https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988285 ("HN: GLP-1 for Everything")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579445 ("HN: Weight loss drugs seem to be driving down grocery bills")
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5073929 | https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5073929 ("The No-Hunger Games: How GLP-1 Medication Adoption is Changing Consumer Food Purchases")
It may not work for everyone all the time, but I know a lot of people that have made these changes.
We can patch bugs in the human, and we should whenever possible and desired by the person. This helps them make their own luck.
The "bugs" are not in "the human," they're in the food industry. Fixing our food supply would be far better for individuals and society than fighting fire with fire by leaving our food broken and using drugs to work around it.
In the meantime, doing what you can to unbreak your diet without using drugs is still far smarter than relying on an artificial "fix" for the "machine" that is literally you (and can't be tossed and replaced when you find out your "fix" caused other issues, which happens almost every time the pharma industry provides shortcuts for people). Doing it this way also moves your demand as a consumer to the unbroken parts of the food supply, which will help everyone else as food companies are incentivized to cater to that instead of continuing on with what they're doing.
Humans lived for thousands of years (without the widespread diet-related ailments we're seeing epidemics of today) without artificially "fixing" their own brain chemistry. This is not an internal medicine problem, it's an external food supply and societal lifestyle problem.
If you want to say it's too hard for you (you, only) to do what's required to not get sick and you'd rather rely on medicine, fine. But it is actually insulting to pretend like everyone needs a crutch just because you do. The main thing is that the crutch should be a last resort, and "willpower isn't a solution" should not be a common mantra to push the crutch as the first option.
I don’t take GLP-1s, but I support getting them to everyone who wants them and ignoring anyone who tries to stop that, or says that is a lesser path for lesser people. I hope you learn to give grace, because lucky people are just lucky, not special.
They still work for plenty of people, just not you. They can work for more if we enable healthy diets and lifestyles as a society.
And no, that's not a "gold star" to the people who were able to literally have their "machine" work as designed. It's rather a gold star for you to not acknowledge if you needed artificial assistance to exist.
> Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale... We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it.
None of the articles you cited in your earlier comment address "scale" at all, nor provide evidence of "shifting industries." Two of them address changes in the spending patterns of high-income consumers who are already using the drug (unrelated to the proportion of the total population using the drug), and the third is a blog post by a doctor literally selling GLP-1s as a miracle drug ("It's getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren't good for"-- yikes).
Your most recent KFF link (which it looks like you removed) claims 12% of adults have taken GLP-1 drugs (going off of a single poll taken by a health-tracking organization-- probably biased towards people actively working on their health). If that number was true, it would be alarming that over 10% of humans needed an artificial fix for a problem created by the food industry and socially sanctioned sedentary lifestyles, not something to parade around like you've actually fixed the underlying problem.
But toomuchtodo didn't write that GLP-1s were the only way to address the issue. So maybe there's no reason to be insulted. Perhaps you could exercise your willpower and not feel insulted by things that didn't happen.
I never got past 220. I would get terrible heartburn and bloating and be too full to eat enough, 220 seemed to be about the max my body could obtain without severe discomfort. It always made me wonder how people get up into the 300+ range. Liquified sugar seems like the only food that your body can process efficiently enough to get you into those massive weight categories.
Metabolic syndrome is when you have 3 or more of: central adiposity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low HDL.
You can have any of these independently, it becomes metabolic syndrome when you hit the bingo.
It might or might not be involved. At this point, it's not clear. Obesity and insulin resistance are the most likely proximate causes.
Say one group drinks six cans of coke a day per person vs another group drink only water. Overall they have similar caloric intake and expenditures. What is the increase in type 2 diabetes for the first group vs the second? Yes, it is not surprising it would be higher, but is it 5%? 10%? 50%? 100%? more?
A growing body of studies signals consensus - that’s newsworthy. This ties two specific factors together rather than any general metabolic syndrome.
To my current understanding, metabolic syndrome caused by sugar / glucose spikes is by far the biggest root cause of physical health issue in the US. Most people I know personally who are suffering from physical ailments, it's most likely metabolic syndrome at the root of it.
How to shift culture on this? When I'm in civilization in the US I'm constantly confronted with foods I have to turn down. It doesn't have to be that way.
Furthermore, because of what is in my opinion bad science and propaganda, a lot of people still think they need to stay away from saturated fat, which pushes them toward processed high glycemic index foods. Sure, you can eat a low saturated fat and low glycemic diet but it's not so easy. I'm serious it's shocking the number of people suffering from metabolic syndrome / diabetes who have told me they are trying to stay away from saturated fat but are eating crazy amounts of sugar.
I hope this continues to be talked about more and more so the people I love can turn down sugar without feeling like they're radical and countercultural.
Partly I think there's a taboo on talking about health and diet, that would be good to shift. I'm not about fat shaming but diabetes is really just bad, and preventable and reversible, and I'd like for that to be widely agreed on and talked about.
Will also be interesting to see how lawsuits like this play out: https://chat.google.com/dm/wQTk3gAAAAE/WPNwzCxw9sI/WPNwzCxw9...
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/10/21/advisory-replacing-...
Most of it always tracks back to Nina Teicholz. I wonder how many people she is sending to the grave?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
If I read right, you're saying that an entire food group that people have been eating for eons is simply "bad", specifically, meat, dairy, and eggs, in their unprocessed form. The argument I've seen is that it's better to eat a new kind of food that people have only begun eating in quantity within the last hundred ish years requiring industrial technology. (Specifically, oils extracted from plant material using solvents like hexane.)
I'm open minded but this is a really serious claim and I'd need really solid evidence which I haven't seen, and I've looked. There are a lot of studies; those that I've looked into have too many confounding variables for me to take their conclusions at face value.
I could also see the possibility that saturated fat in someone who already has metabolic syndrome might increase their risk of heart disease, and maybe be considered the proximate cause, in cases where the root cause is the metabolic syndrome caused by sugar in the first place.
There's also the question of there being different kinds of LDL cholesterol and it perhaps actually serving a function in the body that isn't categorically bad, even if in some circumstances the metric correlates with atherosclerosis.