The Seattle Times sheds some light on the obesity hype industry:

How did the fight against fat reach this point?

It started more than a decade ago as drug companies and their scientific consultants increasingly promoted using a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 as the trigger point for when someone should be treated for obesity, including being prescribed weight-loss drugs.

The BMI is a height-to-weight ratio that provides a rough estimate of body fat. Adapted from life-insurancecompany measures three decades ago, the BMI not only measures obesity but also sets ranges for “ideal weight” and “overweight.”

[...]

With a new drug in the pipeline, the industry and its experts demonstrated a new urgency to define obesity as a chronic disease that should be treated with its own drug.

In May 1995, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked 24 experts to write guidelines for diagnosing and treating obesity. The expert panel officially defined obesity as a BMI of 30 or higher, and overweight as a BMI above 25 and below 30. The panel, which included the pharmacologist who created the phen-fen combo, was criticized for its ties to the drug and weight-loss industries.

[...]

At the hearings, Interneuron presented data showing an obesity pandemic and said desperate measures were required to stop it from prematurely killing 300,000 Americans a year.

That controversial figure came from weight-loss experts and researchers who used epidemiological data from decades-old health studies to build the case that excess body fat was a crisis more urgent than even AIDS. They estimated the economic cost in health care, including associated heart attacks, diabetes and other diseases, to be more than $60 billion a year.

The high costs and daunting death toll bolstered support for physicians to apply risky treatments to the obese, such as gastric bypass surgery, stomach banding or long-term courses of drugs that would be too dangerous to give to healthy people.

[...]

At the FDA hearing, Interneuron and its experts presented grisly calculations in support of Redux’s approval: For every nine people who died from the drug in a given year, 280 people would be saved from premature deaths.

The company’s chief scientific officer, Dr. Bobby Sandage, told the FDA panel that, despite expected deaths, the drug had “a highly favorable safety profile given the morbidity and mortality of obesity.”

Dr. JoAnn Manson, a Harvard medical professor, making a presentation on behalf of the drug maker, said her research showed that even modest weight loss — as little as 11 pounds — would “substantially reduce morbidity and mortality.”

One of the leading obesity experts supporting Redux and the effort to classify obesity as a disease was Dr. George Bray, a physician and medical researcher at Louisiana State University. A consultant for numerous drug companies for more than three decades, Bray holds patents for such things as low-fat potato chips, a cream to reduce fat thighs, and treatment for metabolic disorders.

Also at the hearing was a newly formed group, the American Obesity Association, which built a case for treating obesity as a chronic disease. Funded largely by drug companies, including two involved with Redux, the association was headed by Dr. Richard Atkinson, an internist who advocated gastric bypass for severe obesity and who later founded a company to test for what he believed might be an “obesity virus.”

At the hearing, the association positioned itself as a patient-advocacy organization, though it offered no patients to testify for the drug.

We hear lots of aspersions cast on the pharmaceutical industry, most of which I find to be ill-considered. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the industry did play a huge role in formulating and promoting the obesity hype. Not only that, but also in stoking the passions of government agencies and public health activists to help spread the word. Big Pharma played a huge role in last summer’s to-do over Medicare announcing it might begin to treat obesity as a disease.

Just another example of where the interests of industry don’t always coincide with free market principles.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2005 at 12:43 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.