In a previous blog article, we established the fact that less than 1% of adolescents were maintaining ideal cardiovascular health.
In another previous blog article, we looked at the fact that 1/3 of the US population is prediabetic, also related to the same lifestyle changes that aren’t being made.
It’s clear that our society is not willing to make the changes needed to be healthy. Luckily, that may not be a concern because the Better Living Through Chemistry folks are here to hold your hand and fix everything.
In this particular study, researchers took as small group of 26 kids 12-19 years of age with severe obesity and evaluated whether using a new, high-powered diabetic drug (the GLP-1 agonist called Byetta) that I have grave concerns about, could help them manage weight better.
Here’s what they found:
- Over the course of 3 months, the exenatide (aka Byetta, or the hila-monster spit drug) group lost about 1.13 points on the BMI charts.
- This works out to be around 5 lbs or so for a 5’7″ male, or 1.7 additional pounds per month.
Wow. 1.7 pounds for a very expensive drug that has to be injected and carries grave concerns of acute pancreatitis and thyroid cancer (and probably more that we aren’t yet awareof..).
Don’t be surprised if we start to see more and more of this type of study trying to find a drug answer for our adolescents to “solve” the obesity and prediabetes problem. Given the numbers of people who are prediabetic, there is a massive amount of money to be made in this market. But as we see from this study, it’s a high price to pay for paltry results.