Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial

Those are causes, you can't just invert it (again) and call them mechanisms for anti-aging... Those things are side effects of obesity and diseases causing obesity, there is no evidence or reasonable basis here to suggest there would be any "anti-aging" effect in healthy people without those problems.

Similarly "Ozempic shows anti-gravity effect in humans!#11"... assuming you have unhealthy excess fat to lose.

The thing with ozempic is that is seems to do several things, most (all?) of them good for us in different ways. We probably just lucked out. It's not the only case - plenty of drugs do incredibly good things with only reasonable side effects. Antibiotics. Ibuprofen. Aspirin. Vitamin D.

A recent example - statins used to be seen as a tradeoff: you get better cardiovascular health, but some hepatotoxicity. Nope, it was wrong - they actually protect your liver. I think the official change came out this year, when I started them a couple of years ago I still found it framed as a side effect.

What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline that is bad.

The people who should be taking Ozempic aren't lacking in buccal fat.

Besides ensuring you're getting sufficient water, there are a lot of dermatologic procedures that can help you to recover at least some of your skin elasticity. And in more dramatic cases, there's a plethora of options, from fillers to lifting procedures.

I literally realized how amazing life must be for a hot girl.

Must have been because of how disgusting I look...

I think you may be making things up to make yourself feel better friend.

1) Being fat is really bad for you 2) Moderate calorie restriction may have some health benefits

Both of which we already knew, the second one being a bit more controversial but a hypothesis that has been around for decades

While I agree with your sentiment, your argument here assumes the human body always makes intelligent decisions for itself. My obstructive sleep apnea would like a word. After it's done choking me awake, of course.

The body is a marvelous machine, but it is far from a perfect or intelligent design. We are lucky to have what we have, but expect operating mistakes.

There are several reasons: Chimps have a higher density of testosterone receptors with a higher sensitivity than humans. Compared to humans, they are essentially roided out all the time.

Humans are also hairless endurance hunters so we naturally have much larger fat reserves (15-25% of body weight vs <10% for chimps) in order to retain body heat and have enough energy to hunt prey till they collapse from exhaustion.

To store calories so you don't starve. This is a failure mode of evolution and there is in fact "free lunch" when we use technology to reoptimise our bodies to calorie abundance

Idk, why can’t we synthesise vitamin C? Why do we have a bent oesophagus prone to choking and heads bigger than womena’ hips?

We weren’t intelligently designed. To the degree we were optimised for anything it isn’t the modern environment. A lot of pushback against medicine in general seems to derive from an underlying belief in an innate perfection of human biology.

Dominant subgroups in a species are dominant because their parents survived that last set of pressures (external death inducements) at a higher rate than other subgroups -- but won't necessarily see the same results with the current set.

Even 90 years ago, there was significant loss of life due to famine, so selection was towards people who could efficiently gain and store calories in a biological Keynesian strategy. Now we have the opposite problem -- abundance of life-sustaining food produced for cheap but good quality food is expensive (in the US -- many other parts of the world have their quality food cheaper but I digress). So there hasn't been enough pressure (external-induced death) for GLP-1.

As a species with a remarkable ability to modify its environment to suit our purposes, body response to disease is just another thing to modify.

Separately, evolution took place in a very energy and calorie constrained environment which is very dissimilar to today's world. Many people do not feel spontaneous desire to fast or run laps even though these are clearly beneficial.

On the natural evolution. I think it's best to think of it as a proces, with optimal state being a limit (e.g. in time, in total population), but especially in a changing environment. So, as it became easier to procure/produce fats or sugars there can be local sub-optimal states. So, in this framework, th "how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1?" question, can be answered with the fact that it's possible that we just haven't adapted yet. If we end up back to previous availability.— e.g. we lose farm land and "starve" again it would end up being the right evolutionary speed, if not, those that naturally produce more, may end up becomign majoritary.

The bottom line is that natural evolution is a long term process that's adapting things to long term changes and "long" here can mean many generations.

In a sense, philsophically, I wonder what prevents our own "changes" to be just a natural evolution of the natural evolution— i.e. a "conscious" evolution.

Evolution led to the intelligence that led to creating Ozempic. Maybe that's the mechanism by which evolution is improving evolutionary fitness. The idea that what was created by man is not part of evolution is part of the naturalism fallacy; it's the false belief that the domain of nature stops at the doors of the lab.

Weight loss aids are given far more scrutiny because people wrongly view it as a moral failing

Nicotine works just fine as an appetite suppressant without the carcinogenic tar you get from burning tobacco leaves. Similar for other stimulants or stimulant-like substances.

