In my practice as a weight management physician, I routinely see patients with medication lists that are a mile long. This is not entirely unexpected. With obesity comes comorbid disease, and with disease often comes pharmacotherapy. In fact, it’s not unusual to see people on 10 or more medications when they first walk into my office. As a result, one of the first questions I usually ask myself is not, “What new medication can I start this patient on?”, but rather, “What old medication(s) can I stop?”
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In my last blog entry, I highlighted how the high fat/low carb Inuit diet could counter-intuitively be healthy for its adherents. One of my students read the article and asked me if I knew anything about the (also) high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet. Sometimes used as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy, the diet has also become increasingly popular not just for weight loss, but to change body composition - that is, to increase muscle mass and decrease body fat percentage. The student asked me if the ketogenic diet could do that in a safe way for a young person like him.
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