Posted on 08/02/2007 3:06:40 PM PDT by neverdem
Obese people are often simply greedy and should not always be treated with pills, the head of the British Medical Association has said.
Dr Hamish Meldrum believes an obsession with medical labels may be stopping overweight people addressing their own problems.
He said the obesity epidemic is being mistakenly targeted with medical treatments and doctors' appointments.
Dr Meldrum told our sister paper, the Evening Standard: "We are saying, 'This patient has a hyper-appetite problem' rather than, 'They are just greedy.'
"People like to put fancy labels that suggest things are a medical problem. But [obesity] is not just a problem for GPs, it is societal.
"We are in danger of over-medicalising. The evidence of anti-obesity drugs is not good. The evidence for effective intervention in primary care for obesity is very weak."
Almost one in four adults and a quarter of 11 to 15-year-olds in Britain are obese, according to the World Health Organisation.
The Government wants to halt the rise in childhood obesity within three years but is likely to miss the target. Primary care trusts, which "buy" care for their communities, are under pressure to get the numbers down and GPs were issued with guidance last year. But Dr Meldrum fears this may be the wrong approach.
More than a million anti-obesity prescriptions were issued in England in the last financial year at a cost of £47million. It means about 88,000 people could be on a course of treatment.
The drug Xenical, which inhibits fat absorption, and Reductil, an appetite suppressant, were recommended for use on the NHS by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) in 2001.
There was a dramatic uptake and prescriptions rose by more than 16 per cent in the 12 months to March.
Dr Meldrum said the pills only worked if people permanently altered their lifestyle but "their effectiveness is under dispute". Guidelines say children as young as 12 can get drugs and stomach surgery to combat their problem.
Dr Meldrum said: "I am not saying we should not look at how we can medically treat people who are very obese. But to me it is obviously an issue where prevention is better than cure."
He said the problem of "over medicalising" also affected other conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD)and dyslexia.
He said he did not dispute that ADHD or dyslexia existed and were debilitating. But they are being diagnosed inappropriately.
Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: "How can obesity not be medicalised if there are 45 core morbidities associated with obesity and overwhelming evidence of a causal link?"
Started on weight watchers in May, have lost many pounds so far, but further from my goal than you are. I will make it though. Walking is my exercise of choice.
I started running about 14 months ago, after years of nagging from my husband, and I feel ten years younger. I was at goal for about a year, following the latest baby, but I’ve been - simple truth - drinking wine, eating snacks, and skipping exercise for a few weeks, in this hot weather. So I’ve put on a few pounds. My husband isn’t complaining :-).
Good luck with your weight loss efforts. Another of my problems is that I haven’t been making it to meetings regularly. My Thursday nights are too busy. If I want to keep from gaining steadily, I need to find another meeting that I can make every week.
I am doing it online, it's a new thing, and it is working for me. I don't like going to meetings and prefer to keep doing it online. If I hit a snag(plateau)I will probably go to meetings, I am determined to loose this weight:) Hang in there, and try not to let the weight gain get to high before you fight back!
Good for you! I lost about 50 lbs. from my heaviest ... and then had to keep losing it because I kept having babies.
I’ll get on the scale tomorrow and see what the bad news is. Summer is really hard for me; the first cool day, I’ll be ready for a long run and vegetable soup!
I really don’t care about the “psychology” of obesity....what I care about is having to pay the medical bills of the increasing number of fat people I see checking out ahead of me in the grocery store with cartfuls of Cheetos, sodas, tv dinners and snacks.
Disgusting.
Oh no! I’m not talking about her and short of my insane jealousy of the amount of babies she has, she’s my hero.
Now, look back on the posts of this thread. Very few are saying, don’t eat a BAG of Doritos. They are saying “eat less/move more. I know this and you are stupid if you don’t”
Sorry, but a cup of Doritos is not a healthy lunch. Yet in the “Eat less” way of life, 8 ounces of Doritos is “less” than a big salad. We need to start pushing, eat more of the good stuff and the bad stuff, push aside. That is what many don’t know.
I have a niece that is near 400 pounds. She is a binge/starve eater. That’s how she got that big in five years. She would starve herself and then when she went back to eating, her body packed on the pounds. Even eating right and in small amounts. She then gets discouraged and eats what she wants, only to pack on more pounds.
