Wendi tells a funny story sometimes about a woman she’d met who was considering undergoing gastric bypass surgery to help her lose weight. When Wendi asked the woman whether she’d consider changing her diet to a raw foods regimen, she responded with something like, “Oh, no, that’s too radical.”

This is really what it’s come to in society; having part of your digestive system surgically altered (in a profound, irreversible, dangerous, and invasive way) is no more than some nonchalant, consequence-free elective decision … while eating more salads is viewed as “radical.”

Now, I don’t know how accurate Wikipedia is when it comes to statistics, but that site’s gastric bypass page reports an estimated 200,000 such procedures having been performed in the U.S. alone last year (2008). Two hundred thousand, friends!  Also according to that page:  Aside from the (admittedly slight) possibility that you could die from the surgery, other complications include infection, hemmorhaging, hernias, bowel obstruction, blood clotting, internal “leakage,” complications from all of the scar tissue created, ulcers, and more. And then, since you’ve altered your digestive system, there are numerous nutritional issues you’ll face, even after losing weight.

I should add that the weight loss is not healthy weight loss. It’s more akin to starvation weight loss because you simply will not be able to hold as much as you once did. And starvation, if that is one’s goal, could easily be accomplished without surgery. (Although we would never recommend starving yourself! Just needed to add as a CYA measure.)

The kicker is no surprise to me… As compared with adopting a “radical” raw foods lifestyle, a big irony is that, for most gastric bypass patients, it’s reported that the toughest part is the psychological side — realizing the emotional attachment you had to all of the foods you used to love but now can no longer eat very much of thanks to the limited capacity of your now 90% smaller stomach.

Two hundred thousand people do this each year?  I simply cannot believe 200,000 people annually would opt for this instead of making a dietary adjustment (even if it’s a tough one for them). How much of that, do you suppose, is because (1) they know about dietary alternatives, yet still consider them unacceptable, or (2) they’ve simply never heard of raw foods, yet were exposed to media coverage and marketing campaigns? (My money is on #2. And that’s part of the reason we’re here!)

Anyway, I really wasn’t planning at all to write about this today, but happened to be browsing one of my favorite language web sites, World Wide Words, run by a witty British grammarian and word sleuth named Michael Quinion.  I happened to see this morning under his “Turns of Phrase” category a listing for “Raw Foodism.” So I clicked, only to read the opening line:

This is an extreme form of vegetarianism, in which all cooking is eschewed in favour of raw ingredients as near their natural state as possible. (emphasis mine)

Et tu, Michael?  Ahh well, until raw foods gets some serious coverage in the media, until “eating the same way that all other species eat” stops being labaled as extreme or “orthorexic,” and until gastric bypass surgery is no longer marketed as a panacea, I suspect we’ll all have to be content to sit quietly in our small, eco-friendly, ultra-healthy corners of the world. But, at least we’re a welcoming bunch. When people do wander in, dazed and confused from all of the misinformation and surgical marketing campaigns, we just smile and say, “Yep, you finally figured it out. Welcome to your journey back to true health.”

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