Photography By Renée Comet
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Conquer Fat
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, March-April 2003
There’s an obesity epidemic among older Americans—but new weight-loss breakthroughs will make it easier to drop pounds fast.
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If the health experts of America were to stage a convention and pick a candidate to represent the past and the future of the nation's obesity epidemic, they might well choose Betsy Stewart. Like nearly two-thirds of all Americans, the 55-year-old retired schoolteacher from Charlotte, North Carolina, is overweight. Like most, she has tried dieting, without success.
From well-known diets such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig to controversial ones such as Atkins and fads that called for eating grapefruit or cabbage soup with every meal, nothing worked. She spent a year taking fen-phen—the drug combination that was later found to cause heart valve damage—and dropped 80 pounds, only to see her weight balloon again when the drugs were yanked off the market.
About a year ago, 125 pounds overweight and desperate, Stewart went to see Donald Schumacher, M.D., director of the Center for Nutrition and Preventive Medicine in Charlotte, who works with pharmaceutical companies to test experimental weight loss medicines. With some trepidation, Stewart signed up for a clinical trial. "It got to the point,'' she says, "where I was either going to die or I was going to take my chances with this."
Under the care of Schumacher and his nutritionist, Stewart has drastically changed her eating habits and exercises by walking three to four times a week. Each morning, she takes two little white capsules. Neither she nor Schumacher know if the drug is the actual medication or a placebo.
"All I can tell you," she says, "is that I've lost 75 pounds."
The media often touts obesity as a scourge among young adults and children, but a study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found something astonishing: Obesity is affecting older Americans with much greater frequency. In the past decade, people ages 60 through 74 experienced the highest increase in obesity of any age group in the United States, says Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist who helped conduct the research.
This contradicts long-held beliefs. Typically, doctors thought most people stopped gaining weight after age 55 and then gradually began losing girth as they aged. This led most physicians, even geriatricians, to think obesity wasn't a dangerous health problem in people over 55, and many even believed that it was actually beneficial to them to be a little on the heavy side—as a protective cushion against the effects of old age. Scientific research, at the time, seemed to back this up: In 1998, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine reviewed the health histories of 325,000 white adults and found that although obese people were, overall, more likely to die from all causes (particularly heart disease) than their thinner peers, the increased risk was only slight by age 65, and by age 75 it was nonexistent.
Richard Atkinson, M.D., president of the American Obesity Association, recently gave a presentation about weight loss to geriatricians and recommended they start treating obesity. "The initial reaction was, 'Gosh, that's not something we do.' I said, 'You'd better rethink this.'"
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