The Year of Ozempic
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
More recently, I've lost about 25lbs on Mounjaro in two months. Zero effort. I was (quite literally) losing weight in my sleep.
I never felt full/satiated before in my life eating normally before starting Ozempic. Now I understand what it means to be satiated. I wonder if this is why it was easy for me to gain and hard for me to lose weight.
These drugs will be game-changers for many Americans. I think they are the solution to the obesity crisis. Now the big question: is it all priced into the stock already?
Being able to just lose weight while maintaining a healthy relationship with food is going is going to be a night and day generational shift for women.
Not sure what this drug would do. I’ve heard it curbs appetites but if I curb my appetite anymore, I’m not eating at all.
Obviously that’s not sustainable so I’ve leveled out and work out less because life.
Frankly speaking, while I enjoy the weight loss, it's not healthy at this rate. This is probably just a dosage issue. Still, I can't imagine a drug that curbs appetite would be good for someone that already doesn't eat much.
My wife has been worried about her mental acuity declining over the last few years and I kept saying I felt like the diabetes was taking a toll on her brain. Perhaps it was? And perhaps it's slowly reversing a bit?
Last year my wife got the “you need to lose weight now or else” speech from her doctor. Diabetic signs starting to appear in her numbers. I was terrified for her.
12 months of Wegovy and she is down 52 pounds, and all diabetic signs have disappeared. Her doctor is thrilled.
And, (not that this matters much to me) her looking like a million bucks is a nice bonus too.
Losing weight when body has extra fat to cushion caloric deficit can improve a bunch of indicators, for me it's eliminate acid reflux -> better sleep -> less fatigue more sharpness. Losing weight without much fat can do the opposite when body feels full brunt of deficit. Worse sleep, more fatigue, less accuity. I wonder with how accessible these drugs are going to be, if general productivity is going to crash leading up to summer beach bod weather as more people cycles on and off every year.
My first fear is that these psychological side effects are going to be more impactful in the long term than any physical side effects.
My other and more immediate fear is that we don't know the full ramifications of what "reduced impulsivity" actually means. Does that mean you're going to seek out dopamine less? Does that mean you won't enjoy your hobbies as much? Does that mean you're going to be slightly less motivated to work on that satisfying side project or startup? Does that mean you'll be slightly less desirous to fix tha one extra bug which otherwise might be so very satisfying and will drive your project forward?
Obesity in Females: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
Obesity in Males: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
(graphs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States )
"Trends in obesity among children and adolescents ages 2–19 years, by age: United States, 1963–1965 through 2017–2018": https://www.niddk.nih.gov/-/media/Images/Health-Information/... (from https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti... )
Cable TV started growing as did Satellite TV
The baby boomers started coming of age
We started piling up mountains of debt government, commercial and consumer
As a society we started to party, it hasn’t stopped since, people are so stupid rich that they support several multi billion dollar corporations which do nothing but ferry food someone else makes to your grubby little paws. To add insult to injury they charge service fees, and markup menu items and on top of all that you have to tip the driver. you spend 2x the cost of the food to get it delivered half cold and soggy.
This is all normal and celebrated even, and then we wonder why everyone is overweight
A lot of people miss the fact that GLP-1 agonists have been on the market for 13 years. That’s still relatively young in drug terms, but not nearly as young as some of the GLP-1 critics would suggest. Just because you didn’t hear about it until last year doesn’t mean it’s a brand new drug without a track record.
That said, these also aren’t quite as free of side effects as some people want to think. For most, the minor side effects are more than worth the benefits of significantly reduced body weight. I do worry about the people who are using these to drop weight and then throwing all caution to the wind with the content of their diet, though. There’s more to eating healthy than body weight, and I’ve watched a few close friends go from planning their diet to eating pure junk and fast food because their GLP-1 agonist will keep their body weight in check. That’s not a problem with the drug, though. These people would be eating junk food if they were “naturally” skinny too.
I might have been thinking that I could just do whatever at the start, but I’ve drifted into eating more healthily because it’s what tastes and feels good to eat. Even nominally healthy packaged food tastes more like ash, while things cooked from whole ingredients taste better than ever. My experience is that I find myself enjoying food more and making better choices than before.
I’m sure your friends will have their own experiences and relationships with food that may differ from mine, but how people behave when they are freed from their constant hunger may surprise you.
Regarding social reasons for overconsumption - this drug makes you totally full with small servings. Even in social settings you will not overconsume unless you fancy throwing up.
