What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

END THE APPROVAL OF WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS WITH DANGEROUS—EVEN FATAL—SIDE EFFECTS Diet drugs and supplements aren’t just the products of junk science—they put lives at risk. People of all sizes who take diet pills have experienced major health complications and, in many cases, death. While diet drugs and supplements impact people of all sizes, fat people are under a unique, constant, and unyielding pressure to lose significant amounts of weight immediately. Standing up for fat people will require us to increase federal regulation of products claiming to aid in weight loss. It will require us to build in checks for the sensationalist, false claims of people like Dr. Oz,5 and to counter those baseless assertions with the real-life harms of diet culture.6 It will require us to hold a simple line: diet pill manufacturers (such as Hydroxycut, Alli, Fen-Phen) and diet food purveyors (such as Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers) may only make claims that are based on repeated clinical trials conducted by independent, third-party researchers—not bankrolled by corporations invested in making sensational claims.