Buyer Beware
In this chapter you learn why you need to take personal charge of your wellness and weight-loss plans and not depend upon solutions from conventional medicine with its prescriptions and surgical procedures. In fact, you’ll discover how little your doctor may know and how blindly accepting what he or she prescribes could be dangerous. This chapter highlights:
• How weight-loss drugs sabotage health.
• Why liposuction and gastric bypass surgeries are not good choices.
• Why prescription drugs and medical care can be deadly.
• Why current medical practices are obsolete.
• The startling lack of nutrition education required for medical doctors.
• Why taking personal responsibility for your health is so important.
The modern medical paradigm is stuck at the turn of the century. . . . Lacking a paradigm broad and deep enough to enable scientists and practitioners to progress, medicine is in many ways paralyzed.
—Joseph D. Beasley The Kellogg Report (1989)
Because overweight is a disease, you might be compelled to look for answers at your doctor’s office. To that, we would say: Caution When Entering. Modern medicine, as it is commonly practiced, does nothing to address the true causes of disease, and more often than not, doctors and the drugs they prescribe make you sicker and fatter. Modern mainstream medical science is not your answer to optimal health or permanent weight control.
Moving toward health and weight control on the Medical Pathway requires knowledge and caution. Only a limited number of cutting-edge physicians and other practitioners can lead you in the right direction, one that sustains you throughout your life. Most physicians have a limited set of tools that they offer the sick: drugs, radiation, and surgery. Desperate people often turn to drugs and surgeries in an effort to lose weight, yet these outmoded treatments have proven themselves to be both ineffective and dangerous.
The major reason modern medicine (also known as allopathic medicine or conventional medicine) is ineffective in treating overweight and obesity is the same reason it is ineffective in treating any chronic disease: modern medicine treats the symptoms of disease but does nothing to correct the underlying causes. Physicians use powerful synthetic chemicals to suppress symptoms and keep the patient out of immediate danger, while the patient continues the unhealthy lifestyle that caused the problem in the first place. Traditional physicians have been inadequately educated within a system that clings to outdated thinking. Most physicians are simply unaware of the awesome scientific advances that have occurred over the last century and particularly over the last few decades. Deficiency and toxicity are the two causes of disease, yet the overwhelming majority of physicians have little or no understanding of this. Nutrition may be the single most important factor in preventing and reversing disease and overweight, yet most physicians have virtually no training in nutrition and assume that the vast majority of illnesses have no connection to nutrition. When is the last time—if this ever happened—that your doctor asked you in detail about your nutrition? Have you and your doctor ever had a serious and detailed discussion about vitamins and minerals? Has your doctor ever asked about your exposure to common toxins? Is there time during your office visit when you are asked about the emotional stresses in your life? How strongly does your physician insist upon regular exercise and fresh air as part of your prescription for health? When was the last time your doctor suggested that you could choose how your genes are expressed by the way that you live? Without recognizing the true causes of disease and overweight, physicians are reduced to merely managing symptoms by writing costly prescriptions for toxic chemicals and doing unnecessary surgery. Diseases and obesity remain chronic, patients suffer, and medical and social costs continue to increase.
Conventional doctors look at the body one organ at a time without developing an understanding of the body as a whole, which is critical to holistic health—the only true state of health. When one part of the body malfunctions, that part is singled out by conventional medicine and its many specialists. Disease is seen as confined to specific locations or organs, rather than affecting the whole person. But disease happens because cells malfunction, causing the body’s self-regulating and balancing mechanisms to malfunction, which affects the entire body, not just one part. When you are sick, you are sick all over. Conventional doctors try to force disease into submission through drugs and surgery, which only throw the body further out of balance. Today’s doctors are taught that “cures” come from outside the body, while the truth is that the human body has a natural capacity to heal itself. The focus should be on that natural healing process and on giving your body what it needs to do its job. That is why the NBFA Lifestyle focuses on cellular health; the whole body is made of cells. Problems at the cellular level cause overweight disease. In order to achieve permanent weight loss, you must pay attention to all Six Pathways along which healthy cells are supported. Once your cells are healthy, disease and excess weight simply vanish.
The Dangers of Diet Drugs, Liposuction, and Gastric Bypass
A variety of drugs have been used to try to treat obesity, but no magic pill exists. Some weight-loss drugs are designed to increase the levels of certain brain chemicals in order to suppress appetite. Other “diet” drugs are intended to inhibit fat metabolism in the gut, causing less fat to be absorbed. Still other weight-loss drugs have proven to be so dangerous—causing heart-valve problems, for example—that they are no longer used, while many have just failed in their mission. On average, people on these drugs lose only 5 to 10 percent of their original weight. If you start at three hundred pounds, you may lose only fifteen to thirty pounds—hardly a victory. The success rate of weight-reduction drugs is minimal, and what little success there is comes at a high price; side effects are numerous and can be dangerous.