She's been very consistent in going to the gym and has seen some good results. But it does require a lot of motivation and effort.
She's tempted to ask our GP about Ozempic, but also afraid of unknown risks that comes with going off-label.
My opinion is that she should continue in the old-fashioned-way because it's been working well, not just for weight-loss, but also as an escape from childcare.
But now seeing people lose weight very much faster than her, I almost see her lose the motivation to do it the old-fashioned way. Some of her gym friends are on it, and so is a daily reminder for her.
So I am a bit mixed on this. We're also planning to have another child soonish, so unsure if this even factors in.
I am worried that collectively, the world has gone a bit too fast in using this for minor weight-loss.
For folks who are risking health complications due to obesity and yet still struggle to achieve meaningful weight loss, this can be an acceptable tradeoff. Especially considering the increased life expectancy. The health benefits of being in a normal weight range can't be overstated.
But if you're "not overweight", or are fortunate enough to make progress through diet and exercise, you probably don't want to be taking this for the rest of your life. It's not cheap and there can be side effects.
And if you're not planning to take it for the rest of your life, there's no point.
Not necessarily. When you get to the target weight, you don't need to go straight from the dose you are on to zero, you can, and probably should, lower the dose little by little, just like you raised the dose at the beginning of the regimen. If you are at 2mg, you first go to 1mg, see if your weight is stable, then if it is, go to 0.5 mg, then 0.25 mg. In the near future there will be oral versions of the GLP-1 antagonists, to you will be able to fine-tune even more precisely the dose, for example, you could figure if you can skip some days.
The body has some "weight memory". But I heard this memory disappears after about 10 years. If you take Ozempic for 2 years, go in very low dose maintenance mode for 8 years, and then stop taking it, but keep an eye to see if you need to start again, what other dieting option offers you this type of choice?
I do think they'll probably be available eventually, but I don't think it's as trivial a problem to solve as you're implying.
I'm at the age where I'm attending a ton of weddings, and many of the brides and grooms go on Ozempic for a few months before the wedding, fully acknowledging they'll probably gain all the weight back afterward (despite their best efforts to keep it off!)
The weight loss may not be permanent, but it's a day where most people are probably photographed and recorded more than any other day in their lives, and those captured images are indeed pregnant. The added stress and hectic nature of planning a large wedding makes it quite difficult to diet, exercise, and lose weight the natural way as well (I imagine).
How is it that once you stop taking everything reverts?
In response, your body secretes more hormones, so you take more GLP-1 drugs. Increase until you reach a stable balance that adequately controls the hunger.
Now, when you stop taking the GLP-1 drugs, you have a flood of surplus hunger hormones... and the hunger comes back with a vengeance. Plus, you probably haven't learned any effective coping skills for dealing with that hunger while taking the drug - so you're likely to revert to old lifestyle practices.
Or at least that's my understanding. The endocrine system is complicated. However, mechanism aside, the data is clear that people regain the weight once they stop. There's a relevant study here:
https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.147...
If your body is telling you 24/7 that you're hungry, it's very hard to ignore that drive - it's literally one of our most basic hardwired instincts. Even more so if you have a particularly stressful life or get poor sleep, which also feeds into the hormone issues.
So yes, it is always "calories in - calories out"... but unless you're willing to lock people in a lab and have a third-party control the diet, you also have to consider the mental and biological factors that drive how many calories people's bodies are seeking out.
Diet and exercise do work for some people, and is always the best option when it works. But we also know from decades of failed diets that they do not work for many people - lifestyle modification has a terrible success rate.
Trying to ignore being hungry it is a poor strategy. The solution is to to make peace with the sensation of hunger.
I do think most obesity should be treated as a mental health issue rather than a physical health issue.
The issue isn't that the person is obese - that's the symptom. The issue is that they're overheating. "What's driving me to overeat?" is the question they need to be asking themselves, and that answer will be the first piece of the puzzle.
Most obese people became obese in childhood. In obese people, especially those from childhood that were forced to always clean their plate, signaling pathways for satiation tend to stop working, so consuming a "normal" amount of food becomes difficult. Furthermore, mechanisms for hunger in obesity function very similarly to mechanisms for cocaine or alcohol addiction.
Drugs like Ozempic finally allow their biological signals for "you've had enough food" to actually work, so obese people can lose weight because they feel satiated like normal people do.
