You know that moment when it hits you: You have no choice but to lose weight. By that time, your options might feel drastic—from intermittent fasting to going keto… or even looking into weight loss surgery. A new study reveals that within 30 days of undergoing one increasingly typical weight loss method, men are dying at significantly higher rates than women are. Here’s a new reason it can be so important to get your nutrition in check before your health spins out of control.
Most nutrition and medical professionals might suggest that lifestyle changes like a leaner diet and more exercise can be the healthiest way to lose weight. In other cases, for individuals who need to take the bariatric surgery route to shed pounds, authors of a new study recommend that patients should be consciously proactive about when they have the procedure done.
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At this week’s Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, lead author Hannes Beiglböck, M.D. from the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, presented findings from a recent review of 10 years’ worth of studies that included over 19,000 bariatric surgery patients.
As a press release states, Beiglböck’s study concluded: “Men who undergo bariatric (obesity) surgery are five times as likely to die within 30 days of the procedure compared to women, and their long-term mortality is almost three times higher.”
Study Finds suggests this is due to the fact that men wait until they’re older to seek the surgery. The source explains that in many cases, by the time they do, they already have cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, or Type 2 diabetes, which may contribute to this higher death rate among men.
Women, on the other hand, “seem more willing to look at surgical weight loss earlier in life, whereas men tend to wait until they have more comorbidities,” Beiglböck said. (Psychiatric disorders were also a comorbidity for both genders, while for women, cancers were 9% more prevalent among women who expired after surgery.)
We should note that this study doesn’t necessarily call for total alarmism over bariatric surgery, as it can indeed be helpful for many patients. To be specific, the researchers cited hopeful insights based on the data they reviewed: “Between January 2010 and April 2020, less than 2% of bariatric surgery patients died,” they reported.
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