Robert L. Morgan, NP, who practiced in the Houston area, contributed this chapter (edited by the first author). He attracted patients who failed elsewhere.
Texas is the tenth most obese state, and we are pitifully overweight. I have been fighting this for over 30 years, and I have been losing. Against my efforts stand big Food, doctors, big Pharma, and meddling government. This cabal wittingly or unwittingly caused the international obesity crisis. They subsidize sugary corn products, oppose fat consumption, and have cold-shouldered effective treatments including diet pills and thyroid hormone. I have had minor victories patient-by-patient, and these have cost me years of struggle.
No one is sure about the cause of the obesity pandemic. But the national directive to decrease dietary fat came out at about the time we got really overweight. This is not a coincidence—it is a cause. Other theories went as far afield as blaming bacteria in the intestine, but for me, walking into any grocery store or convenience mart makes it obvious that the core problem is corporate food production. Who can resist the tastes, the color, the packaging, and the marketing? Everything is sweet, fat, and salty.
To put the obesity disaster into context, compare us with people in Korea and Japan. Americans who travel there are shocked—everyone looks fit! You can see their back and leg muscles through the clothes. Food habits must be more powerful than corporate influences. Even within the US, obesity rates vary from 23 percent in Colorado to 37 percent in Arkansas. These cultural differences must be a clue to causes.
The Food and Drug Administration’s function is to oversee both industries, but big Food and big Pharma control it with funding. Since the FDA is incompetent as well as compromised, it does many wrong things, and all this makes us fatter. (See Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, 2012, for more.)
The result is many of us have an addiction to food as powerful as others have to opioids. The morbidly obese die just like drug overdoses. I have no prayer of getting rid of marketing or food packaging. Individual patients’ cooperation limits my ability to get take them off harmful medications. So I do what I can with diet pills, which suppress appetite and aid weight loss.
There is a catch. Patients gain the weight back unless their metabolism is normal or made normal using hormone supplementation. Thyroid deficiency is epidemic, and testosterone levels have been falling in our entire population. The decline of these two contributes to obesity. Replacing them for deficient people is the most effective way to keep weight off long-term, but most doctors ignore this.
Hormone replacement can kick off a gradual weight loss that continues for a decade. It works without other prescriptions, but some patients benefit from using diet pills. These are not ideal solutions, but our lives are being threatened. My program works—many of my patients have sustained a healthy weight for years.
The drug industry dictates the beliefs of traditionally trained doctors, and I have had an uphill battle against them. They vilify thyroid for weight loss and claim it is not the “standard of care.” They push expensive medications and oppose simple solutions. I have suffered complaints to the medical board and have been threatened with laws