FWIW I have lost weight both ways - 80lbs through sheer will, and 25lbs through Mounjaro. I vastly prefer the second. The former is the hardest thing I have ever done (or will likely ever do) in my life. It was harder than getting into a top college, harder than anything relating to my career, harder than literally any other endeavor I've taken. It is definitely unreasonable to expect the average person to expend so much extreme mental effort when alternatives exist to become healthy.
I was SO hungry, it was indeed one of my dominant thoughts other than wanting to kill myself (or distract myself with hot hand warmers in between puking). It virtually never truly went away, other than when I was distracted by even worse senations.
What I then struggle to understand is why my obese and well-off father with a LOT of free time can't make the decision to stop eating fast food, can't consistently stick with not buying presumably very immediately gratifying and pleasurable fast food that often makes him feel sick later. Why I could actually have made radical changes to my diet years before I ever had that level of extreme suffering, or consistently rejected taking any opioids or weed even when my tolerances were probably more reset 1 or 2 weeks in and they could've provided substantial short-term escape from that hell.
I ask in this manner not to try to "brag", as if there's some achievement in meaningless and random suffering, but rather to ask about and understand how you might interpet it. I feel like I've experienced severe and truly engulfing hunger + pain. Coming out of that, I don't understand why some people can't escape the "addiction" of overeating unhealthy food, let alone too much of it, and others can escape the throes of drug dependency.
What could be so alien about someone like me compared against my own father, as opposed to his being in an active refusal to try?
Ultimately, it all seems to me like the issue isn't one of avoiding pain so much as refusing not to experience constant cheap pleasure, and yet given the same opportunities of similar constant cheap pleasures I've mostly avoided them in seeing the longer term pain lying in wait behind their facade. I feel as though the only definitive observation I can make there is that most obese people can't seem to see their condition similarly. They can get hyped up selling themselved and those around them a meme "diet plan" while its easy in their mind, but once it comes time to do the hard work of rejecting harmful habits all the cheap fun imagining the future disappears and they quit, simply ignoring all the downsides by trying to embrace even more pleasure.
Well, addiction is a difficult thing. Most people with a serious addiction will never be able to overcome it. A small number of people will have the willpower to get through the withdrawal and engulfing suffering related to it.
> it all seems to me like the issue isn't one of avoiding pain so much as refusing not to experience constant cheap pleasure
People that are addicted to food, cocaine, or alcohol don't want to be addicted to it. They hate their constant urges. When I was at my worst I didn't want to eat the food I was eating. But fighting that urge requires a monumental amount of willpower people often simply don't have. It's not a "willpower deficiency" just as we wouldn't call a normal person willpower-deficient if they couldn't kick a cocaine addiction.
> once it comes time to do the hard work of rejecting harmful habits all the cheap fun imagining the future disappears and they quit, simply ignoring all the downsides by trying to embrace even more pleasure.
Yeah, they give up - which to me is completely unsurprising given how hard losing weight and kicking that addiction is for some people. See, given how addicted you are to food, a diet plan could range from merely "hard work" to "so ridiculously hard that your psychology can't handle it".
This is why I think medicines like Ozempic are critical. They enable you to lose weight without needing to exercise Herculean feats of willpower if you are very addicted to food (especially if you have been since childhood.)
Exercising the willpower to not eat when you're hungry is only a Herculean effort if you've stopped exercising it regularly for a long time.
At any given moment, we might have multiple conflicting desires (e.g. "I want to eat this pizza," and "I want to lose weight"), and it takes a lot of mental practice to be able notice when this is happening, and take a moment to identify which of your wants are base urges and which are real, higher-order desires, then align your actions with the higher-order ones. Meditation helps, and for those that really struggle with exercising executive function, therapy can help as well. But it takes a lot of practice and sustained effort. Habits change quite slowly and most of the work of losing weight is building the right mental frameworks so that you can start changing habits. Trying to brute force weight loss is like trying to swim the English channel with no training - you're going to fail and might hurt or even traumatize yourself in the process, which will make it even harder if you try again later.
Medication does work and it has its place, but because it comes with side effects and does not resolve the underlying mental issues that are driving the addictive behavior, I really do feel it should be a last resort for the most serious cases of addiction, not the first line of attack. It's possible you and I may agree on this point, but many don't, and refusing to acknowledge that obesity is primarily a psychological issue is doing more harm than good.
