Friday 5: Five Things VERY Wrong With A Personal Stomach Pump

A couple of days ago, ABC released a story about the creation of personal hand-held stomach pumps.

No, really.

Called the AspireAssist device, it works by sucking the food right out of the stomach so that only about a third of the calories are absorbed by the body.

Patients wait 20 minutes after eating, then empty 30 percent of their stomach contents into the toilet through a tube — a small, handheld device connects to a skin-port discretely embedded on the outside of the abdomen.

Calories not digested are calories not absorbed, which, say the inventors, leads to weight loss.

In a one-year trial of 24 obese patients, patients on average lost 49 percent of excess weight, the equivalent of about 45 pounds.

Mikael Cederhag, 55, of Sweden was one of them. When he had the AspireAssist device implanted last year he tipped the scales at 264 pounds. Now he’s at 200 pounds and still losing.

“This is it for me. I’ve been jumping up and down in weight for 30 years,” Cederhag said. “Finally, this is a solution that allows me to get my weight down and stay that way.”

Katherine D. Crothall, president and CEO of Aspire Bariatrics, the maker of the AspireAssist, said she understood why people might find the idea of the pump “gross” but insisted it offered a viable way for morbidly obese people to drop pounds.

“Some people manage to lose weight on a diet, but the kinds of changes you need to make to keep it off are probably not sustainable for many,” she said. “There’s a lot to be said for people being in the driver’s seat with their own body, with their own health. This allows a patient to do that while under the care of a physician.”[source]

I tried to not quote the entire article and was failing miserably…. so I’m going to work backwards. That being said, I’m going to pull five (or so) quotes from this article that show me why this – and anything like it – is essentially the worst idea I’ve ever heard of in my life when it comes to weight management.

Whew, somebody help us all:

1) This is medically assisted bulimia. The end. I could, really, end the post here,… but y’all know me:

Called the AspireAssist device, it works by sucking the food right out of the stomach so that only about a third of the calories are absorbed by the body.

Calories not digested are calories not absorbed, which, say the inventors, leads to weight loss.

[…]

“People often wish they could just eat and make the calories go away,” [Ayoob] said. “It was only a matter of time before someone came up with this.

How do we explain this to all of the bulimics, in recovery, who used the binge and purge system as a means of weight management because “If it comes back up, it can’t stick?” How do we explain to bulimics that the logic behind why they did what they did was wrong, but so long as they gave some money to big pharma, they could have medically assisted bulimia?

2) It allows 55 year old human adults to believe they don’t have a problem… or that they do have a problem, however a personal stomach pump is the solution:

“This is it for me. I’ve been jumping up and down in weight for 30 years,” Cederhag said. “Finally, this is a solution that allows me to get my weight down and stay that way.”

It’s 2013 – you’ve been jumping up and down in weight since… the 80s? (Right around the time when processed food and the low-fat craze got their boom….but I’ll chill.) It’s such a problem that you’re… now willing to walk around with a stomach pump attached to you? All day? You want an open vessel between your stomach and your skin – between the inside and the outside of your body that your body didn’t come born and built with… yuck – that you can’t clean, can’t fully protect from infection, that could even potentially tear the lining of your stomach with one false move (isn’t this, in more or less words, a lot like a stomach ulcer?), and that the body will, undoubtedly, treat as a foreign substance all because you can’t figure out how to eat?

And, on that note…

3) A personalized stomach pump falls right in line with the mentality that the problem isn’t “the food,” it’s “the people.” It’s the myth of personal responsibility. We make pharmaceutical companies list the entirety of the risks of their drugs in their commercials; NyQuil has taken to putting “non-habit forming” on their cough syrup because they had to admit to and accept the fact that people become addicted to it. Food? No…if you’re addicted to a food, it’s because the food is soooo good, you can’t control yourself! This is something manufacturers aspire to! (No pun intended.) They aspire to create something addictive, and they don’t even bother with the flavor of it anymore. Put in enough sugar, fat and salt, and it’ll hook anyone. Cheetos taste like trash; bet money their pockets are still fat.

