America keeps getting fatter.
Look at this chart from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It tracks the adult obesity rate in each of the 50 states.
In the last 25 years, not a single state has trended downward in the rate of obesity:
Every single state is now above 20%.
Let’s break that down for a minute.
According to the most recent Census, the U.S. population was 318,857,056. At the time, 23.3% of the population was under the age of 18, so we’ll subtract that, leaving us with 245,519,934 adults.
20% of that is 49,103,986 people.
According to this group, almost 50 million people are obese RIGHT NOW.
Guess what? It’s actually more than that.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that in 2009-2010, closer to one-third of the adult population was obese. That’s 78 million people.
While diet and exercise play a major role in reversing the obesity trend, a lot of Americans turned to bariatric surgery to fix their expanding guts.
According to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS), the number of bariatric surgeries has increased in each of the last three years.
In 2011, there were 158,000. In 2012, it went up to 173,000. In 2013, it was 179,000.
The numbers for 2014 aren’t in yet, but it’s a good bet that they continued the upward trend.
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But here’s the thing…
The most common types of bariatric surgery carry a very high failure rate. Lap Bands are only successful half the time, and Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypasses can have a failure rate as high as 60% depending upon the weight and physical condition of the recipient.
The problem with these surgeries is that they attempt to fix obesity by altering the capacity of the stomach. But the next big thing in fixing obesity is not in the gastrointestinal system at all.
It’s in the brain.
One American company is offering a device that hooks into your brain waves to control when you feel hungry. Basically, it sends an electrical current into a crucial nerve in the body, and it disrupts the hunger signal.
This “smart stomach” tech is currently in a multi-year trial, and it’s part of a comparative analysis being done by the FDA. It’s the first new weight loss therapy device to get FDA approval in eight years.
Right now, the company is trading in the $1 range. Shares were more than $50 five years ago, but there was a massive sell-off, and they’ve lived in the basement ever since.
But the company has a great deal of upside potential.
Though its device has already been cleared for use in America, the company is testing it out so it can receive an improved classification that would make it attractive enough to be covered by insurers.
We’ll let you know more about the company and its advancements as our research continues.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
