For those who prefer losing weight from the comfort of their living room couch while watching TV and eating a bag of potato chips with a large diet soda, the FDA has a new drug for you!
Vivus Inc. manufactures the FDA approved anti-obesity drug Qsymia. Doctors prescribe it for overweight and obese people who have at least one other health problem related to weight. Examples include hypertension, high cholesterol, or Type 2 diabetes.
The market for this highly anticipated new drug is huge, with more than 1/3 of US adults now obese.
Obesity projections are no doubt great news for Vivus Inc’s shareholders. Overweight and obese people will likely total 80% of the adult population by 2020 with more than 1 in 5 children obese in just a few short years.
Qsymia Nothing More than Repackaged Fen-Phen
The new anti-obesity drug Qsymia was created using two older drugs: topiramate and phentermine. If phentermine sounds vaguely familiar, let me jog your memory.
Fen-phen, the popular weight loss drug tied to heart valve damage and yanked from the market in 1997 was, you guessed it, one-half phentermine!
In a nutshell, this new anti-obesity drug Qsymia is fen-phen repackaged as … top-phen.
Thousands of lawsuits resulted from the damage caused by fen-phen with billions in settlements paid out to victims and their families.
That’s the standard business model in the pharmaceutical industry. Simply repackage a drug removed from the market by changing it up a bit, get it approved, and make a fortune fast. When it is yanked off the market for harming people (again), just settle the lawsuits. Just a normal cost of doing business, right?
In the end, Vivus will likely make much much more than will ever be paid out in future lawsuits from Qsymia, so it is a sound business decision for shareholders to get it out there and get the revenue flowing quickly.
This strategy is, of course, unethical, but it is perfectly legal and a proven way to generate huge profits for the drug industry in a short period of time.
Qsymia Side Effects
Acknowledged side effects of Qsymia include tingling in the hands and feet, constipation, dry mouth, dizziness, and insomnia.
Wait a minute – insomnia? Isn’t lack of sleep a recognized and very big cause for overweight problems in the first place?
What Obesity Medicine Specialists in their right minds would prescribe this for a patient?
It is important to note that the FDA initially rejected Qsymia, then known as Qnexa, in 2010 because of side effects including elevated heart rate, psychiatric problems, and birth defects. No worries, Vivus submitted additional “safety data”, with the drug application quickly approved.
Qsymia Doesn’t Help You Lose That Much Weight
Here’s the kicker. A patient prescribed Qsymia will take on all this unknown health risk from taking a drug that was previously removed from the market over 10 years ago. Worse, he/she probably won’t lose that much weight either. Hint: If you would like to know how long it takes to lose weight, this article tells you exactly with no gimmicks!
Documentation submitted to the FDA indicated that nearly 70% of patients taking Qsymia for an entire year lost only 5% of their body weight. This compares with 20% of patients taking a placebo losing the same amount!
This means that a 250 lb person would only lose 12.5 lbs after taking Qsymia for a full year.
This insignificant weight loss certainly wouldn’t reduce the long term health risk of anything weight related!
Eating Grassfed Meat Achieves Nearly the Same Results
An overweight or obese person would be much better off simply switching to grass-fed meat (here’s where to get it). A typical 6-ounce grass-fed steak has approximately 100 fewer calories than a conventional 6 oz steak from grain-fed cattle.
What’s more, since it is considerably more nutrient-dense, it fills you up better and you stay full longer. Since the average American consumes 66.5 lbs of beef per year, this simple change can have a profound effect! Such an easy tweak would translate to a 6-pound loss per year with all else remaining the same!
Eat grass-fed beef or take a new anti-obesity drug with many side effects that will no doubt be prescribed for children as well?
That’s an easy choice.
References
(1) Obesity Pill Qsymia Gains FDA Approval
(2) Young Americans Need to Cut Caloric Intake
(3) Eat Wild
I don’t understand why the author thinks that all obese people are couch potatoes, junk food junkies, and want ‘only a pill’ to cure all their problems. I was actually on Phen-fen for about a month, lost 8 lbs while working as a waitress and working out, and watching what I ate. Because I was only on it for a month, I did not qualify to get my heart valves checked. That was 1996 when I took it.
I started getting depressed, so stopped taking it. I have been overweight since I was 8 years old. I have also had hormonal problems my whole life, and even growth problems and other health problems AS A BABY. My health problems included hydrocephalus and flat footedness, growing up, and lately as an adult, cancer. Not exactly easy to be put in sports when you have feet like flippers. My mom enrolled me in Weight Watchers when I was 9 years old, so I know what a balanced diet looks like. For about the past 10 years, I started going on an organic kick and ate EVERYTHING organic, went to the gym at least 3x/week, and did exercise videos on top of that. I saw a nutritionist, and later a naturopath. I still was not able to lose weight. It’s interesting my dad blamed everything on my weight, tried to get me to start smoking as a teen in order to lose weight. He died from cancer at a relatively young age, even though he was thin. At one point after several attempts of losing weight over the course of DECADES by the BMI standards, you have to realize that obesity does not ONLY stem from lifestyle. Interestingly enough, the doctor who diagnosed my cancer stated that my cancer was due to my lifestyle. Not my weight, but the fact that I’m an older mom. We are all snowflakes, and although yes we as a nation do not move around enough and eat the wrong foods, lifestyle choices are not the ONLY factors to obesity.