We are allowing the public to be manipulated. Period. Do we tell alcoholics that they just need to learn moderation? Do we tell heroin addicts they need to learn moderation? No. We tell food addicts that they should just learn to moderate intake of the thing to which they’re addicted… and we never let them admit the addiction is real.

We just enable their addiction by telling them that, as a means of controlling themselves, they need things. Things like a personalized stomach pump.

4) This device is enabling emotional eaters. Plain and simple. This quote:

“This is an enabling device, not a helping device,” Ayoob continued. “It doesn’t do anything to make someone change their relationship with food. Once you put this in someone, they’re never going to want it taken out.”

and this quote:

Crothall said that her company hadn’t looked at how weight loss is maintained once the device is removed but was marketing the device for long-term use. She said that trial participants were offered counseling to help them modify their eating habits, but there was only anecdotal evidence that any of them made changes.

go hand in hand for me. This device enables people to eat their feelings, and Crothall knows it and is banking on it – and, by “it,” I mean the desire to have this just because it is a “polite bulimia machine” – being what makes her company billions of dollars.

Yes, billions. With a B. A capital B, at that.

“Trial participants were offered counseling to help them with their eating habits?” Do you think that, if they were receptive to initial simple “changes to eating habits,” they’d need a personal stomach pump?

Hadn’t even considered what people are supposed to do when it comes time to take the thing out? Listen. Listen closely. I’m going to tell you something important. The pressure to be thin, combined with the drive to eat emotionally, is so great… so high-stakes in this situation, that an emotional eater who manages to get one of these will actually experience relief and even trigger positive feelings through their internal reward system – the same system that creates the positive feelings that one gets after a binge on something sugary, salty, or fatty – and could compel them to become just as addicted to their precious stomach pump as they already are to the food they keep consuming against their better judgment.

I mean, for goodness sake, did you see this?

Cederhag said the device helped him avoid “disordered eating” by allowing him to enjoy normal meals while still losing weight.

“I don’t want to be seated at the table with an empty plate. This way I can eat together with my friends and my family, I can drink my beer or wine if I want to. And then I can just let go of 30 percent.”

55 years old, and you still think that losing weight means being “seated at the table with an empty plate?” If you really think the cause of your frequent weight fluctuation is “my beer or wine if I want to,” with the italicized implying that he may not always want to, then have you considered that maybe you drink too much? If you are really drinking enough that your weight is fluctuating, and it’s to the point where you’d rather get a personalized stomach pump

5) This right here, is the got-damn kicker:

Ayoob also brought up the point that chunks of food could get stuck in the tubing of the device, much in the way debris backs up in a sink drain. One trial participant reported such “clogging,” and had to avoid cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese food, stir-fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips and steak.

“With the tube it’s much easier to eat smooth and creamy foods like ice cream, pudding and cake versus hard or crunchy foods like fruits, vegetables and lean meats” — the foods most apt to promote weight loss — Ayoob said.

Check this out. You can’t eat the things that promote weight loss, you can only eat the things that promote weight gain…. which is why you need – need – to keep wearing the device long term.

Dude. This is the greatest big pharma scam ever in the history of big pharma scams. Of course you’ll never want to remove the device. You can eat smooth, soft, dissolving foods – food that will probably obliterate your blood sugar and cause any number of components of metabolic syndrome – without having to suffer the consequences of such! Wooooooo, this is hilarious.

The pump, according to Crothall, will “only perform a limited number of aspirations until the number has been reset by the doctor.” If doctors are out here assisting patients in abusing prescription meds, what makes you think they won’t be out here assisting patients in abusing this? Especially if the patient is well-off, or in some other way useful to the doctor?

And what about maintenance? What about upkeep? Is this something that, while you’re so busy wearing it long-term, you’ll need to replace frequently? Is this something that expires, and needs additional surgery to modify? Does it need yearly maintenance?

You guys… I am overwhelmed by the awfulness of this. Somebody hold me.