But I agree that they get a bad reputation, despite actually working pretty well, and with manageable side-effects: not worse than what I've heard about the nausea people get on GLP-1 drugs, and much better than the health effects of obesity.

We can do science and technology on timescales vastly faster than evolution. "Why didn't evolution do it?" is just a very irrelevant question.

> The second point I haven't seen discussed is that weight loss drugs prior to GLP-1 agonists include cigarettes, which (worst case) give you cancer; stimulants, which cause your heart to fail; parasitic intestinal worms, which can kill you but more importantly are just plain gross; and mitochondrial uncouplers, which set you on fire at a cellular level. That's a long history of miracle weight loss drugs which turn out to have horrible side effects.

Cigarettes, parasitic worms, and 2,4-DNP were never medications.

This strays too far into appeal to nature teritory. Evolution made us fit to reproduce not to age.

As for "no free lunch" - we do have a lot of that in medicine historically speaking: iodine salt, clean water, vitamins (C, D), iron supplements, hormone theraphy, vaccines. The field of medicine is no stranger to free lunch.

Of course maybe its not possible, but it is the default for pretty much every other animal so its not like it is trying something completely outrageous like trying to eliminate sleep.

Because our bodies have been tuned to deal with food shortages for hundreds of thousands of years. Now we live in an age of abundance but our bodies still try to harvest each calorie they can get.

If this continues we might evolve to no longer store surplus calories as fat. Though I doubt it because the age people die from overweight related issues is way after the age most people have kids at.

But I imagine that soon we will be able to directly tune some of that evolutionary bagage that no longer applies, by gene modification.

We’re designed to consume calories and store those calories indefinitely to meet short term needs, rather than lifelong health.

But we weren’t also designed to consume microplastics, artificial sweeteners, or flavors designed in a laboratory. Yet here we are. And it’s quite probable those things contribute to obesity.

We don't know. But one early signal is that you lose an atypical combination of muscle mass and not just fat, which is not a good evolutionary adaptation if you are an endurance hunter.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/newsroom/news/2025/08/new-study-...

Same with health, etc. A bio professor once said "life doesn't work perfectly, it just works." There's a lot left on the table because evolution optimizes for the median case over time.

Evolution favored this level of GLP1, then we invented agriculture, and cooking, and bliss points. Now it’s far easier to ingest massive numbers of calories in ways that our old world systems can’t properly signal against. Evolution hasn’t caught up and maybe never will.

In particular it seems Ozempic has anti-inflamatory effects which could explain a lot of these non-weight-loss-related results.

since we're preventing the body from adding excess potential energy to the system, I don't think this is violating any no-free-lunch rules.

But it is not a hard nature law such as the speed of light in vacuum.

we get fat because of the american diet, priori to which people in the world were actually not that fat

the lack of fermented food, the epidemics of ultra-processed, ultra-rich and grotesquely fat and sugary food is why people have gotten fat, which is a relatively recent phenomenon (and which is not as widespread in culture that resist the American diet the most like the French and the Japanese)

The issue with this logic is that evolution tends to find local, not global, maxima

Washboard abs?

Like, I figured we were just never going to solve it, given the two possibilities were "radically re-engineer US culture such that moving to the US doesn't make previously-skinny people fatter" (with other countries heading the same direction as us needing to make similar moves, one supposes) or "find a miracle drug". Neither seemed likely. Turns out, decent odds we've managed the latter! Which was always the more likely of the two, but I still wouldn't have rated it as very likely.

We know for a fact the inverse happens: girl starves herself for years to slim down to become a ballerina, eventually decides it's not worth it and tries to stop being so dangerously thin and... can't. She never feels hungry. Every time she eats she can only stomach a few bites before pushing it away. Just eat ice cream? Instant puke. She cannot gain weight no matter what.

Obviously she broke her metabolic system and she obviously did it through diet.

Yes it's possible for some skinny people to gain weight. But that doesn't mean every skinny person simply can decide to be fat just by eating. It's like climbing Mount Everest for some skinny people to put weight on, even if they really desperately want to.

I don't think the situation with obese people is all that different.

If he overeats he said he feels kinda bad (with heartburn the next day).

This is going to accelerate when every one and their mother (with industrial capacity) starts making generic Ozempic/Wegovy (Semaglutide) next year due to Canada's patent protection lapse[0].

https://glp1.guide/content/novo-nordisk-patent-protections-l...

I feel like I've seen and heard more of the opposite: The trend is to avoiding anything that might make someone feel blame for arriving in their situation.

