What Are The Health Benefits of Intentional Weight Loss?
Friday, July 24, 2015
To conclude this brief series on our new exhaustive review of the putative health benefits of long-term weight-loss maintenance, published in Annual Reviews of Nutrition, here is the summary paragraph of our findings:
“Obesity is well recognized as a risk factor for a wide range of health issues affecting virtually every organ system. There is now considerable evidence that intentional weight loss is associated with clinically relevant benefits for the majority of these health issues. However, the degree of weight loss that must be achieved and sustained to reap these benefits varies widely between comorbidities. Downsides of weight loss that is too rapid and/or extreme may occur, as in the increased risk of gallbladder disease, the presence of excess residual skin, or deterioration in liver histology. Uncertainty also remains about the potential benefit or harm of intentional weight loss on patients presenting with some chronic diseases and on overall mortality. Clearly, well- controlled prospective studies are needed to better understand the natural history of obesity and the impact of weight-management interventions on morbidity, quality of life, and mortality in people living with obesity.”
The is much left to be done and answering some of these questions will become progressively easier as better treatments for obesity become available.
@DrSharma
Kananaskis
