Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer's risk in people with Type 2 diabetes
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Semaglutide is one specific drug within the class of GLP-1 agonists. Other examples include Liraglutide (Victoza, Saxenda), Dulaglutide (Trulicity), and Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, though this is technically a dual GIP/GLP-1 agonist).
Semaglutide is available under several brand names for different uses: Ozempic (type 2 diabetes), Wegovy (weight management), and Rybelsus (oral form for type 2 diabetes).
The number of things it apparently just cures is staggering.
Lol. I can think of dozens of worse things. Drinking. Cocaine addiction. Meth. Winding up in prison for some reason. Riding a motorcycle without a proper helmet. Getting into a plane flown by Harrison Ford. Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems. Ever looked up the average life expectancy of professional athletes, especially the NFL? It isn't great.
Being obese is probably worse for you. NAFLD has long eclipsed alcohol related liver issues.
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Even treated HIV is probably less of a risk to your long term health than obesity, but I'm not a doctor.
> Cocaine addiction. Meth
OK, yes, there are illegal drugs that are going to be worse for you than being fat.
I'll rephrase:
Being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself that affects a huge portion of the population of the western world.
Very very few people are riding motorcycles without a helmet, even fewer are getting into planes flown by harrison ford, only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the population even has the option of being a professional athlete.
Ozempic treats all of those too.
GLP-1 solves this too
> Cocaine addiction
GLP-1 solves this
> Meth
GLP-1 solves this
> Prison ... no helmet
Okay, GLP-1 don't solve these but these aren't medical issues. This is just danger
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Mmm... not really. People overblow this. Pretty much all STIs are completely harmless to your health if treated. One shot of penicillin and you're good to go. Your average flu is probably much worse than syphilis or chlamydia. HIV is the "biggest" risk, but HIV doesn't even impact your lifespan anymore.
DNP is an extremely effective drug for weight loss, but no one who knows anything about how it works would think that it would be reasonable to compare it to the GLP-1s, and anyone who knows how it works would also plainly see the dangers around its use.
GLP-1 type drugs have been on the market for decades now as well, and while they are not perfectly safe, we've got a good amount of data around the short to medium term side effects.
We have the data.
And I don't care about votes up or down. But I appreciate your theory on how they're playing out!
One of the most commonly consumed drugs on the planet seems to indicate there is no such thing - caffeine in reasonable quantities is tolerated by the overwhelming majority of human beings and research indicates that even outside of the stimulant effects that humans use it for, it is beneficial. We have significant evidence that caffeine in the 100-400mg per day range decreases risk of heart disease and stroke, and smaller but still compelling evidence that it is protective against diabetes.
Irregular use does seem to cause a small increase in heart rate and blood pressure, but this fades in the overwhelming majority of users as they make the usage more regular.
Too much can cause adverse outcomes, such as anxiety, and in some people timing might be important for maintaining sleep quality, but the vast majority of us would see positive impact from consuming a cup or two of coffee in the morning with little to no concern around side effects.
I think this is the part where the argument falls apart, though. My relationship with food is vastly different now than it was when I was a teenager or in the front half of my 20s. It was easy for me to eat a healthy amount of food and exercise. I never struggled with it. It didn't take any particular amount of willpower to avoid overeating. I even was able to fairly easily bulk and cut because I was focused fairly heavily on lifting weights - the bulking was harder for me than the cutting!
But as I got busier with other aspects of my life, it became easier and easier to just grab some fast food, or swap over to eating almost entirely uber eats during the pandemic. Before I realized it, it was suddenly very hard to eat less. It was still possible - I would lose weight, manage my eating, exercise, etc. - but something would always happen that caused me to lose track and backslide. A huge project at work, a bad breakup, tearing my meniscus while lifting. But all of these attempts took significant effort and willpower from me, something that I had never struggled with before. It wasn't my metabolism slowing down - I was always hungry in a way that I had never faced when I was a slimmer person, and fighting it caused significant impact to my mood, ability to focus, stress levels, etc. Tirzepatide has put my relationship with food and hunger back to being much closer to how it was when I was younger.
