Healthy Eating & Diet
This article is from the WebMD News Archive
The Skinny on Fat Drugs
Feb. 20, 2002 -- Need to lose weight? You may know you're not alone. What you may not know: you're not bad or crazy, but you need help.
The surest way to lose weight is to eat a little less and exercise more. If you take in just 500 to 1,000 fewer calories than it takes to keep your current weight, you'll lose 5% to 10% of your weight in four to six months. If you add exercise to your new moderate diet, you'll keep the weight off.
Some overweight people can do this. Most can't. That's why weight loss usually doesn't work without help to develop healthy thinking habits, healthy eating habits, and healthy exercise habits.
A minority of people needs something more. For some, surgery is the answer. Others need drug therapy.
The road to weight loss drugs is scattered with failures and frauds. Now, however, researchers are closing in on new drugs that just might do the trick.
A review article by National Institutes of Health researchers Susan Z. Yanovski, MD, and Jack A. Yanovski, MD, PhD, appears in the Feb. 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. It looks at the past, present, and future of weight loss drugs.
An overview of the article follows. Here's the bottom line: weight loss drugs are not the answer for most people. They're only for people who can't lose weight any other way -- even though they've tried -- and whose obesity threatens their health.
No FDA-approved weight loss drug has been tested for more than two years. The drugs usually don't lead to dramatic weight loss -- on average, people lose about 5% of their body weight. And there are side effects. These can be very serious. Never take weight loss drugs without a doctor's supervision.
Where We've Been
Remember fen-phen? Studies published in 1992 revolutionized the field of weight loss research when it showed that this combination of two very different drugs could help people sustain weight loss for as long as three-and-a-half years.
Unfortunately, continued fen-phen treatment turned out to be associated with serious heart disease. The treatment was withdrawn from the market -- but obesity research forever was changed. Doctors began to see obesity not as a moral failure but as a condition they could treat.
"For a minority of obese patients who have substantially increased medical risk and for whom [nondrug] treatments alone prove unsatisfactory, weight-loss medications may be useful adjuncts to behavioral treatments," the Yanovskis write.
Where We Are
Current weight loss drugs come in three types. Some make you less hungry. Others keep you from absorbing fats and other nutrients from food. Still others -- none of which are approved in the U.S. -- make you burn off more energy.
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