(14-05-16) Obesity, high cholesterol, blood pressure rates soaring so fast that conventional medication will become obsolete

by David Gutierrez, staff writer
Drugs that are used to lower cholesterol and blood pressure will soon become medically useless if obesity levels keep growing at their current rate, according to a World Health Organization study led by scientists from Imperial College London and published in The Lancet.

"This epidemic of severe obesity is too extensive to be tackled with medications such as blood pressure-lowering drugs or diabetes treatments alone, or with a few extra bike lanes," said lead author Majid Ezzati. "Obesity has reached crisis point. We need co-ordinated global initiatives."

The study found, that worldwide, one in ten men and one in seven women are now obese, and this number will double within ten years.

Surgery for everyone?
The study is the largest investigation into global obesity ever conducted. Over the course of 30 years, researchers measured the height and weight of almost 20 million adults. Based on this, they estimated that 640 million people worldwide are obese.

The nations with the highest obesity rates are the United States and China. However, one in five obese adults lives in one of six wealthy, English-speaking countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The United States has the highest number of people classified as "severely" obese.

Since 1975, the rate of obesity has doubled in women and tripled in men. It is still higher in women (15 percent) than in men (11 percent). The weight of the average person has increased 3.3 pounds every 10 years. At this rate, 18 percent of men and 21 percent of women will be obese by 2025.

These rates of obesity are so severe that they would render pharmaceutical mitigation — in terms of cholesterol-lowering statins and blood pressure-lowering beta blockers — basically useless.

"What we're saying is that once you get such high levels of morbid obesity, the effects on health are so severe that statins and beta-blockers will only help in a small way," researcher James Bentham said. "If you get so big your blood sugar levels, cholesterol and blood pressure are dangerously high, these drugs can't bring it back down to safe levels. More dramatic interventions are needed."

If people continue to become morbidly obese, more of them will have no recourse for saving their health other than gastric band surgery, the researchers said. But they emphasized that this should not be considered a "solution" to the problem.

"We made this suggestion to show what a serious problem obesity is - and there's no easy solution," Bentham said.

"Weight loss surgery is effective but it's a very expensive, intrusive operation. With the rates of obesity we're predicting, there aren't many healthcare systems that could afford it."

Diet and exercise still the answer
Of course, obesity rates don't need to get any higher for statins to become useless — the blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drugs are actually useless already. Because while they are certainly effective at lowering levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol, evidence suggests they don't actually prevent cardiovascular disease.

That may be because new research is indicating that high LDL and total cholesterol may actually be a sign of heart disease, not a cause.

In any case, a study in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology found that the drug industry and media have dramatically exaggerated the effectiveness of statins, which reduced cardiovascular disease rates by only about 1 percent. In contrast, rates of dangerous side effects from the drugs are much higher — including cancer, diabetes, cognitive impairment and musculoskeletal disorders. A recent study may have revealed part of the reason: Statins appear to deactivate the stem cells responsible for cellular repair.

Mariachiara Di Cesare, co-lead author of the obesity study, said that only systemic interventions will be able to stem the epidemic of metabolic disease caused by rampant obesity.

"There have to be Governmental interventions - sugar taxes, education of people, easy access to fruits and vegetables and more physical activity," she said.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Fonte: NaturalNews

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