There are tons of feedback loops that are well documented that makes it more and more difficult to lose weight once you've put it on and kept it on for a while. It's certainly true that there's no magical situation where people can eat fewer calories than they use and not lose weight, but for a huge amount of people, these GLP-1 medications are a far simpler solution.
> Hope it works out for everyone and it's a smashing success!
Me too!
You're grossly underestimating the problem.
40+% of the population are obese.
This isn't just a few pounds to lose. This is 60, 70, 100lbs.
The task is to lose the weight forever.
For which long term weight loss success numbers are abysmal.
For me, a month in on 2.5, I was still struggling to force myself to eat enough. Zero need to move up. Some people don't feel anything at all until they're on 7.5mg, though.
There's also a lot of people seeing better success with smaller doses more frequently, too. Instead of moving up to 5mg, I'm doing 2mg every 3-4 days. Loss is still steady and I'm not seeing any indication I'll need to bump up any time soon.
- Higher rates of cardiovascular disease
- Type 2 diabetes
- Sleep apnea and breathing problems
- Osteoarthritis due to excess pressure on joints
- Multiple types of cancers (colon, breast, endometrial)
- Depression and anxiety from social stigma
- Reduced mobility and quality of life
- Higher medical costs (~$1,429 more annually per person)[1]
- Decreased workplace productivity
- Shorter life expectancy (can reduce by 5-10 years)
Oh no wait, sorry, those are the effects of obesity.
We already know the side-effects of the alternative because Western society as a whole has been living them.
It's bad. The obesity epidemic causes pretty much everything bad. This drug doesn't just solve one thing, it solves hundreds or thousands of things all at once.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/does-exenatide-lower-or-ext...
We already know what can go wrong.
We already did that decades and decades ago. Sugar, for example. Aside from so many foods being laced with it, you can now simply walk into a store and buy a kilogram of sugar and eat it. So many other examples. That ship sailed a long long time ago. All we can do now is nudge the dial the other way.
This style of condescension does grow tiring.
He's saying we already have completely fucked our reward system.
That's why 75%+ of American are literally eating themselves to death. And they can't stop. And no, "discipline" isn't a solution.
If anything, I'd say Ozempic brings our reward systems to be more in line with modern reality. Monkey brain doesn't work when you have the unhealthiest food available constantly at your finger tips.
Regardless of your stance on anything, it should be obvious we have a HUGE problem. I'm sorry, but a "do nothing and hope it works" approach is now off the table. We need real, tangible solutions. Not moral grandstanding.
You aren't making compelling points by pretending the OPs are stating things they are not.
Purchasing NN Would cost roughly 0.2 Iraq wars.
The EU loves to ransom US tech companies for budget money. It's very clear that this is an opportunity for the US to similarly damage a big EU company by threatening its patents in the US, or otherwise hitting Novo for tens of billions of dollars in ransom money. The US market is by a huge margin the most important drug market in the world, and especially for Novo.
Find an abusive excuse to invalidate their patents if all else fails. Let Europe learn a valuable lesson in trade wars.
I have been reading obsessively about this drug since going on it. I have been fortunate enough not to suffer side effects on it, save for one -- frustration with the cynicism around it. A cynicism I shared prior to experiencing its effects.
I am convinced that, barring any life threatening long term side effects, this is the most important drug of our lifetime (from a first world perspective) or until a silver bullet cancer drug is found. The potential to be the tide that lifts so many boats and alleviates so much physical and emotional pain and suffering on a population level is almost overwhelming to think about.
It reminds me of the British reaction to the famine in Ireland - the good ministers were concerned about the moral health of the Irish. If they were provided with charity food, it would be a terrible tragedy if they became dependent. Just let them starve to death, with a clean soul.
The strange thing about GLP-1s effect on my desire to drink is how it manifests: I just don't care about drinking. I actually _could_ drink and be fine I think, I haven't tested it. I don't go through life with the burden of the knowledge of my own addiction. I don't have to be vigilant about triggers and self-assess my actions. I just don't drink.
I noticed that I did not want to drink the day after my first shot. It was that fast. If anything the closest I came to drinking came from routine, not desire. That is to say, what is an afternoon watching football if not with a beer in hand? But I was able to move past that.