The starvation factor is never put into this. And it’s a mistake.
I went to WW about 8 years ago. I lost 30 lbs, then lost NOTHING for 10 months. I was running 4 miles a day, and in order just to “break even” at the weigh-in, I had to fast the day before. The leader kept telling me I was “cheating.”
Then, one day while I was out running, I fell and broke my ankle. No more running, and arthritis has set in.
Sometimes your DNA just sucks.
Oy. I think something happens to us when we have large numbers of children. I used to be able to go days without eating, and now if I don’t have a full meal by 10:00 a.m., I’ve got a hypoglycemic migraine by 11:00.
I hope your ankle got better! I haven’t broken anything, yet.
That's the psychological factor. Why does a person want to eat that much? You have to work on your coping mechanisms, as well as nutritional education ... just as I have to work on my alcohol consumption.
Oh, here's my lovely husband, the food pusher, with ice cream! I get the impression he wants us to have another baby next year, only he's trying to make it be "my fault" ...
I do believe it is diet-based, but I think there is something about food that is changing our absorption and retention of fat.
Anecdotes...
Sedentary lifestyle--I was a very skinny sedentary kid--a complete bookworm. The only exercise I got was bicycling to the library.
I see very active, very HEAVY children at the schools. What awful damage is being done to their joints, is awful to contemplate. But they are not sitting around--they are running and playing with an extra 70-80 lbs.
And they eat heartily enough, but we all know that scrawny teenage boy who eats like two horses and his ribs still show.
I think something in our diet is changing these kids' physiologies. I mean, they're ginormous. "Fat" when I was a kid wouldn't even be pudgy now. Too many of them are just way too huge for it to be mere greed. The startling, generational change in obesity cannot be explained by sloth and gluttony.
Now, the stickler:
Calories are not always the same. Leftover carbs, for instance, can turn into complex sugar which is difficult to burn.
Your body is not stupid. If you starve it it will try to save every spare calorie because it doesn't know if there will be more food. Eat regularly and the body is more likely to be inclined to burn calories during exercise. Metabolism can be managed to an extent but it takes considerable effort to develop the right habits. You can become metabolic, catabolic, anabolic, etc., depending on how you eat and exercise. This is why nutrition is a science. It is not just eat less, exercise more, it is eat right and exercise more, but for many, less is a good place to start!
>>I could eat nothing but flies<<
Or millipedes, ewwwww.
You, my FRiend are the voice of reason.
I have a bit of a different view on this whole subject. In the past I did take the phen-phen combination and lost weight. My brain chemistry was changed so that I didn’t think about eating, cooking, when my next meal would be, shopping for food, etc. While there is no one single answer to being overwieght, drugs should not be totally ruled out. And for the record, I did have an increased interest in exercise at that time. So maybe it was all in my head :):):)
>>Why does a person want to eat that much? <<
It’s not “that much”. It’s A donut. Seriously. I’ve seen her eat. She could have a bowl of Grape Nuts but who wants that. A donut with chocolate frosting is so much better. And it’s less than a whole bowl of Special K.
But it’s not eating right, it’s eating less.
Lunch is an Oatmeal Creme Pie. Yummy, Really a small amount of food. Horrible for you.
Dinner, A lean cuisine. Small amount. Processed, high salt, small amount. After a starvation period, she will gain weight on this. And honestly, so would I.
It was a glycerin shell full of tapeworm eggs.
I believe that much of it is “Low Fat” and using corn products to improve the taste.
I have heard that when they want nice marbled meat in cows, they feed them low fat feed. I think we are poisoning our kids with High Fructose Corn Syrup. It’s in almost everything and the only reason I know it is because I give up sugar for lent. Salad dressings, ketsup, almost anything processed has it.
I think we are ethanoling our kids.
Cool!
I want one.
I don't know....
Pandering to them and suggesting their rolls of fat have been inflicted on them by genes or something out of their control doesn't seem to have worked. Call it like it is...they are fat because they WANT to be fat.
Weight Watchers totally works. (I’m the workplace coordinator for my company.)
I only wish I’d figured out how well it works before my wedding. ;p
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