Word: diets
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With the euphoniously named diet-drug combo fen/phen all the rage in the mid-1990s, victory finally seemed near in the war on fat. Selling by the millions, the little pills appeared to melt away pounds without maddening diets, demanding exercise or nasty side effects. But as investigative reporter Alicia Mundy reminds us in her absorbing postmortem, Dispensing with the Truth (St. Martin's Press; 402 pages; $24.95), what began as a panacea for intractable obesity--and a bonanza for the pillmakers--quickly turned into a public health disaster...
Legal claims proliferated against American Home Products, whose Wyeth-Ayerst subsidiary made Pondimin (or fenfluramine, the "fen" in fen/phen) and marketed the related diet drug Redux. Though many of these suits were combined in a single multibillion-dollar class action, Mundy focuses on Linnen's case and one other. In the latter, a couple of outsize Texas lawyers named Kip Petroff and Robert Kisselburgh brought ole-boy tactics to bear on behalf of Debbie Lovett, 36, a manicurist with valve disease. Their client had a long history of smoking and high blood pressure, which suggests that more than diet drugs...
Though it's American Home Products that must pay the huge settlements, Mundy makes clear there were other villains--doctors who heedlessly prescribed the diet drugs "off label" (in unapproved ways); scientists who ignored early signs of trouble with fenfluramine; Food and Drug Administration officials who acted more like agents of industry than of the taxpaying public; and politicians who repaid campaign contributions from the pharmaceuticals by pressuring the FDA to rush dubious new drugs through the pipeline. Like her litigators', Mundy's language is sometimes hyperbolic. She also lets the public off a little too easily for relying...
...cholesterol. In one stroke, the panel nearly tripled--from 13 million to 36 million--the number of adults who should be taking daily doses of powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs. They also raised by 25%--from 52 million to 65 million--the number who should go on a cholesterol-lowering diet...
Think of it as a remake of a Hollywood movie starring a cast of familiar characters: the good cholesterol (HDL), the bad (LDL) and the ugly (heart disease). The heroes are diet, exercise and a class of drugs called statins that cut cholesterol levels sharply by blocking a liver enzyme involved in cholesterol production...