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Comment by olegious | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads up “weight loss” is a poor metric if it comes at the cost of lean muscle mass. It seems that 39% of weight loss associated with Ozempic comes from lean muscle mass which isn’t great.

https://peterattiamd.com/the-downside-of-glp-1-receptor-agon...

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When you diet to lose weight you lose lean muscle too unless you exercise to minimize it. What's the lean muscle mass loss from just dieting? I would guess that it's a relatively large number too.

I’m generally skeptical of pharmaceutical weight loss solutions as a bandaid over the underlying problem, but for this statement to mean anything you’d have to compare it to traditional methods of weight loss.

If you simply eat at a calorie deficit and aren’t taking specific steps to preserve muscle (resistance training and high protein), a lot of the weight you lose will be muscle mass.

But the people most in need of the intervention are also the ones least likely to take those muscle-preserving steps.

And if you can get them to take those steps, the need for the drug decreases.

Though a certain amount of lean loss is inevitable with significant weight reduction (usually about 25% of total weight loss), the goal is to increase the body’s overall proportion of lean mass – in other words, to improve body composition.

lean loss does not mean muscle loss

There's no shortage of people debunking that charlatan.

https://twitter.com/MichaelAlbertMD/status/16470364172503040...

Why do you think Peter Attia is a charlatan? Out of all these longevity & health influencers he seems most realistic & knowledgeable.

In 2020, Diabetologia published a body composition analysis of 88 volunteers with type 2 diabetes who used semaglutide for one year. These participants lost an average of 12.5 pounds. Of that weight loss, there was a 7.5-pound reduction in fat mass and a 5-pound reduction in lean mass.

In 2021, a major trial of semaglutide’s weight loss potency examined the body composition of a minority of participants. These patients did not have diabetes, and they took a much larger dose of the drug. The 95 participants to undergo a body scan lost an average of 18 pounds of fat — and 12 pounds of lean mass.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6997246/

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