A weight-loss machine that lets you eat all you want and then drains the food out of your stomach has been approved by the Food and Drugs Administration.
AspireAssist works like this: In a 15-minute outpatient procedure, a surgeon implants a tube into a patient’s stomach. The tube is connected to a valve that lies flush against the skin of the abdomen. Twenty to 30 minutes after every meal, the patient opens the valvAe and uses a connecting device to drain the stomach contents into a toilet. “The device removes approximately 30 percent of the calories consumed,” the FDA said in announcing the approval on June 14.
Although few major news outlets made much of the FDA decision, a number of bloggers responded – usually with fury.
“Bizarre FDA-approved weight loss system encourages eating disorders,” raged the headline on a BigThink.com blog by Derek Beres. “Aspire is a corporation concerned with courting investors as clients,” he writes. “Like any company, continued growth is the true goal – it markets its device as ‘long-term.’ The expansion of the American waistline is its cash cow. Like the food industry itself, Aspire relies on addictive impulses for success: keeping shoving in the bad stuff, we’ll shovel it right back out.”
“I am absolutely, utterly and totally appalled that it was approved,” says Florida endocrinologist and diabetologist Joseph Gutman, quoted on TheVerge.com. “This is mechanized bulimia. It’s a device that makes bulimia okay.” Gutman says he’s rounding up physicians to jointly sue the FDA to take the device off the market.
The FDA approval said that the machine is intended for obese people who have been unable to lose weight by other methods and that it should not be used by anyone with an eating disorder.