Tech Companies Fight Obesity Epidemic

I’m a new father, and I just recently passed my fifth month wearing the “dad” honorific.

This has seriously changed who I am. I’m sure you parents and grandparents will back me up on this.

Parenthood has become my primary function.

It wasn’t really my choice, either. It just happens that way. Parenthood has taken precedence over my work as a tech analyst and blogger, and it’s put my hobbies in a paused state.

As long as my daughter is totally dependent upon us to keep her alive, I’m sure “dad first” will remain my default condition.

However, it’s had a lot of unexpected side effects.

Almost against my will, parenthood has infiltrated the way news hits me. Stories that involve children being harmed are now extremely difficult for me to read.

If a news story involves a child fatality, there’s a good chance I’ll be too choked up to hear the whole thing.

The New York Times ran an op-ed over the weekend that plucked these newly sensitive strings in my heart. Obstetrician and gynecologist Claire Putnam told the story of a complicated childbirth where she had no idea whether the baby she was delivering was going to be alive or dead. The mother was having seizures, and the baby’s vital signs were lost.

The problem?

The mother was obese, and her systems could not hold up to the stress of childbirth.

Epidemic

The problem, Putnam says, is that overweight mothers have complicated pregnancies and pass health problems along to their children. On the night she wrote about in the op-ed, eight out of 10 of the deliveries she did were for overweight women.

Overweight and obesity are major epidemics in the United States, and as a result, life-threatening conditions related to weight are on the rise.

More than 60% of adults and 30% of children are overweight or obese.

“We recently had two patients with BMI’s of 53 and 60 in labor at the same time. BMI’s above 50 are now classified in a new category: ‘super-obese.’ It is frightening to think that this might become normal,” she wrote.

Super-obese?

Americans are so fat that there’s a new category fatter than obese.

People who find themselves at this point might have to turn to science.

A New “Lap Band”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists suggests bariatric surgery as a weight loss option for patients with a BMI of at least 40.

Bariatric surgeries such as RNY gastric bypasses can be undertaken approximately a year before conception, and the management of labor and delivery are expected to be mostly normal.

Still, the organization says any patient with extensive and complicated abdominal surgery from weight loss procedures needs to have a lot of consultation and supervision if they plan to have a baby.

But there’s a new surgical weight loss procedure that doesn’t require invasive surgery into the body cavity. The simple outpatient surgery takes only a couple of hours and adds an electronic device to the patient’s nervous system.

This device tells the brain that the patient isn’t hungry.

It’s extremely new and only received FDA approval a couple of months ago.

We at Tech Investing Daily think the technology is very exciting and have done significant research on its origins, its successes, and, most importantly, where you can invest in it.

It is one of many technologies being applied to weight control, an area where the opportunity abounds.

Check it out here.

Good Investing,

Tim Conneally

 @TimConneally on Twitter

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.