Addiction mechanics play a role here. It's not just willpower, it's willpower minus addiction. The second variable is absolutely massive, it snowballs over time, and it's why addiction treatments often have more interventions than just willpower.
As such, it's a thousand times more difficult for an obese person to "simply not eat" than it is for a normal person to "simply not eat." To the normal person, not addicted to food, it might seem simple, like the obese person simply lacks willpower, but in the obese person's shoes the normal person would likely end up the same way.
Hence, the obesity epidemic - it sneaks up on you.
I wonder what this is doing to our insurance premiums because it sure isn't cheap, but other than that, I say if you want to take it, then go for it. I probably would if the cost was reasonable.
Others will simply lie about their weight to their primary care, increasing it slightly to match the BMI bar.
Finally, some people will get the drug from compound pharmacies.
TL;DR - yes, it probably impacts premiums, but insurance companies are somewhat evil for attaching so many restrictions around a drug that every overweight person should have free access to.
It is frankly ridiculous that these companies have the power to get between a doctor and patient, and what the doctor deems medically necessary.
It will figure out your TDEE and give you the information you need to hit a particular rate of weight loss or gain.
Strength and endurance training now is still a great idea for the health benefits and for building her body up before the next pregnancy.
One of my friends, I would consider heavily overweight if not obese (I'm not sure what the specific definition is). The other was certainly heavier but not by anything I would consider crazy. She however was working out religiously and watching her food intake and still struggled. She admitted to using it and it helped kick start her journey.
My other friend (heavier one) took it to lose weight for a wedding. Dropped a lot of weight, but didn't work out or change eating habits, stopped taking it and gained weight back.
So long story, I would say it's fairly likely that some of your acquaintances are taking/using it.
If ozempic was $100/month or something like that, I’d probably go for it, but I was trying not to blow my high deductible health plan and that stuff is not cheap.
I assume prices will eventually fall via competition or generic which should be pretty cool for lots of people.
Here it is for $211 per month: https://www.farmaciasguadalajara.com/ProductDisplay?urlReque... though that’s only a deal if your insurance won’t cover it in the states.
I bet it’s not in stock.
In the end I didn't need Ozempic, I just started working out several times a week and holding myself accountable to my eating habits. I think for the majority of people diet and exercise is enough. But for those who need more help, even Oprah, it's a miracle drug.
On a population level, it has failed miserably. Sure, some can force themselves through the process, but that number is not that many.
As far as I understand it, in the wild for the majority of the people there’s very little evidence that obese people can diet and exercise themselves to a healthy weight. It just statistically doesn’t happen very often. For whatever reason, they need the hormone regulating drugs.
The fact is that the food we eat has evolved over time, and is too hard to resist overconsuming for a large fraction of our population. If we can create more addictive food, why not create antidotes? If we could easily treat alcohol addiction with a pill, would we tell alcoholics to just apply willpower instead?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539812/
If at best only one in fifty can do such a thing, when the entire world is screaming at them to do so then you must re evaluate your position that it’s about just making some changes and having it all work out. Becoming a normal weight is just not something that you can expect for most currently obese people to achieve. The facts were have seen do not support the idea that it’s something that people can knuckle down and do in the majority of cases.
Whether the causes are biological, social, or whatever it’s something that we have not been able to even slow down as a society yet. The article mentions the abject failure of decades of efforts from doctors, government and individuals that have lead only to greater rates of obesity.
Even these drugs won’t be enough, given the best results in studies only show something like a 20% loss after more than a year. For many obese people, that leaves them still obese but $15k poorer if their insurance doesn’t cover the drug.
If you managed to lose a bunch of weight, congrats. But the experience is not generalizable, unfortunately. It’s really not for lack of effort on anyone’s part.
The health benefits of losing that amount are enormous. In fact, they may get ~80% of the health benefits of a healthy fat percentage. Their blood pressure will plummet, their salt intake will drop, they’ll eat less sugar but more lean protein (it’s common to crave it). Because of this their blood work will improve and they’ll be at significantly lower risk of diabetes and heart disease etc. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the waaaay better!
I don’t think that being obese is a moral failing at all. But caloric deficit does result in weight loss.
Anyways, there are plenty of other benefits that come from exercise and a healthy diet, besides weight loss. Hopefully these drugs can be used as part of a more holistic improvement in lifestyle, and not as a sole treatment.