One thing I should make clear, no matter how heavy a drinker I have been at times in my life, including with liquor, I have never had a physical addiction. A person deep in the throws of physical addiction will need to approach this carefully.
If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading this newsletter: https://recursiveadaptation.com/
There is a lot of great writing on this subject and some real world testimonies in there. Also happy to answer any more questions here.
My sleep has been pretty hosed up since I started but it wasn't like it was great before. I am also probably suffering from sleep apnea and I'm hoping to address that soon as I probably have another 4-6 months at the current weight loss rate before I am at a normal BMI.
Edit: oh, I see you describe it elsewhere in the thread. Thank you for sharing.
There's the rub. We have not been prescribing semaglutide very long, and I won't trust it until we've had enough time to suss out long term side effects.
My father was on a long-term maintenance dose of immunosuppressant (I think prednisolone, but I could be misremembering) following his kidney transplant. When it was first prescribed to him, the long term side effects were either not known at all or not widely known. By the time these side effects were more widely known, it was too late, as he was already losing his vision (cataracts) and mobility (cartilage was being destroyed). He spent his last few years in pain.
I am very cautious about the potential for damaging long-term side effects.
We've been prescribing GLP-1s for almost 20 years now. Not to say they all should behave identically, but from a Bayesian inference perspective these things really do appear to be quite safe.
This adds literally zero information.
It occurs in a small number of patients, sure, but maybe that just means I am more risk averse than you. My calculus is simple. I don't need wegovy. I can lose (and am losing) weight without it. Sure, it would be easier with wegovy, but it is not necessary. I am not going to take an unnecessary drug that has a nonzero chance of killing me.
Excellent! A huge chunk of people try and fail to do this for a wide variety of reasons.
If you can lose weight without the help of a GLP-1 drug, then yeah, that is likely the safest option. But most people aren't choosing between using a GLP-1 drug to lose weight or losing weight without it - they're choosing between staying fat and using the GLP-1.
> As of March 31, only 4 cases of gastroparesis were recorded for semaglutide—the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy—in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), a surveillance database updated by healthcare professionals, consumers, and manufacturers. For tirzepatide—the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound—there is just one case logged.
I don't have more recent numbers, but these seem pretty low.
I don't think anyone is saying that there is no chance of significant side effects in people, but when measured against the risks of being obese, they'd have to be very bad and impact a significant number of people taking the drug.
The dosage though for losing weight is 3 or 4 times the dosage for diabetes.
This is fair. But I'll ask you this: how long would it take for you to trust it? Assuming there are no side effects beyond what we know now, which are:
* gastroparesis is a small number of patients
* elevated thyroid cancer risk in mice
* nausea and general uncomfortableness when taking it (some percentage, not all)
* muscle and bone loss which seems to be roughly on par with any rapid weight loss approach
* a small percentage of people develop malaise, anhedonia and suicidal ideation
* a propensity to gain some percentage of weight back and/or relapse in addictive behavior when going off the drug
These are the side effects we know about with over a decade of prescribing GLP-1 agonists. Assuming these continue to be the primary side effects, how long would you wait until you are comfortable in trusting they are the only ones?
These things we already know are dangerous, and we also already know they're the most prevalent. We're not treating mesothelioma here.
This drug in a nutshell partially paralyzes the stomach and upper intestine causing food to move through slowly. This has the effect of reducing food cravings as you literally stay full longer.
However slowing down the stomach muscles has many risks and many side effects.
Yes this drug is great for people who have struggled with weight loss and may not realistically be in a position to work on diet and exercise.
However this drug is not a substitute for the larger issue at hand. Many (possibly most) Americans are not living healthy lives in terms of mind, body (maybe spirit).
Improving physical activity leveled.. learning to eat less and to eat healthy should be a national priority. If anything the US government lack of addressing the elephant in the room and the underlying cause of many of these metabolic orders should outrage all Americans.
Just my two cents
No it isn't. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
> Improving physical activity leveled
It doesn't appear that this is the issue. You can't explain a recent trend (obesity) using something that hasn't changed recently. And exercise is not very effective for weight loss compared to diet (it's something like 20%/80%).
