therapy but made no dietary changes maintain the required levels of "lean" microbes, or would those microbes die off and be replaced with "fattening" ones?
I find all of this ironic, though. For decades, it has been believed that obesity was simply a personal failure. If you were fat, it was your own darn fault; if you would just eat less and exercise more, you wouldn't have a weight problem. We still see alleged "experts" suggesting that fat-shaming might produce behavioral changes in obese individuals (because obviously fat people aren't already discriminated against). We see massive amounts of time and energy being poured into educational programs aimed at children, teaching them the USDA pyramid and the importance of exercise. Yet we continue, as a society, to pack on the weight. Patients who choose a WLS must frequently pay from their own pockets and are subsequently viewed as having somehow cheated their way to health -- yet those same patients and procedures that are producing metabolic changes that may be translated to non-surgical options!
I am also reading a book called "Why We Get Fat and What We Can Do About It"; it's basically an abridged version of "Good Calories, Bad Calories". The author, Gary Taubes, makes some very compelling arguments that the very same entities who pushed a "heart-healthy diet" on the American public is now trying to reverse the obesity trends by pushing the very same ideas about diet and exercise that mark the beginning of the obesity explosion (no pun intended) in the U.S. As the dogma of "diet and exercise" is pushed, medical research keeps finding "breakthrough" evidence that obesity is not a choice -- it is a side-effect with real and measurable causes. It has tangible markers besides excess body fat: chemical changes in the body that affect every process are tied tightly to obesity. Yes society would happily continue to tell us it's a personal problem and we should be able to fix it on our own. That's like telling a patient who desperately needs a quadruple bypass they can't have the treatment because they chose to eat cheeseburgers. The concept is absurd, and it is widely accepted that cholesterol is influenced by genetics -- and yet, adiposity is not?
I sincerely hope that soon obesity will be treated as a chronic disease, not a moral failure. Until it is, though, we must continue to educate those around us. We cannot be afraid to speak up -- if we won't do it for ourselves, we must do it for the children and teenagers who are already at risk for obesity.
