You’d be forgiven for thinking the Aspire Assist is an unusually biting piece of satire targeting the medical industry. A tube that sucks food out of your stomach to keep you from getting fat? This is a Silicon Valley thing, right? Maybe Saturday Night Live? Nope. It’s real. And in fact, the FDA just approved it for human use.
Created by Aspire Bariatrics, the Aspire Assist is basically the last resort of portion control. You have a tube installed in your stomach, with a port on your skin to slot a tube into. After a meal at which you may have consumed too much, you fill a bag with drinking water, slot it into the pump, and suck the food out. It goes out of your stomach and into the toilet, just skipping a few steps in the typical way one conducts this process. You can then pump water into your stomach and repeat the process, if you so desire.
Needless to say, this is pretty much the very last resort when it comes to weight loss. Installing a plastic tube into your body is a dangerous process with serious long-term risks, and should only done in the most extreme cases, for the people with serious gastrointestinal or psychiatric issues that render all other methods ineffective. We’re sure that’s not going to stop somebody healthy from getting one installed anyway, but hopefully when people are presented with the option of the food removal pump or learning about portion control, they choose the latter.
(via CNBC)