One popular weight-control drug is Xenical. Xenical works by blocking fat from being absorbed, but its benefits are marginal, and it has tremendous side effects. It can cause significant hormonal and nutritional imbalances, including the loss of critical fat-soluble vitamin absorption. And if you eat fat, it can cause severe stomach pain and uncontrollable diarrhea. (The manufacturer is now planning an over-the-counter version of Xenical called Alli.) Some consumers are so shortsighted and anxious to drop pounds that they do anything for the immediate gratification of weight loss and choose not to consider the long-term problems that these risky drugs may initiate.
Doctors usually recommend that weight-control drugs be used in conjunction with a healthy diet and regular exercise, but a healthy diet and regular exercise by themselves reduce weight—no drugs required. The drugs merely take credit for benefits derived from improvements in eating and lifestyle. Doctors also prescribe numerous drugs to treat the complications of obesity, including cholesterol, diabetes, and blood-pressure medications. These, too, come with long lists of health-damaging side effects. Worse still, such medications can actually make you gain weight as certain drugs and combinations of drugs interfere with the body’s water management, appetite, and weight-control systems.
A common option offered to overweight people is liposuction, a surgical procedure during which fat is literally sucked out. Liposuction results in weight loss, at least temporarily, but this procedure is not benign and comes with an assortment of dangerous side effects, including infections and even death. The death rate for liposuction is twenty times higher than for other elective surgery.
Gastric bypass surgery (bariatric surgery) creates a much smaller stomach by removing part of the stomach. This procedure makes you feel full faster, and you learn to reduce the amount of food that you eat at any given time. The small intestine is rearranged and attached to the new stomach. In April 2005, an article in USA Today reported that gastric bypass surgery is by far “the most effective option for severely obese people.” Let’s see if you agree. This surgery does help people to lose some weight (an average of only fifty-five pounds), but gastric bypass surgery does absolutely nothing to address the causes of obesity, and it comes with some extremely dangerous side effects, including malnutrition, infection, digestive problems, and death. What really happens is they rip out part of your digestive system, staple you back together, and call it a “weight-loss plan.” Overweight people are already malnourished, and to create more malnourishment by causing you to eat less is catastrophic to health. Even if you try to eat a healthy diet, you will not get or absorb enough nutrition. Nonetheless, the popularity of bariatric surgery has exploded, up 400 percent between 1998 and 2002. By far the largest increase was for patients between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four, a 900 percent increase for that age group. The annual cost of these surgeries is now $5 billion and increasing rapidly.
While costly, gastric bypass surgery is only marginally effective, and the risk of complications is virtually 100 percent, including a high risk of death. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in October 2005 that the death rate for men aged thirty-five to forty-four was more than 5 percent, and that the rate among sixty-five- to seventy-year-olds was 13 percent. In patients older than seventy-five, half of the patients who opted for this surgery died! In 2005, 145,000 of these surgeries were performed, and 1,400 of these people died right on the operating table.
Severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is one dangerous side effect of bariatric surgery. Some patients become confused and lightheaded and experience rapid heartbeats. Many shake, sweat, and suffer headaches. Some patients even fall unconscious due to low blood sugar, which has been linked to a number of auto accidents. Internal hernias, a devastating postoperative complication that leads to intestinal obstruction, also can occur long after surgery. There is also an increased risk of blood clots, which continues beyond the immediate postoperative period. The main risk, though, is pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in the lungs) that can occur up to two years after the surgery. Physicians often prescribe blood thinners to avoid such clots, but this increases the risk of bleeding so that internal hemorrhage is both a common and alarming side effect. Even under the best of circumstances, surgery-related complications may continue for a lifetime and are often life-threatening. Too often the resulting weight loss is only temporary. Some people, for the love of food, have managed to stretch their surgically undersized stomachs and put the weight back on. They never learned to change their lifestyle, and the result is temporary change only. The NBFA Lifestyle is a safe and far more effective option, offering lifetime success to even morbidly obese individuals.
Modern medicine’s latest weapon for fighting fat is a European development—inserting a balloon into the stomach to make the stomach feel full and to reduce food consumption for a period of time. In this procedure, a balloon is inserted down the patient’s throat and into the stomach where it is filled with a saline solution. The balloon is removed after six months. This is just another nonsensical approach to weight control. It does not address why the patient is overweight, and as such, patients can expect to regain their weight after the balloon is gone. Further, this procedure also has risks and side effects.
Medical education continues to be wedded to outmoded models, with our physicians poorly educated in nutrition, biochemistry, physiology, and biophysics. Most medical education is directed toward pharmaceutical drugs, which cure nothing and, worse, do harm—all of which points to why we need to educate ourselves and take personal responsibility for our health.