The thing that helped was a complete, week-long fast (I had 13 weeks of PTO per year so sacrifing 2 wasn't a huge deal then), that I prepared with my family (lot of them are either doctors or PT). The second day was worse than when I dislocated my ankle, except in my whole body, without the adrenalin/shock to help with the pain. The pain came in waves. Once that passed I was mostly fine, and the third day until the last I was mostly functioning (I tired easily, and couldn't work or really exercise, but I was mostly fine and could go out and walk).
If I knew those drug existed, I think I couldn't have passed that second day, and taken those instead.
Talking about things that are feasibly solved with willpower as if they should be achievable because people ought to be able to willpower their way through any plausible challenge is just bullshit. The world is full of people who are so eager to say that they did it ergo everyone else is just being lazy. But just… shut up. Everyone has different circumstances. Things that are very mentally hard are very mentally hard and we don’t need to pretend otherwise. It’s complete bullshit and moral high grounding. It’s not helpful in the slightest. It’s not an easy way out. It’s a way out.
After 5 years of vigilance the mental and social toll was just too much and I gradually let down my guard within about 3 years I was up 50+lbs.
So now 10 years on it's corner cutting because there's a medical intervention that can help or just weakness because I can't find the will to do it to myself and people around me all over again?
Not helpful.
Telling people who've lost weight through willpower to just shut up is rude and unhelpful.
I lost 90 lbs through diet and exercise. When I say that others could do what I did - which is true for many - I often get people asking me for advice, which I give. What's wrong with that?
So good job. But shut up. Whatever rudeness you feel from me saying shut up is FAR less rude and unhelpful than the poor people you’re telling to “power through it” who are certain that they cannot. Because you are implicitly calling them weak. And that’s fucked up.
Because for the third time, it might be MUCH harder for them to lose weight than you.
You can't see how presumptuous and rude this is? And how weak you are presuming all of these people are? Treating them as if they have no agency and they cannot handle hearing someone else's life experience.
While I don't doubt for many people it would be harder to lose weight than it was for me, you also have no idea how hard it was for me to lose weight. So what? Other people like me exist.
I lost weight by listening to other people who lost weight and learning from their experience, and I'm available to do the same for others. Why you think this is "fucked up" and demand I shut up is just bizarre.
If people want your advice on diet and exercise they can ask for it. Otherwise, I trust they know it’s an option
1. There will always be parents/guardians that are unable to teach this - That's why the education and children arm of government exists.
2. Ignorance IS an excuse here (people can't know that they don't know, if they don't even know that they SHOULD know!)
3. Even if we were to clamp down on unhealthy food advertising etc., our bodies still crave sugar binging etc. So regardless of success in that area, state education is still the keystone.
But that's it... I just don't know where to go from there. Is state education getting better at teaching these life skills over time? (Personal finance too, while we are at it). Are there things I could be doing to amplify this message? Is this the correct angle, even?
Congratulations on such a massive achievement by the way!
State sex education has been saturating youth in all the sex related artificial interventions while treating self-control as unrealistic at best and religious nonsense at worst. When do you think we’ll get an eruption of stoic self denial virtue from the state?
Not sure what nation's syllabus you refer to though, I would guess that it is USA based
(edited because my wording seemed weird and pointed)
There’s no need to bring gender ideology into this, the analogy is perfectly valid just referring to prophylaxis, hormonal medication, implants, and abortion. Those are commonly taught in schools around the globe.
I'm pro-sex-ed but not sure what that looks like in your locale.
What? US sex education advice is to be forceful and rapey because 'guys can't control themselves' or any other bullshit reason like this?
Being nauseous is a very effective appetite killer
Since these are not fda approved, you will most likely get turned down by your primary doctor if you start asking about them. HRT clinics seem to be leading the way to trying these out. FYI - generic semaglutide is very cheap if you get it via HRT clinic as opposed to name brand and pre-mixed ozempic.
Years ago people started with great enthusiasm and then slowly realized that the effects over the long term aren’t always predictable. Some of these compounds make people feel great in the first few doses and then the negatives only appear much later. There are numerous stories of people getting burned out or stuck in long-lasting depressive states following experimentation, but they’re often waved away as contamination or blamed on something else they were taking.
Mainstream influencers like Huberman are now flirting with these chemicals after they’ve run out of interesting basic content to talk about for 3 hours on a weekly podcast. I’d caution anyone listening to the likes of Huberman to be extremely cautious about influencers who only tell the positives with a minimal caution to CYA and a wink wink suggestion that you don’t use them. The same story has been playing out for decades with fitness influencers and new chemicals, and every generation has had their too good to be true moment where the newest chemicals were assumed to be free of side effects.