It cures behavior, not directly disease. I see red flags. Firefly did a movie about a drug that interfered with people's motivations to do things.
Nothing is being healed, we are just helping people cope with excess
There is an enormous amount of biotech work to develop next-gen versions that have better half-lives, lower adverse events, and most importantly, have long patent lives. But it seems base GLP-1 are good enough that we should see massive societal change starting next decade.
* Blood sugar levels (or whatever this is a proxy for)
* Weight
* The changes the GLP-1 Agonists make to the body itself.
While it is simple to say if you reduce the weight, you reduce the blood sugar levels, and so the GLP-1 is unnecessary, you can look at many accounts of using Ozempic where it talks about reducing the "food noise."
That is, Ozempic makes it easier to eat the right things. I'm a "normal weight" through grit, but I don't think my life is better through said grit - in fact, I'd say it's significantly worse. In my earlier life, I was naturally thin, and I can say that my weight increase wasn't a significant change to my diet, nor was my weight loss: I just had to be hungry and irritable more.
So, fundamentally, the cause and effect doesn't matter, because the drug makes it easier to be a more healthy weight and to control the blood sugar.
Yes! I keep trying to explain to folks that this is the benefit of these drugs, they let you keep a healthy relationship with food, maintain "intuitive eating" where you aren't constantly fighting and discarding your hunger signals, and aren't (as) miserable doing it.
I did it the hard way, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Obviously we need some more double blind studies dedicated to this class of drugs and Alzheimer's, but this informs the direction researchers and drug companies will likely map out.
Those choices become easier when you have assistance.
All we need to do is just tell a few million people to lose weight.
If it’s the drug and not the weight loss that lowers Alzheimers risk, then even people who are not overweight might benefit from the drug.
Losing weight is still a hard endeavor.
Plenty of people find their appetite capped at a level where the caloric intake will make them skinny. If they don't eat right and exercise, though, it won't necessarily bring them to great health. Like all caloric restriction, you will lose muscle mass if you don't ingest enough protein and perform resistance training, so you could still end up with a suboptimal lean body mass:fat ratio.
>IIRC it increases the effects of a healthy lifestyle change by 15%,
I'm not sure what this means. In the clinical trials for weight loss, semaglutide patients lost 10-15% of their body weight over the trial period, which might be what you mean? The trials don't indicate that this is the maximum, however - people have seen sustained weight loss for periods longer than the trials. Nor did it require people follow a specific diet or exercise plan. Plenty of people lose weight just eating less of what they were already eating - though this is generally not the best way to approach it.
>effect which is lost if you leave it.
Some number of people regain some or all of the weight they lost when going off the medication, but not all. However, the current indication is that people should be allowed to remain on the drug to maintain (generally at a lower dose) indefinitely if they need to. If the safety profile changes, this recommendation might also change.
>The life style change (activity and nutrition) alone is more important, cheaper, and as permanent as you want it to be.
Agreed. I'm someone who was quite fit when younger and let a variety of factors cause nutrition and exercise to fall farther and farther back on my priority list, and so far, tirzepatide has made it much easier for me to prioritize these things and enjoy them. I'm fairly confident once I have spent some time back at a healthier weight and developed long term habits around these things I'll be able to go off of it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/alzheimers-theo...
This publication is bogus. It is too soon to know if there is any benefit at all from Semaglutide.
If you are expert in this space: Is such a dataset available publicly? If so, are there examples of other studies that have used this? Where does one go to read more about the mechanism of this study? Thanks!
This deduplicates patients and lets them find specific details like which medications they are on without knowing any PII.
It's very common for researchers within health systems to want to collaborate and combine populations to perform retroactive data analysis.
(The Trust Me Bro™ security aspect is the "It's secure because people will go to jail" and "We so totes won't use this easily subpoenaed data against you" security, when it would be best if the data stayed on a RAID in my doctor's office and an offsite VPN-linked backup instead. This goes 20x for psychs.)
Given that, I'd want to see more reproductions.