With obesity the trend is to blame some combination of "our food supply", trending science topics like microplastics or the microbiome, and genetics.

I've heard countless people explain to me that dieting doesn't work for them. It's not hard to find people claiming they ate <1000 calories per day and still gained weight. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, a figurehead of the "rationalist" movement, has written about "metabolic disprivilege" and claimed that his genetics do not allow him to lose weight through dieting. This thinking runs deep.

What's interesting about GLP-1 inhibitors is that they modulate the intake portion of the diet, which shatters these previous notions that some people had "metabolic disprivilege" and simply could not lose weight by reducing caloric intake. They just make it easier to reduce food intake.

RFK Jr's "let them eat less" is paradoxically the modern version of "let them eat cake"!

As an American with a sister with thyroid issues, I can say that is absolutely not true for the majority of Americans. People are mostly sympathetic to those who are not obvious slobs.

Another interesting question is where do people go from there? What is the next signal of virtue, I wonder.

I always thought of this as essentially the same idea as with Civ allowing you different paths to victory.

it can be more than aspirin. Such an effect on glucose should, among other things, be affecting cancer, probably in a very positive way.

This is a strange thing to say. If you do something normal, and you end up in a normal state, why would that be a moral failing? There's no such thing as "overeating". Different people eat different amounts. The same person eats different amounts at different times.

> (From that perspective:)a miracle cure that allows someone to stop being fat is like an indulgence (in the Roman Catholic sense). It’s a cheat, a shortcut that allows the unworthy to reach a state they do not deserve.

This is incoherent. If you believe that being fat is a sin, but that the things you do that make you fat are not sins, then a miracle cure that makes you thin removes the only sin you were committing. You can't be unworthy if you're not fat. In order for a miracle cure to be "cheating", it is necessary that the sin is in the behavior and not the result.

What's your threshold on that? How many years is "long enough"? Trying to calibrate my own sense of risk.

Or, some of us older folks have been around long enough to understand that we are, in an uncontroversial and factual way, the long term medical trial, and long term effects found in that trial, along with the eventual market withdrawal, may not show up until 10 to 20 years later, creating a healthy distrust in the money/corporations behind the, sometimes outright crafted [1], early medical trials.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w

I personally hope it's just cultural and sugar/hfcs. Because some alternatives might be grim to reckon with just from a humanistic/grief perspective: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34484127/

And yet we rarely ask or say "maybe I should just eat fewer calories?" Unless you have some other disorder that prevents normal bodily function, that does work (and would be viable I'd imagine for the majority of people being prescribed).

But it requires patience and discipline which are basically non-existent for the majority of the population.

The idea that people might only benefit from something like Ozempic a little if they were doing some other intervention before is irrelevant, because no one is doing those other interventions. Requiring people to suffer before providing useful, known-safe and well-researched medication is silly.

Medication is technology.

When being fat becomes more of a deliberate choice (due to the drug accessibility) I do wonder how society and society's expectations Will change. Will women be even more pressured to "bounce back" during postpartum? Will the "baby fat" we only get to have during adolescence be eliminated and drop out of the shared experience of growing up?

There's also a lot of concern within the eating disorder community about the potential for abuse, because these drugs are so easy to get a hold of by lying on telehealth (could be argued that I've abused them by getting them when they're not truly necessary).

I also notice people will make note that 'eccentrics' from the 1940s-1950s hated air conditioning but it helps to understand it was a dangerous technology that regularly injured and killed people back then, especially in its earlier days the adults of that period were children during. AC didn't get safe until fairly recently in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It would catch fire or leak poison that killed people in their sleep. Some people just saw it as an unnecessary risk. Same with early fridges. When they leaked, that leak could be fatal as poison or explosion.

It wasnt until later that these technologies got safer and even now today, we consider full anesthesia a last resort and will always try to get away with local or twilight anesthesia because full anesthesia does regularly injure, disable, and kill people. Evolution didnt design us to be trivially "shut off" like this. Injecting us with substances like that will always come with risk.

In other words, a lot of those people weren't mindless luddites, but people who assessed their personal risk and said "nope, not worth it." I think that's perfectly fine.

I'd argue the revisionism of today and the ego justifications of the time were just that, ego protection. Its far easier to say "Well, I'm tough, I don't need that," then "I'm scared of that." The former is rewarded in our individualist capitalist society. The latter is vulnerability and honestly which is often only punished in a society like ours. We see it today with people with limited access and affordability to healthcare in the USA putting off care or engaging in various home remedies, alt-medicine, supplements, or conspiracy-culture-esque pharma drugs gotten cheaply via the gray market.

