Of late, Big Pharma and Obesity Inc. have been very unhappy, not to say apoplectic, with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Why?  Because the FDA has turned down all their recent applications for new weight-loss drugs.

“Everybody in the obesity field is upset. There is a lot of anger,” says Dr. Donna Ryan, past president of the Obesity Society in a December, 2010 article.  The FDA treats drugs for obesity “as if they were in a different category,” said Judith Stern, UC Davis professor and Big Pharma consultant . “I think [the FDA is] not taking it seriously as a disease.”

Here’s why the FDA is taking a hard line and why it must continue to do so.

1.  Diet drugs have had an horrendous track record

In no other area has Big Pharma encountered the number of disasters that has plagued it in the weight loss arena. Amphetamines caused addiction; digitalis and diuretics directly caused deaths; Aminorex resulted in pulmonary hypertension; fenfluramine and phentermine (the so-called Fen/Phen drugs) resulted in heart valve insufficiency; and Sibutramine (Reductil/Meridia) has been banned due to the high level of heart and other problems among people who have been taking it. All these drugs were all put on the market with great fanfare, only to be pulled when their disastrous side effects were uncovered.

2.  Weight loss drugs are fundamentally different from other drugs

Why? Why have diet drugs produced such lethal, catastrophic results while in other areas, the pharmaceutical industry has been enormously successful in treating and sometimes curing many serious problems? The reason is that diet drugs are designed to do something fundamentally different from all other pharmaceutical products.

Other pharmaceutical products either help the body fight off outside invasions from viruses or bacteria, or they try to correct the problems associated with diseased systems.  Diet drugs are totally different. They are designed to make a perfectly healthy system malfunction. When your food energy intake exceeds the energy that you expend, the body stores that extra energy as fat. This is exactly and precisely what it is supposed to do. It is functioning normally.

In order for a diet drug to work, it must make your fat storage system malfunction. It has to make it stop working the way it is supposed to work. And when you try to make a person’s basic survival system malfunction, you have to use a pretty massive sledgehammer, and there has been untold collateral damage.

3.  Obesity is not a disease and the FDA knows it

The scientists and researchers at the FDA are not taken in by the “obesity is a disease” hype of Big Pharma and Obesity Inc.  They have read and fully comprehend the same research that underlies The Great Fat Fraud.  They know that obesity is not a disease and that all of the health problems being attributed to obesity are actually caused by low fitness levels.  Therefore, they are extremely reluctant, and rightly so, to approve any more weight-loss drugs unless they are absolutely, positively sure that there won’t be long-term adverse side effects.

The FDA is correct in what it is doing and we need to support their position.