Dangerous drugs for kids who don’t need them

Diabetes drugs are bad enough for the millions of Americans saddled with this terrible condition… but now, there’s a new push to force these meds on fat children who don’t even have diabetes.

A recent study finds that obese teens might lose a very small amount of weight over a very long period of time by taking diabetes drugs… and this is somehow being treated as a success story.

Want to know who’s really sick here? Researchers who use children as human guinea pigs… and then try to disguise failure as success.

The study involved 77 obese children between 13 and 18 years old. All of them were given weight-loss tips and told to exercise, but some were given the diabetes drug metformin XR, while the rest got a placebo.

After a year, the kids on the placebo gained a little weight. The ones who took the med shed some pounds–but not a lot, certainly nothing worth crowing about. In fact, the kids on this med managed to shave an average of just 0.9 off their body mass index, according to the study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Let’s take a look at just how insignificant that is.

Someone is considered to have a “normal” weight when his or her BMI is below 25. Above that, you’re overweight… and when you hit 30, you’re obese. So at a minimum, obese people need to shed 5 points of that BMI to get to where they should be–and most people need to lose a lot more than that.

The kids on this drug didn’t even make it a fifth of the way there after an entire year, and that’s assuming they were just at that minimum level of obesity.

That’s an utter waste of a year… yet the smug authors of the study proudly declared that metformin “may have an important role in the treatment of adolescent obesity” and that they’d like to see a longer-term study.

I bet they would. I bet they’d like to get the grant for that, too.

Here’s something that doesn’t need further research: Put these kids on a good diet of real foods instead of sugar- packed snacks, fast food and packaged meals. Get them off soda and energy drinks, and get them outside a little more.

They’d lose weight far more quickly, and they wouldn’t have to risk the awful gastrointestinal side effects that come with metformin, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, gas, heartburn, headaches and a potentially fatal condition called lactic acidosis.

The alternative not only offers kids a natural way to lose weight… it also teaches them the good habits that will keep them in shape for the rest of their lives.

That’s how you really measure success.