Also, I'm very annoyed by our American culture which tries to fix problems with drugs, rather than preventing them from happening in the first place with good diet, exercise, sleep and stress management.
Realistically, ozempic is a miracle and it seems to be a solution to numerous issues of our world.
It would be nice if it wasn’t so, but apart from the 10% of people who can control themselves (which also causes psychological issues btw), most people just can’t.
"Taking the medication could be linked to ileus, a condition where the intestines temporarily stop functioning. Increase risk of Gastroparesis"
Why even bother lying if you don't possess the intelligence to formulate even a shallow deception? You understand that attempting to be deceptive, and then demonstrating you're too stupid for even simple deceptions is worse than if you had just said nothing, right?
Some advice: if you have to employ deception to make your argument, your argument is probably shit and probably isn't even worth the sound waves it travels on. So go back to the drawing board and trying coming up with something less fucking stupid.
It's the food industrial complex's fault, along with many others (politicians, individuals without self control, etc)
I lived in rural Colombia for 4 years. People had access to the junk food, but it wasn't consumed very much because the veggies and meat are all produced locally and super tasty and cheap. And the local dishes were extremely meat and veggie based.
Oh, and most people know how to cook there.
It's not a fact of human nature to be unhealthy. It's a fact of modern culture.
If I sold cigs on every street corner in a "skinny" country like Japan, how confident are you that I wouldn't create a smoking culture?
This is not a matter of motivation or discipline. Such thinking is short-sighted.
Considering Japan has long been one of the highest per capita consumers of tobacco, apparently it's quite likely ;)
Basically every country sees obesity rise as the people gain access to the modern diet.
If not needing it makes you feel superior, I'm glad you've found a source of self validation.
It's quite obvious that you think anyone who is incapable of just willpowering through things is lesser for it. And that's fine - you're allowed to hold whatever opinion you want. Thankfully, neither of us are forced to interact with each other in any real manner.
The solution involved exercise and diet, surprise surprise. It's not magic or some law of nature that people will only get more fat and unhealthy.
If we think that way, then it will surely happen though.
Yes, if we remove all of the modern, processed, high calorie, energy dense, sugar heavy foods out of a place we can improve the obesity rate.
I hope you understand why individuals are going to take things into their own hands vs. waiting for massive societal change. I thought you were referring to whole cultures or countries making significant change here, not small communities.
I'm someone who has spent many years of their life fit. I'm also someone who has spent many years of their life fat. I can tell you that when I was fit, I did not suffer from the sort of constant hunger I did before I was fat. It didn't take any sort of willpower or discipline on my part - I just wasn't hungry nearly as often, healthy food was satiating, and things were easy. Lifting weights multiple days a week took a bit of discipline, but it wasn't the reason I was eating healthy - I was doing that before I ever got particularly into exercise.
But I got busy with other aspects of my life and it became easier and easier to just grab some fast food, or order uber eats during the pandemic. But this was just laziness - I didn't have constant hunger or cravings. But before I knew it, I had gained significant weight, and then I did have constant hunger and cravings, and it became a tremendously difficult task for me. Losing weight by sticking to healthy food in healthy quantities required significant willpower, and shoving that hunger down had impact on my mood, ability to concentrate, etc. I struggled to make it past 6 months before some other event in my life would require me put my focus towards it, and I wouldn't have the capacity to deal with both things, so I'd go back to eating poorly.
Tirzepatide puts my relationship with food and hunger back to where it was before I had gotten fat in the first place.
And if enough people do it, we have a healthy culture again.
There's countless comments in here from many people explaining why this is the case. If you don't get it by now, I doubt you ever will.
It's insane to imply this culture just needs some drugs to be healthy.
Then I got busy with life and the convenience of fast food and then eventually uber eats lead me to putting on weight at a steady pace, and before I realized it, suddenly it was incredibly difficult for me to eat healthy quantities of food. As someone who had many years of success being healthy, it was not something I ever succeeded at doing for more than half a year or so after I let myself get fat, despite repeat attempts to resolve the issue.
