Ditto! Ditto! Ditto!

I would love to sterilize these people right in my office, but that's unethical. Or so they tell me.

Oh, you are So Correct! Rack: I know in Cali, no one can be surgically sterilized before age 21, even with their own consent! There are so many who shouldn't be allowed to breed!!

I've known a lot of people that have had the surgery and gained all the weight back. People have to change their live styles.

The younger a person gets the surgery the quicker they seem to gain it back.

My generation had all of the health and nutritional information at our fingertips all of our lives...yet we are the 1st generation to be obese in such a large proportion. But for the most part the boomers got fat after puberty.

The coming generation will have strained their body with obesity all of their lives. It's going to be interesting to see if the medical and insurance industries will be able to keep up with their needs.

We've been to a funeral for one young person who had this surgery, looking like there'll be another within a short time. Something about internal scar tissue.

I understand your opinions, but way to be compassionate, Barbara. (and in bold too)

I didn't read that the women in question where having babies in their teens, only that they became pregnant at some point in their lives after having had surgery in their teens.

That's what I read, also. Teens having the surgery in their teens may not actually have babies for 20 years, the question seems to be what about the babies in the girls' distant futures.

Not all teenage girls who have this operation do so because they're morbidly obese, some do so because they are mildly overweight and wish to lose weight fast (in most cases to appease their peers or parents who are only worried about social status). There is more to the this than food, pressure from a materialistic and outward looking society has a lot to do with the problem. Please open your mind and show a little compassion.

That was my first thought, too. How big is the morbid obese/gastric bypass patient, teen mother population that they were able to find enough people to do this study?

It doesn't say they are getting pregnant as teens--only that they are having surgery as teen. It does not say how much later they are getting pregnant. It could be a great deal of time.

If you know anything about the gastric bypass operation there are too many doctors doing the procedure to women primarily who are not really that big, some barely considered obese. And teen pregnancy is fairly common still. These girls who are loosing weight fast feel good about themselves and therefore have sex and get pregnant because they arent taught what birth control is and how to use it...

I think the bottom line is that these kids aren't taught consequences of their actions.

They must be getting pregnant fairly soon if their bodies are that short of nutrients.

CO- Mama: It doesn't say they are getting pregnant as teens--only that they are having surgery as teen. It does not say how much later they are getting pregnant. It could be a great deal of time.

I am sorry to disagree with you but, if you read the very first line of the article it says:

Teen girls who become pregnant...

and not:

Teen girls who have gastric-bypass and become pregnant later on in life...

or am I reading it wrong?

Since this was presented at a conference just this week, and the text does not yet seem to be available online, none of us know what the study really said.

Given MSNBC and the rest of the press often misinterpret such papers--and the headlines in particular can be completely wrong--the cases found by Farmer, et al. may very well involve women in their 20s who had this surgery as teens. We will have to wait until the actual paper can be found online before we can conclude anything about the study subjects.

You should always take the headline and the text of the article with a grain of salt when it comes to the lay press reporting on something from the medical or scientific literature, even if the writer is the "science editor" for that entity. They want an attention-grabbing headline more than they want accuracy.

Gastric bypass does not just make the stomach smaller, it also causes a malabsorptive state. Vitamin supplementation in these patients is crucial, regardless of gender or age. Adolescent girls--and for that matter, adolescent boys and a good number of adults of either gender--do not always follow the new (lifelong) eating rules post-op. These people can remain "short of nutrients" for the rest of their lives if they are not careful. For all we know, some of these women were in their 30s, pregnant many years post-op.

Plus, teenage girls in general have children with more birth defects than women in their 20s and 30s.

How about we just not let teenage girls get pregnant? Then we'll all be better off as a society. I mandate all girls at the age of 14 have IUDs placed.

Girls and boys racknstack....5 year shots...

...and make 'em like up again at 18...

I agree.

Health care costs will never be controlled until people start caring for themselves through diet and exercise.

Maybe society does put pressure on girls to become thin, but if a teenager has gotten so obese that they need surgery (or are too darn lazy to get off their butts and exercise the weight off) that is not society's fault or society pressuring them to lose weight - that's reality hitting them in the face and the fact that parents don't parent their children anymore and just allow them to shove whatever they feel like into their fat bodies is a mere symptom of this epidemic disease. Parents are getting lazier and lazier and people just want a quick easy fix, a pill, a cream, a surgery to solve a problem that is easily solved with hard work and SELF RESTRAINT. This is what parents need to teach their children.

So, help us better understand you: what do YOU define as "fat"? A size 4, size 6, size 8, 10, 12,......???? Where is your "fat" definition standing? By your attitude, I'd give it a 0...but I am curious.

Either way, to each their own. If looks is all you care about, then more power to you.

Shallow, meaningless relationships are all that can come out of a 100% "worried about fat" approach.

I don't like hairy guys either; gross! :)

So, I married one that didn't have all that much hair; and loves me for my looks. I love him for who he is, looks, wonderful height, caring about who I am, and amazing....well, anyway, 'nuff said. (hehe)

That last sentence in the reply-made me want to puke. Bad visual.

While I share your disgust over the many ignorant and cruel comments here, I have to point out that deena's comments were absolutely correct:

Become much more fertile as they get thinner

Female patients who are obese--especially if they have polycystic ovary syndrome--are frequently insulin resistant, often oligomenorrheic, and have many anovulatory cycles.

Never depend on this as a form of contraception, however. Plenty of obese girls and women are quite fertile, and need to use protection if they are sexually active. Even those with documented anovulatory cycles will ovulate once in a while and become pregnant. But for many, they have become lax in their use of birth control pills, condoms, etc, and just via sheer luck have avoided pregnancy when their lack of contraception coincided with lack of ovulation.

When the weight comes off, the insulin resistance improves. Even though IR is often the cause of the obesity in the first place, once established it sort of perpetuates itself, and breaking that cycle by losing as little as 5% of body weight can restore monthly ovulation. Then you have a woman or girl who has become suddenly fertile again, and her lax use of contraception can result in pregnancy.

In fact, certain diabetes drugs such as metformin are often prescribed off-label to non-diabetic women with PCOS to reduce insulin resistance in order to increase fertility and decrease the other stigmata of the disease. They tend to lose weight much more easily on metformin as well.

So dieting, exercise, gastric bypass, and insulin-sensitizing medications can all increase fertility in obese women and girls by promoting weight loss and reducing insulin resistance.

This video explains the increased fertility often seen after gastric bypass.