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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

why can't a weight loss treatment be created harnessing a similar effect . dial down the pancreases so food does not digest as well

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Trying to mess with any part of the metabolism is going to have consequences.

You can even take a more direct route and make the body just burn more energy. Works perfectly well, technically doesn't have any side effects, though you have to take into account that burning energy results in heat.

And in all cases homeostasis is just going to attempt to return to normal as soon as possible. You need to somehow break the loop of your body wanting more energy to maintain its weight. This is a lot trickier because the checks and balances are everywhere and affect everything.

Very glad we have eg CSIRO comparing how well various methods overcome that homeostasis and publishing their results.

Successful weight loss has been totally life-changing for me, and being able to access reliable info on what works long term was a key part of it.

The real pay-off of weight loss is later in life when your joints and tendons will not be worn to bits.

And less likely to break bones (butttttttt (pun intended?) less padding against impact). So maybe that part's a draw.

> You can even take a more direct route and make the body just burn more energy. Works perfectly well, technically doesn't have any side effects, though you have to take into account that burning energy results in heat.

Historically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol .

Most weight loss treatments have terrible side-effects. GLP-1 is working pretty well as a target now, but all the other ideas didn't turn out so simple after all, and there were a lot of ideas for weight loss drugs

so does obesity have bad side effects. we need more answers. GLP -1 is a good start

In my opinion orlistat (blocks fat absorption) isn't that bad if you actually follow the suggested low-fat diet. But if you're hoping to counteract a pint of ice cream, it's going to work tooooo well. The Public Relations was a nightmare... never stood a chance. The jokes were too good.

Acarbose blocks starch (and sucrose, to some extent) absorption. Instead of oily poop you get dry smelly gas that hopefully goes down over time. Starch & sucrose is not as big a part of American caloric intake as fat, but it can still help cut some of that out.

(Just sucrose. HFCS has glucose and fructose, which means sucrase doesn't need to work. Not a meaningful difference in most people considering how fast sucrase works, but when you block sucrase...)

Better idea: Focus on eating high nutrition, low cal foods (relatively speaking). Skip or limit the empty calories.

If you have CF, you become seriously ill in part because you are effectively seriously malnourished. I suspect many overweight people are also effectively malnourished and don't know it because their body turns the empty calories into fat.

if this actually worked, why so so many dieters fail? if this works so well, someone could make a diet program out of it, it would be super-effective and would sell billions. obviously easier said than done.

high nutrition, low cal foods (relatively speaking)

this is sorta contradictory. calories are nutrition.

From what I gather, dieters frequently count calories rather than tracking nutrients. If you are already deficient and try to limit your intake of food and it worsens your deficiency, at some point you are likely to spaz and stuff your face in desperation.

physics work

therefore diets work

Except there are some weird feedback loops in the body, such as restricting calories leading to reduced calorie consumption, leading to less weight loss than expected.

no. literally conservation of energy. humans cannot beak the laws of nature. calories in > calories out

The issue is this is like nicking an engine oil tube to decrease the car mileage. In principle it could work but you really need to nick the right tube at the right place. We have been nicking things everywhere for decades but finally with glp-1 and sglt2 inhibitors we found the right ones. A bit serendipitously.

Cystic fibrosis clogs the pancreatic ducts, which eventually causes irreversible damage to that organ. Because of that, many CF patients also develop diabetes. Sounds like a terrible way to downregulate the pancreas.

Terrible side effects.

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