Did our culture make it easy for me to get fat when I started devoting all my mental energy elsewhere? Yes. But I was never able to get back to where I should be prior to tirzepatide. Now my relationship with hunger is basically where it was back when I was fit.
Some people are be able to push through the various biological feedback loops based on willpower alone. I'm not one of them. So instead of staying fat, or berating myself for my repeated failed attempts, I'll take the drugs and be better off for it.
The problem is these are individual solutions. We have a societal-wide problem. These solutions are therefore useless. You can't solve societal problems with individual solutions.
For example, I can't say "people shouldn't steal because it's immoral". It's true, and for me or you that might be enough to keep us from stealing. This is an individual solution.
The societal solution is how do you demotivate people from stealing? Now we're not talking about morals. We're talking about economics, poverty, crime prevention, the criminal-industrial complex, etc.
If you're waiting around for the day that American "culture" magically reverses itself and everyone wants to be healthy by their own accord, it will never come.
If you want an example of changing "culture", look at smoking. Hint: it has nothing to do with "being healthier". The changes we made were not about that.
I like bottom-up way to approach it, rather than only top-down via policy.
Be healthy yourself and hopefully that bleeds out to your family and friends. If enough people do it, you have a different culture. Certainly possible given all the cultures that do prioritize these things.
This just straight up does not work. I will be blunt - you are not suggesting a solution, you're suggesting a delusion.
This "do nothing and hope it works" approach is not novel. It has been our one singular approach to the obesity epidemic. Has it been working? We have many decades of evidence now. No, it hasn't.
I could maybe see your perspective better if what you're suggesting is not already tried and tested. When you do something for decades at a time and the problem doesn't improve, but in fact gets worse, you have to face the reality that what you're doing just doesn't work.
> Certainly possible given all the cultures that do prioritize these things
They really don't. They just have less access to food.
Some, like Japan, get around obesity by instead having some of the highest tobacco use in the world in combination with a stressed-out population.
As fun as it sounds to reintroduce smoking culture to offset obesity, I think it might make more sense to give people access to safe drugs that help regulate their propensity for overconsumption.
Exercise and diet do work. Next!
> They really don't. They just have less access to food.
I lived in a fit, rural area in a "third world country" (Colombia) for 4 years, still spend several months there out of the year. The people in my town are not starving for food. In fact it is abundant and everyone has a garden and everyone walks every day and everyone knows their neighbors. The food is entirely local and shipped in from the surrounding farms every morning.
Your perspective is informed by looking at people like numbers, statistics and robots. But the truth is that humans are dynamic, social, organisms that are very capable of changing their ways.
First off this "Next!" nonsense is annoying. Second off you're not understanding what I'm saying.
Just because something works FOR YOU does not mean this is a systemic solution!
To be perfectly clear, what you're suggesting is not novel. In fact, it's so tired I don't even know why you bother to speak it. This has been our solution for the entirety the problem has existed.
Well, is obesity fixed? No, right? So, your solution doesn't fucking work. I don't know what to tell you, open your eyes and look around.
> looking at people like numbers, statistics and robots
Yeah buddy, that's called statistical analysis. Not whatever the fuck you're doing. Sorry, I'm trying to use my brain here and come up with real solutions, I hope you can forgive me!
Oh but the people in your town in Colombia are doing good, that's just great. Clearly, you've cracked the code to solving obesity based off that. All those fatasses just need to garden!
Next up: do people know stealing is bad? Why don't we just completely do away with law enforcement and just tell people stealing is bad? I mean, it works for me! After all, humans are dynamics and yadda yadda yadda some other unscientific bullshit I pulled from my ass. Let's just ban door locks, too!
lol us American's eat like crap and barely walk. It has not been the solution in this country. Just because the solution is simple does not mean it is easy.
Stealing is a great example of a cultural problem. Did you know some countries are more dangerous than others? In fact, did you know in some communities stealing doesn't happen very much or at all?
Why? The people decided to behave better via mechanisms not finely levered by drugs or pharmaceutical policy. Individual behavior, cultural upbringing, economic circumstance, physical environment, etc. These things are way more important than any drug or policy and minimally impacted by them.
The rest of your argument is just ad hominem. Next!
