Post: A Look at Bariatric Surgery

Last updated: November 14, 2024 • 10 min read health professional with a digital image of a stomach Obesity isn’t new, but the obesity epidemic is . We went from a few corpulent queens and kings, like Henry VIII and Louis VI (known as Louis le Gros, or “Louis the Fat”), to a pandemic of obesity, now considered to be perhaps the direst and most poorly contained public health threat of our time. Today, 71 percent of American adults are overweight and 40 percent of men and women appear to have so much body fat that they can be classified as obese, and there’s no end in sight.

In 2013, the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease against the advice of its own Council on Science and Public Health . Disease implies dysfunction, but bariatric drugs and surgery are not fixing physiological malfunction. Our bodies are just doing what they were designed to do in the face of excess calories . Rather than some sort of disorder, weight gain may largely be a normal response , by normal people, to an abnormal situation. And with more than 70 percent of Americans now overweight , it’s literally normal. What Is Bariatric Surgery?

Bariatric surgeries involve changing our digestive system to facilitate weight loss. As discuss in my video The Mortality Rate of Bariatric Weight Loss Surgery , the use of bariatric surgery has exploded from about 40,000 procedures, noted in the first international survey in 1998, to now hundreds of thousands performed every year in the United States alone. The first technique developed, the intestinal bypass , involved carving out about 19 feet of intestines.

The most common procedure is stomach stapling , also known as sleeve gastrectomy , in which most of the stomach is permanently removed. Only a narrow tube of stomach is left, so as to restrict how much food can be eaten at any one time. Bariatric surgery can be thought of as a form of internal jaw wiring.

Gastric bypass, known as Roux-en-Y gastric bypass , is the second most common bariatric surgery. […]

A Look at Bariatric Surgery