Newswise — Based upon the steadily rising number of bariatric operations performed to combat obesity, decisions to go under the knife in many cases may be made in haste. Moreover, consideration for Medicare coverage of obesity surgery may further accelerate the trend. This according to diet and health experts writing in the latest issue of Food Technology magazine.
Operations performed on patients who must lose weight rapidly in order to survive can certainly save lives, according to Peter Pressman, a practicing physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. But, he says "Poor patient selection and incompletely studied complications and results may fail to clearly draw conclusions about the efficacy and safety of these procedures."
With a decade of bariatric surgery performed on obese teens and adults, data suggest that a significant number of patients fail to sustain clinically meaningful weight loss, Pressman reports.
"There are many important questions that still persist in the realm of less-intrusive and safer methods of weight management," says Roger Clemens, a functional food expert with the Institute of Food Technologists and nutritional biochemist at the University of Southern California. He maintains that "More innovative and aggressive approaches to diet and caloric intake, exercise, accessibility to food, control of portion sizes," and other research be pursued.
Clemens and Pressman were among many scientists participating in the last year's IFT Obesity Research Summit who concluded, among other things, that identifying reliable long-term behavioral and biological indicators of obesity risk are needed, as is ascertaining the motivations behind choosing foods and choosing when to stop eating.
Pressman urges other research to consider the role of education, mass media, health insurance, and social support groups and their affect on obesity and, more positively, a healthy lifestyle.
"If surgery is to be only the final recourse for elective management of obesity, then we may be on a slippery slope on many dimensions," says Pressman. "Developing interventions that take into account multiple causative factors is mandatory; and in the name of public health—the sooner the better."
Food Technology is published monthly by IFT, providing news and analysis of the development, use, quality, safety, and regulation of food sources, products, and processes. It is available online at http://www.ift.org/foodtechnology.
(Hi-rez cover image available for re-production).
Founded in 1939, and with world headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, USA, the Institute of Food Technologists is a not-for-profit international scientific society with 22,000 members working in food science, technology and related professions in industry, academia and government. As the society for food science and technology, IFT brings sound science to the public discussion of food issues. For more on IFT, see http://www.ift.org.
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