Again, you're not understanding and I'm just not sure how much more I can dumb this down.
When you are fat, the thing everyone will tell you is "eat healthier and move more"
That has been our approach to the obesity epidemic since the beginning. And it's not working.
> Individual behavior, cultural upbringing, economic circumstance, physical environment, etc. These things are way more important than any drug or policy and minimally impacted by them
Literally all of those are directly impacted by policy.
If you legitimately think culture, economy, and physical environment has nothing to do with policy, go move to South Sudan. If you're truly that unbelievably stupid, put your money where your mouth is.
> That has been our approach to the obesity epidemic since the beginning. And it's not working.
If you don't actually move more and eat healthier, yeah it won't work. Saying something and doing something are 2 different things. Anyone that does it will lose weight and be healthier. There's really no getting around it.
> If you legitimately think culture, economy, and physical environment has nothing to do with policy.
I never said "nothing" to do with policy. Read my comments again. I'm arguing against policy being the only solution and you took that to mean something else.
Culture and personal responsibility have a role in health. Next!
Exactly, it looks like it's clicking for you. Just telling people to move more doesn't work. I'm glad we've finally come to agreement on something that is an obvious reality.
> I'm arguing against policy being the only solution and you took that to mean something else
And additional solutions include...? Oh, fuck all? Because, as a reminder, you haven't actually proposed anything. You've just been talking out of your ass and saying things that directly contradict with reality.
Yes, it would be nice if we could just say "eat less" and magically solve everything. That is about the level of problem solving I'd expect from a 5 year old, so at least you've gotten there.
But dig deeper. Think critically. Do you think if I stood on the street corner and held a sign that said "dope is bad" addiction would go away? Now what if I employed policies to limit the amount of opiates distributed?
What sounds more feasible to you? Employing policies that help people lose weight? Or collectively brainwashing billions of people globally so they lose the weight themselves? Are you seeing how one is an actual solution, and the other is the dreams of a child?
The biggest difference was seen when comparing patients who took semaglutide to those who took insulin: Semaglutide patients had a 70% lower risk of Alzheimer’s, the study found.
Full link to the study itself: https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz...
Honestly, this retort can be made about any/all new drugs entering the market. If you had a legitimate retort/critique I'm sure you would have presented it, but this is all we get.
This is what happens when you start out with "[thing] is bad" then work backwards to figure out a reason.
Low-end cost of $1000 a month is a lot. That's an expensive car lease, or half a cheap mortgage.
Ultimately, a lot of people will literally die because of this greed. That isn't hyperbole.
Suddenly USGov issues emergency production licenses and orders domestically to drop that down to effectively $0.10/kilodose on the market.
Suddenly when Denmark (or whoever) whines, USGov sends a cumulative NATO military defense bill, tells them they are the reserve currency, they have bigger nukes, and tough shit next time don't pork barrel the American people.
Lots of options for Americans; question is, can we be unprincipled enough to take the steps neccessary? :^)
It is as if those who do not remember the past are repeating it, already.
So many shills are singing the praises of this wonder drug.
In India we're all the rave
Discovered that it's great as aftershave, oh-ho
Dropped in the sea just off Japan
Swapped twenty bottles for an aqua-walkman, oh
Immunity from ridicule
Improves your brains if you're a fool, oh-ho
And I read in the Middle East
Traded some for a hostage release
Now if you're bald it'll give you hair
If you've got straight trousers it'll give you flares
Feeling up you'll get depressed
Out of style here's a brand new dress, oh
It was really vile weather
When we got tarred and feathered
You could hear the six-guns sound
As they chased us out of townSo far, I haven't seen much evidence that GLP-1s have a positive effect on people who aren't overweight. And while I'll be the first to admit that the proportion of people who could benefit from these drugs is quite large, it's pretty far from everyone.
It is licensed, tested, and sold as a Type-2 Diabetes medication. Are you claiming it is ineffective for that purpose? Or if you're under the impression that no healthy weight T2 Diabetics exist, I have some news for you...
It is also being studied for: opioid addiction, alcoholism, Alzheimer's/Parkinson’s, Cardiovascular Disease, NASH, and PCOS.
