Can the third time be the charm for weight loss pills?
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the third new prescription drug for obesity since 2012. The drug, called Contrave, was developed by Orexigen Therapeutics, a small company based in San Diego, and will be marketed by Takeda Pharmaceutical of Japan.
About one-third of American adults are obese, so a successful weight loss drug could potentially have huge sales. Doctors specializing in obesity say there is a big need for weight loss approaches that go beyond diet and exercise but are not as drastic as surgery.
Yet two drugs approved in 2012 — the first new prescription obesity drugs in 13 years — have had disappointing sales. Those drugs are Qsymia, which is sold by Vivus, and Belviq, which is from Arena Pharmaceuticals and Eisai.
Analysts, doctors and company executives say one reason the drugs have struggled is that many doctors and many obese people do not think of obesity as a disease to be treated by medicine.
We need more than a couple of drugs to battle obesity. How can we fight a disease while allowing its causes to run rampant through our environment? Internally, our bodies adapt to weight loss drugs- they sense the loss of weight and adjust our metabolism to resist further changes. Externally, we are bombarded by environmental estrogens, food industries' aggressive advertising strategies, the stress of everyday life, misleading food labels, and food companies' alterations to our diets (for example, adding sugar to and removing fiber from grocery breads to improve shelf life). New drugs are like band-aids on an open wound; they partially cover it up, but underneath there's a huge mess to be dealt with. The drugs could prove beneficial if they're coupled with much deeper changes.
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