Regardless, my comment along with everyone else’s comment on this topic is UGC content. It is ones own responsibility to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.
Compounding pharmacies are good too.
We're being told that people are healthy at any size. So why sell people Ozempic?
How is it okay to encourage weight loss with an expensive and possibly (likely) harmful drug, but not okay to encourage weight loss with a sensible diet?
Is being overweight a bad or a good thing? Despite all of the research, that part is unclear.
Literally nobody in the medical community is saying this. Obesity is unequivocally bad for your longevity.
There is a healthy range, which is a little fuzzy. Some people are healthy at a slightly heavier build, and we know there's some flaws in the way the BMI calculation works for certain groups of individuals. However, there is still always a point where you are medically obese and health problems begin.
It absolutely kills people. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes. There's some studies that suggest it might even be a causal factor for Alzheimers.
> How is it okay to encourage weight loss with an expensive and possibly (likely) harmful drug, but not okay to encourage weight loss with a sensible diet?
First, weight loss through diet and exercise is certainly encouraged. The exercise is intrinsically good for you. Improving your diet is intrinsically good for you. The weight loss adds even more benefits on top of that. If this works for someone, that's literally perfect.
However, diet and exercise clearly do not work for many people. Lifestyle modification is hard, for a whole lot of reasons... some social, some biological. We know this as fact.
If diet and exercise fail, then using drugs to combat the biological (hormonal) drivers of obesity is the current second-line option. And even if there's some side effects, the overall increase in life expectancy makes it worth it.
> Is being overweight a bad or a good thing? Despite all of the research, that part is unclear.
Medically, it's very bad. The research is very clear.
Now, that said, if somebody's overweight they should still feel good about themselves as a person. Shifting the conversation from "you're overweight because you're not good enough, and you should feel bad about yourself" (which is both bad for mental health and counterproductive) to "you're overweight because obesity is a disease, not a personal failing - and the fitness+medical community is here to help you be a better you" is a much better approach.
This is disingenuous . Healthy at any size and body positivity are both significant movements with noticeable media campaigns on commercials, TV news, social media. Dismissing the confusing messaging is only adding to the confusion.
American's don't absorb messaging through scientific journals, their beliefs are first distilled through the above media channels. Plus there are plenty of bogus journals pushing "healthy at any size" and "body positivity"
Is being fat good or bad? If it's bad enough to take a drug, then we should also encourage other ways to discourage it.
Just because people don't diet, doesn't mean it's hard to do. People do a lot of unhealthy things where choosing the better alternative is just as easy.
Who told you this? Where are you getting your news from?
If you're not noticing this messaging, I would ask where you are getting your news from.
> an adolescent who has been mercilessly bullied for her weight arrives in an emergency department with suicidal thoughts
No one is quite sure why obesity has become such a problem, but I'll give you several hypotheses all with reasonable mechanisms, and each with at least some data for you to argue about.
All of these things have changed in the last 100 years.
- Base metabolic rates have declined. We burn fewer calories doing nothing. Body temperatures are lower. No one is sure of the cause, it might be downstream from one of these other ones.
- We are more sedentary.
- Antibiotics have caused extinction of gut microbes, which were previously endemic, and passed through the maternal line.
- We take seeds, heat them up to extract oil, and put that oil in pretty much everything. This has significantly shifted the kind of fat in the food supply.
Despite endless diet and fitness apps/trackers and content on social media, as well as the rise of the so-called health-conscious consumer, there is no evidence to suggest anything is improving. Why people got so fat is up to debate, but this is where we're at, and we need these drugs more than ever. People's metabolisms are broken or something. Or small caloric surpluses over a decade leads to obesity. Regaining weight is ridiculously easy for formerly obese people, too.
There's some interest in GLP-1 receptor agonists as IBS _treatments_, specifically for pain relief in IBS-C and IBS-M, though it's way too early to talk about meaningfully.[3][4]
1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2810542
2: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/makers-ozempic-mo...
How many times have I heard someone complain about the weird things we spend our research dollars on?
You just never know what discovery or insight is out there, so we have to go look everywhere. Remember this the next time we’re voting to cut research dollars on some gross bug in a jungle you’ve never heard of.
It saddens me the number of folks on this planet that completely disregard animals and plants that they don’t get immediate enjoyment or sustenance from.