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Surgery for Obese Children?: Pediatric Gastic Bypass
New York Times ^ | 2/15/2010 | Laura Biel

Posted on 02/16/2010 8:23:20 AM PST by Badabing Badablonde

HOUSTON — One callous question turned Brittany Caesar into a medical pioneer: “Why do you eat so much? It’s not normal.”

At that moment, she was in the Campbell Middle School cafeteria, sitting down to her usual lunch: two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries and a Coke. She knew she weighed too much. Her whole family weighed too much. But her world revolved around food, and she could not imagine any other existence.

“Food was my best friend,” she said. “It was always there for me.” Somehow, her classmate’s taunt, back in 2003, wounded her in a way the usual fat jokes never had. She fled to the bathroom and wept, vowing to lose weight. Her salvation did not arrive until more than a year later when, at age 14, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital performed a gastric bypass that left her stomach the size of an egg. On the day of surgery, she weighed 404 pounds.

Ms. Caesar, now 20 years old and 175 pounds, was the first teenager to undergo a gastric bypass at Texas Children’s, but more quickly followed. Today, it maintains one of the busiest bariatric practices for adolescents in the country, performing one or two bypasses each month. Although the procedure is still considered experimental for children, it is fast becoming the next front in the battle against pediatric obesity.

“I honestly believe that in 5 to 10 years you’ll see as many children getting weight-loss procedures as adults,” said Dr. Evan Nadler, co-director of the Obesity Institute at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events
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To: A_perfect_lady
Expensive and dangerous.

And not the quick fix people seem to think it is. The stomach will expand eventually. Plenty of people have had gastric bypass and lost weight only to gain it back because they still ate crap.

41 posted on 02/16/2010 10:53:56 AM PST by retrokitten
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To: retrokitten

Yep. I have heard the stomach can stretch back out again if they keep stuffing themselves.


42 posted on 02/16/2010 11:07:27 AM PST by A_perfect_lady (I miss having a First LADY.)
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To: Badabing Badablonde

Start having real gym class in school and recess periods, stop feeding the kids McDonalds on a daily basis, and take away the video games and computer when needed, and this would not be a problem.


43 posted on 02/16/2010 12:44:22 PM PST by Thunder90 (Fighting for truth and the American way... http://citizensfortruthandtheamericanway.blogspot.com/)
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To: Thunder90

*shrug* I was the fat kid.

Never went to Micky D’s, very seldom ate out.

Rode my bike, played in the swamp with the other kids, who I would ofttimes run into the ground.

Video games? When a computer filled a goodly sized room and sucked down more AC than a small office building? Nahhh. Besides the very first “game”, an orbital mechanics simulator, wouldn’t appear in any but the very highest of high end labs for years.

Weight was still a problem for me.

Thanks for playing.


44 posted on 02/16/2010 1:12:18 PM PST by null and void (We are now in day 390 of our national holiday from reality. - 0bama really isn't one of US.)
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To: null and void

It was especially fun chasing the DDT truck down the street and watch the mosquitoes drop all around us...


45 posted on 02/16/2010 1:18:25 PM PST by null and void (We are now in day 390 of our national holiday from reality. - 0bama really isn't one of US.)
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To: Badabing Badablonde

When children’s weight reaches levels that are causing serious health problems, they should be taken away from their parents. We have no trouble doing this with parents who are slowly starving their children to death, so there shouldn’t be any problem doing it with parents who are slowly stuffing their children to death. Of course, if this was a clear and strictly enforced policy, nearly all parents would see to it that their children never got so fat in the first place. The rest would be completely dysfunctional parents (nearly all on welfare of one sort or another) who shouldn’t be allowed to have custody of their children for a whole laundry list of reasons. The idea of performing drastic and risky surgery on a child to deal with an obesity problem, without first trying the simple measure of removing them from the people who are giving them access to all this excess food, is patently insane. It makes no more sense than performing surgery to install a feeding tube with an automated food pump into a child whose parents have been starving him/her, and sending the artificially remodelled child right back to the parents.


46 posted on 02/16/2010 3:28:10 PM PST by GovernmentShrinker
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To: null and void

In nearly all cases where a person is greatly overeating even though only eating when hungry, the hunger is the direct result of a habitual diet of sugary, starchy, and calorie-dense foods. Some of these people who grow up in families with poor eating habits simply have no idea that eating a big salad will leave you less hungry an hour or two later, than eating a big pile of greasy pasta with 10-20 times as many calories, because they’ve simply never experienced it. They’ve grown up in families where “salad” means things like mayonnaise-laden potato salad with a few scraps of shredded carrot for color, or a concoction of marshmallows, fruit chunks canned in heavy syrup, and nuts suspended in a mountain of whipped cream.


47 posted on 02/16/2010 3:46:15 PM PST by GovernmentShrinker
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To: FrankR

I picked a town and area to raise my sons where they could play freely because there was no crime and my work made it possible for me to be around after school. I came from a family with healthy eating habits and just did the same with my kids.

Not everyone is so fortunate. We took in a fresh air kid from Harlem who was heavy because it was not safe for him to play outside and food was his “best friend.” At our house, all he did is play outside and have a blast. Food was very important to him the first couple of days and then he found himself so busy with wild fun, he did not care if he ate or not. I had to pull the kids in to get them to eat their meals and drink fluids.

A lot of kids are fat because we have a really sick ass society and they are not safe outside unsupervised.


48 posted on 02/16/2010 8:12:49 PM PST by SaraJohnson
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