Well, I guess that would help you if you lived in Venezuela.
Phentermine was not determined to be cause the heart valve damage of Fen/Phen, it was the fenfluramine. If you’re going to fear something, at least do so for the correct reasons. 😀
Honestly though, elevating serotonin (as fenfluramine did, and as phentermine does to a lesser extent) for weight loss was a failed idea back in 1912 when MDMA/Molly was invented (that was MDMA’s original purpose, never made it to market though because can you imagine people in 1912 getting all loved up, in the era that started prohibition? ha!), and it’s still a failed idea. If it worked so well and reliably there wouldn’t be the health risks, nor would so many people on SSRI antidepressants find they start *GAINING* weight after a while.
And topiramate (anticonvulsant, epilepsy drug) is a very, very weird choice to be pairing with phentermine, almost like they just chose any random drug that also has weight loss as a side-effect. But it also has WEIGHT GAIN as a side-effect for 10% of people who use it. And its laundry list of other side-effects does not inspire confidence.
Ally also ignores the fact that there IS an evolutionary advantage to being heavier. 500 years ago when there were regular famines the heavier individuals survived whereas the skinny-minnies starved to death. Regardless of current shape or circumstances, all of our ancestors survived by having a little , or a lot, of meat on their bones.
I find it perplexing that people like Ally speak with such authority about being healthy. Most people who speak this way and blame overweight people for their eating habits are simply ignorant. Unless you’re in the overweight person’s skin, you obviously don’t know what it means to struggle with yourself. It would be like me expecting/asking you to be reasonable, simply because it’s not difficult for me to be reasonable. If you think everyone has the same opportunity regardless of physiology, you can’t be reasonable. Knowledge does not equal wisdom. Grow up.
Ally Avey: By your logic there would be no inherited birth defect or genetic tendency to have any disease. These would “have no human advantage and would never be a part of evolution.” Have you ever looked at a strand of DNA?
I do not believe people are born with a defective gene for being fat. Being fat has no human advantage and would never be part of evolution. Be logical. It’s the quality of the food you are eating! America is poisoning it’s food through Monsanto and then giving you MORE poison through Wyeth, etc., big Pharma. There is no advantage to Obamacare to have healthy Americans, only sick ones that pay into the system. When will the public “get it?”.
The CURE is to eat wisely, like a cave man would eat. It’s very hard with so much sugar at our fingertips, but it’s the truth. Sugar is highly refined, just like cocaine and heroin. Sugar acts in our system just like a controlled drug. Stop taking it and you WILL get better, I promise. You have no other options.
Flour, highly refined from Monsanto GMO wheat, is also a drug. Stop eating it. If you like some bread, find organice spelt, original wheat before it was bastardized….but not too much; it’s still acts like sugar, a drug, in your body.
Those who are obese are not doing food quality research, I’m sorry…you just are not. It’s takes a lot of calories to stay that fat. Eat clean organic vege’s, a few fruits (not many), clean meat in limits and NO SUGAR. Use honey if you have to and stevia. Caveman had honey; stevia is a plus.
Exercise to pretend you are “hunting and gathering”. Remember your roots. Life was not easy, we did not sit down and play video games. We did not jump in a car to go shopping. We skinned the deer using our muscles, worked hard for that meat, and ate EVERYTHING of the animal (super nutrition from a clean animal).
It really is easy; it’s just that the FDA does NOT have your health in mind; you do. This country is no longer working for it’s people, it’s working for the mega mega mega rich, and for those who don’t know this these are men and women mega mega richer than Donald Trump. He is poor by their standards. As long we we remain sick we feed their bank accounts, not our own.
Stop and listen to this and get real. There is no way under heaven you can be genetically tied to weight gain. If you look like your Mom who is heavy it’s because you are eating the SAME FOOD she does.
STOP IT.
Very sincerely,
Ally
There where fat people on this earth, before meat eating and before fast food or Big MaC. I’ve never seen fat people in McDonalds only skinny people. Could it be that some fat people are unable to metabolize, cheese, and bad fat. Most, fat people are born with genetic dysfunction and don’t need your morbid sense of humor. What they need is anti-obese medicine and of cours, a healthy diet and exercise, even if that means a little walk at first.
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Funny how many people have died from taking Viagra but they don’t take it off the shelves. Fhen phen worked for a lot of people and they didn’t get sick or die. I knew one of the people who did testing for people’s hearts who took Fhen phen. Out of 2000 tests only two people had the problem and they couldn’t even say that Fhen phen caused it.
I so agree with you on that i took it and im great i just wish i could get some of them for myself right now.