What is gastric bypass surgery?
Gastric bypass surgery can be a life-saving option for people who are severely overweight or obese. Find out how it's done in this video featuring bariatric surgeon James "Butch" Rosser Jr., M.D.
Transcript
JAMES ROSSER: What in the world is gastric bypass surgery? Well, what I'm going to try to do is break it down
so you can understand what's going on and then you'll be in a position to make a better informed decision.
First, there is the stomach. And the stomach is a huge organ. Our first job in gastric bypass surgery
is to reduce the size of the stomach where your food is going to go. So we take about 5% to 10% of your stomach
and we turn it into a small pouch. In other words, we take 5% to 10% of your stomach
and we leave that connected. And everything else never sees food again.
That's number one. So what have we done when we've done that? We've actually made your stomach smaller
so you can't eat as much. And when you do eat and if you overeat, you're going to feel full.
You're going to listen to your body. And you're not going to eat quite as much. And over time, what happens is that you lose weight.
But that's not all of the story. There's more. The next thing we have to do is you
have to understand that the small intestine is actually responsible for absorbing all of these nutrients that you eat.
So what we want to do is to decrease the number of nutrients or the amount of nutrients
that are actually absorbed into your bloodstream. So how do we do that? Well, we have to bypass the normal route of intestines.
In other words, we have to take some of your intestines out of the loop. In other words, the food never sees
that part of the intestine. There's something called the jejunum and the ileum. And we actually go down, and these
are part of your small intestines, and we divide that a certain distance away from your stomach. And once we divide it, then we can bring up the loop here
and connect it to your new stomach so now when you eat food, it goes into your new stomach, the small pouch, it goes into the shortened intestinal tract,
and guess what, you can't eat as much and you can't absorb as much. And then you start losing weight.
So this is how we technically go about doing this. And once we're finished, we have to now reconnect the intestines
farther down so that everything flows thoroughly. So we don't take anything out of your body.
We leave you with what God gave you. But then we have a new pathway for your food that's shorter.
weight management
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