A recent article in The New York Times Magazine profiled a 16 year-old girl with severe obesity who underwent bariatric surgery at a children’s hospital in Texas. In January 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a clinical practice guideline that suggested referring all children 13 years and older with a body mass index (BMI) greater than or equal to 120% of the 95th percentile for age and sex for bariatric surgery evaluations. Although only a tiny fraction of eligible U.S. adolescents undergo surgery, the number of procedures increased from fewer than 800 in 2016 to 1,349 in 2021 . (In comparison, more than 200,000 adults had bariatric surgery in 2021.) In an editorial in the October issue of American Family Physician, Dr. Kathryn McKenna and I analyzed the quality and quantity of evidence supporting the AAP guideline recommendations. Notably, few studies have evaluated short-term outcomes of the most commonly performed metabolic surgery procedures in adoles...