We thank de Gara and colleagues’ for their letter.1 Given the high prevalence of adult overweight and obesity in Canada, there was an urgent need to review evidence for primary care, the core focus of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care recommendations.2
We did not misrepresent the benefits of bariatric surgery: bariatric surgery is effective for the treatment of severe obesity and we did not state otherwise.
Rather, in the associated systematic treatment review in CMAJ Open3 we specifically excluded bariatric surgery from consideration.