Can Morbid Obesity Be Reversed Through Diet?

“Can Morbid Obesity Be
Reversed Through Diet?” Dr. Walter Kempner introduced
the first comprehensive dietary program to treat
chronic kidney disease, and in doing so
also revolutionized the treatment of
other disorders, including obesity. Kempner was Professor Emeritus
of Medicine at Duke, where he came up with
the so-called “rice diet,” which basically consisted
of rice, sugar, fruit, and fruit juices. Extremely low sodium,
low fat, no animal fat, no cholesterol,
no animal protein. The sugar was added as
a source of calories so people wouldn’t lose
too much weight. But some people needed
to lose weight, so he started treating
obese patients with a lower-calorie
a version of the diet. He published this
analysis of 106 patients who lost at least
100 pounds, not because there
were only 106. He was just picking
the last 100 people who lost over
100 pounds. And by the time he finished
looking through their charts six more had joined the
so-called century club. The average weight loss
was 141 pounds. This study demonstrates
that massively obese persons can achieve marked
weight reduction, even normalization
of weight, without hospitalization, surgery, or pharmacologic
intervention.

Here’s a weight
chart of someone who lost in a year
nearly 300 pounds, from like 430 pounds
down to 130 pounds. One important fact to be gained
from this study is that, despite the misconception
to the contrary, massive obesity is NOT
an uncorrectable malady. Weight loss can
be achieved. Massive obesity can
be corrected, and it can be done without
drastic intervention. Well, the rice diet
is pretty drastic. Definitely don’t try
this at home. The rice diet is
dangerous. It’s so restrictive that
it may cause serious electrolyte imbalances
unless the patient is carefully medically
supervised with frequent blood
and urine lab testing. Dangerous?
Says who? Said the world’s #1 advocate
For the rice diet… Dr. Kempner himself. The best safe approximation
of the diet, so low in sodium and
Also, no animal fat, protein, or cholesterol would be a vitamin B12
a fortified diet centered around whole,
unprocessed plant foods, but even medically
supervised rice diet could be considered
un drastic compared to like getting one’s internal organs
stapled or rearranged, wiring someone’s
jaws shut, or even brain surgery.

Attempts have been
made to destroy the parts of the brain associated
with the sensation of hunger, by irradiation, or by going
in through the skull and burning them out. It shows how ineffective most
simpler forms of treatment are that anyone should think
it reasonable to produce irreversible intracranial
brain lesions in very obese patients. The surgeons defended
these procedures, explaining that their
justification in attempting the
operation is, of course, the very poor results of conventional
therapy in gross obesity, and the dark prognosis,
mental and physical, of the uncorrected
condition. To which a
critic replied, Such strong feelings about
how dark the prognosis is, runs the risk of being
conveyed to the patient, to the effect of masking
the operative dangers of experimental surgery and steam-rolling the
patient’s approval. To which the surgeon
replied, If any “steamrolling ”
is taking place, it comes rather
from obese patients who sometimes
threaten suicide unless they are accepted for
experimental surgical treatment.

As of 2013, the American Medical
Association officially declared obesity a disease, by identifying the enormous
humanitarian impact of obesity as requiring the medical care
and attention of other diseases. But the way we treat
diseases these days involves drugs
and surgery. Anti-obesity drugs have
been pulled from the market again and again after
they started killing people. This unrelenting fall of the pharmacological
treatment of obesity. The same has happened
with obesity surgeries. The procedure Kempner wrote
about was discontinued because of the
complication of causing irreversible cirrhosis
of the liver. Here are the current
procedures, including various reconfigurations
of the digestive tract.

Complications of surgery occur in almost about
20% of patients, nearly one in ten of
whom may be dead. In one of the largest studies
1.9% of patients died within a month
of the surgery. Even if surgery proves
sustainably effective, the need to rely on the
rearrangement of our anatomy as an alternative to
better use of feet and forks- diet and exercise- seems a societal
travesty…