"So far, I haven't seen evidence" may be more related to what you have read than what is available for you to read.
In other words, would a thin, metabolically healthy person benefit from taking semaglutide?
So far, all of the wonderful benefits from taking the drug seem to be explainable by reduced caloric intake / weight loss / better glucose control in overweight and/or diabetic people.
That's what this thread is about; and multiple other studies looking at different diseases/illnesses/addictions. Time will tell. It is currently approved for T2 Diabetes and Obesity.
Struggling with food, being extremely overweight the rest of your life, and not being able to play with your kids because of it?
If it's purely around the weight loss, etc., then it won't.
I don't think the comment was meant to minimize the impact of losing weight on health.
So while it's an amazing drug / new class of drugs, it probably will not lower risk of Alzheimer's in metabolically healthy people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size
And good riddance I say!
Disgusting.
But genuinely, aren’t you just paying money to… not spend the money on food instead?
To manage her disease, she eats much less and much healthier (e.g., steamed kale for dinner every night) than everyone else in my family, and yet she is the obese one amongst us.
Please stop acting like life-saving drugs are evil and everything can be managed through willpower alone. My mom would be dead without modern medical science, and I would have died in the womb with her.
Statistically, people that manage to quit most chemical addictions have lower recidivism rates than people who lose weight through dieting.
So, possibly it is?
I for one have far less trouble keeping any of my drug and alcohol use to reasonable levels than I do avoiding overeating. I can quit drinking or smoking pot for months or years on end without even much thinking about it, but my attempts to lose weight without tirzepatide tended to be huge struggles that I would crash and burn on after 6 or so months.
If we compare the efficacy of "telling people to lose weight" vs taking ozempic, there is a stark contrast. Pooled results show that education and counselling[sic] did not significantly reduce weight (SMD –0.73, 95% CI –1.89 to 0.42, n = 3 studies; I 2 = 98%)[1]. The mean change in body weight from baseline to week 68 was −14.9% in the semaglutide group as compared with −2.4% with placebo[2].
Telling people to just lose weight is not an evidence-backed intervention to affect weight loss. Continuing to practice it is equivalent to practicing folk medicine or alternative medicine. Despite us wanting it to work, it does not. Like all interventions, pharmaceutical interventions have the possibility of side effects, and it's up to the patient and doctor to weight risk vs reward. There is variation in both for each case, but we have to keep in mind that the mere existence of side effects is not typically a reason for categorically deciding against using a drug.
Definitely lacking in compassion. Whether it be obesity or anorexia, these are almost always symptoms of something deeper underlying. I shouldn’t be so flippant.
I think I still have to stand by my belief that semaglutide won’t truly solve people’s relationship with food though. That requires going deeper than the temporary solution drugs might provide.
That sounds fair. I see a lot of over/under weight results as a symptom of a maladaptive coping mechanism for some other issue. Sometimes the issue is simply not having meaning in one's life, but it really can be anything from depression, to anxiety, to lack of friends because of social phobias or low self-esteem.
Looking at this this way helped me find more compassion and less contempt. I hope it helps you too
Yes, it is possible for every obese person on this planet to eat less and stop being fat. 100%.
But for some people, this is actually really difficult to do! And the more fat you put on, the more feedback loops there are in your body that push you towards eating more. Insulin and ghrelin response are big ones, but it wrecks your sex hormones, too - you're almost certain to see massive testosterone drops in men, which further stimulates your body to deposit more fat and build less muscle.
Being told to lose weight by diet and exercise is probably the most prescribed treatment on the planet, and one with one of the absolute lowest success rates.
Because it requires willpower and discipline, this just a pill/injection doing all the heavy work for you. Hence the success in USA. There are countries where this drug is semi unknown.
If you're so convinced that obesity is a moral failing, then just put 'no fatties and no fake skinny glp-1 users' in your tinder profile, and all of the rest of us can move on with our days.
Maybe it is but just in a certain part of the world.
Easy and cheap access to calorie dense food and food heavy in sugars seems to nearly universally be something that significant portions of the population have difficulty resisting overindulging in, regardless of culture.