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medpundit |
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Monday, June 23, 2003Dr. Reubin Andres, an obesity researcher at the National Institute on Aging, sighed. "As the sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken said, `For every complex question there is a simple answer. And it's wrong.' " In this case, the effort to help fat people help themselves has several implicit assumptions, researchers say. One is that all those overweight Americans would be healthier if they would just shed their excess pounds. "Here is what we know," said Dr. Gary Foster, an obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you have diabetes and you lose weight, it is likely to get better and you will go on less medication." That is important, he stressed, because in addition to causing immense suffering, diabetes is expensive to treat and has expensive complications - amputations, kidney failure, blindness. But, he added, it is not yet known whether losing weight will help with other medical conditions: "Will it prevent or decrease the risk of heart attack or stroke or will you be less likely to be hospitalized? We don't know that yet." posted by Sydney on 6/23/2003 08:05:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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