More than half the year has gone by. Have you stuck to your New Year's resolution? Can you remember what it is?
Typically, resolutions take the form of improving personal health, and that involves being more physically active, eating right and losing body fat. Experts are expected to guide us on these issues, and they usually do so by telling us what to do and how to go about it.
Doctors are reporting increases of up to 500 per cent in the number of people turning to gastric surgery in an attempt to lose weight and are operating on patients as young as 12.
Demand for surgery has soared as obesity rates in the UAE have reached “epidemic? proportions, with more than 25 per cent of men and almost 40 per cent of women classed as being dangerously overweight, according to World Heath Organisation estimates.
More Finns are turning to surgery to treat obesity. In Finland, some 75,000 people could be eligible for gastric bypass surgery. However, going under the knife is no guarantee to weight loss.
Just a few years ago, Sirpa Haapalahti weighed 190 kilograms. Now she is down to 116. When dieting alone did not produce results, Haapalahti turned to gastric bypass surgery to reduce her stomach size.
ECONOMISTS have long recognised the arguments for imposing special taxes on goods and services whose prices do not reflect the true social cost of their consumption. Such taxes are known as “Pigouvian? after Arthur Pigou, a 20th-century English economist. Environmental taxes are an obvious example. There is also a Pigouvian case for duties on cigarettes, alcohol and gambling. Smoking increases the risk of cancer for those in the vicinity of the smoker; alcohol abuse and gambling are strongly associated with violence and family breakdown. Moreover, all three habits lead to higher medical costs. In theory governments can make up these costs, or “externalities?, with a tax that adjusts the prices people pay to puff, booze or punt. Such a tax might also encourage consumers to live healthier lives.
Expert: We don't have any known way to make obese people thin except gastric bypass surgery, which has a 2% mortality rate by itself.
Thin person: But I am very thin!
That's about 50% of the conversation in the comments to the Paul Campos interview. It's about as useful as the following exchange:
Expert: We don't have any known way to make short people tall, except for extreme surgeries and hormone injections.
The study looked at safety results for gastric bands and stomach stapling at 10 U.S. hospitals specializing in these procedures from 2005 through 2007. For every 1,000 patients, three died during or within a month of their surgery, and 43 had a major complication.