People whos primary skill is coding, hate AI coding. No talented engineer hates AI coding. The distinction is this: a coder knows how to use their tools, an engineer knows how to work with people, understands product, process, users, and knows how to use their tools.

Talented engineers hate the HYPE around AI. And those of us old enough to remember sigh and think "This is just dreamweaver all over again". It is ESB's with "drag and drop" workflow tools. AI is just another useful tool that a good engineer can pick up and put down where appropriate.

Putting on weight may demonstrate a lack of discipline or awareness, but those losing weight should not be treated as only undisciplined. Scientific research shows that obesity changes the body in ways that actively work against you when you decide to lose weight. You may be able to loose the first pounds with "discipline", but it becomes increasingly harder the more you lose. Once you have lost a few pounds, the body actively works against you to get back to what it thinks should be the baseline.

The first GLP‑1 receptor agonist was commercially released in April 2005, meaning 20+ years. People who often repeat this: If 20-years, and tens of trials, isn't long enough to "know" then where is the line exactly?

Thalidomide by contrast was available for 4-years, Vioxx for 5-years, and Rezulin for 3-years by contrast.

> There's also something to be said for gaining the discipline to do it yourself along the way, which may lead to keeping more of the weight off in the long run.

That doesn't work; we know it doesn't work both from small and large scale studies, and population evidence since 1970s. So you're promoting the same thing we've been doing, and failing at, for beyond all of my lifetime. Feels like a religious belief at this point, rather than following the data and what we know from it (i.e. that objectively does not work, and has never worked).

Is there something new you know that health experts haven't known as Obesity as increase up through 40.3%+ (with overweight being 73.6%+)?

This isn't true

https://glp1.guide/content/do-people-regain-all-the-weight-l...

The rest of the incorrect points other people have basically covered, so won't repeat.

Is teaching the discipline lesson worth the shorter life people would live without this medication? Maybe we could find another way to teach people discipline that doesn't maintain a threat to their health?

> I don't find any of that unreasonable to me. I'm saying this as a type-2 diabetic who could stand to lose a lot of weight.

Gonna be incredibly blunt, but talk to your doctor and get on GLP1s. Take a low dose if you want.

GLP1s are incredibly well researched and effective. Imagine dying of a heart attack early because you refused to properly research effective, low-risk medication that is being used by millions and recommended by professional organizations and doctors widely. Real Steve Jobs energy.

What are the long term side effects of NOT taking it? The article implies it could be early death.

Habits are something you can learn though, and having more discipline helps you form them.

And those in politics are not interested in change since because (the cynical part starts here) they are selected / sponsored by billionaires who own the media, or go to politics as a job and not to help anyone but themselves

On a side note storing fat to feed the brain in case of bad times makes sense. In the past there were no convinience stores, nor refridgerators

[0] obesity appears to be caused by moving downstream/to lower altitudes, and has increased in farm and lab animals at the same rates as humans.

The techno-optimist GLP analogs like solving these things with clean energy and other modern marvels throws a wrench into that story.

Caffeine is an insecticide.

That's just not true at all. Like, not even close.

Almost everything we've invented in medicine has been free. As in, little to no downsides and just makes things better. And not just in medicine - look around you, compare it to 100 years ago. A lot of stuff is safer, for free.

Think about infant mortality. We went from 1/4 100 years ago to 1/1000s. For free. Surely birth must be more painful now, right? No... we got rid of the pain too. Well surely mothers die more, right? No... They die orders of magnitude less too. Well surely the Vitamin K shot must have SOME downside? Pretty much no, it just pevents bleeding out.

Metformin, insulin, many vaccines, some statins, and some antibiotics are clearly on that list.

Although one of the clocks they used, DunedinPACE, only looks at pace of ageing, so in that case you can only infer that it slowed (as you do not get an 'epigenetic age' figure from DunedinPACE).

It turns out enterprising chemists and pharmacists are capable of reverse engineering.

I don't think it's that hard to figure out how someone might do it -- imagine having to reverse engineer food you've received, given many samples. Imagine some of those samples might have "fallen off the back of a truck".

> That being said, I'm waiting for oral GLP1 agonists. Injections are a hassle and gray market ones even more so

This is really going to be the second leg of adoption and will catapult GLP1s even further IMO. Rybelsus has not really seen a ton of popularity compared to the injections. That said, Orforglipron is Eli Lilly's upcoming oral GLP1 and it looks to have really good results:

https://glp1.guide/content/updates-from-maritide-orforglipro...

That will show you peptide sellers though with prices x10 higher than getting it directly from manufacturers in China

https://trials.lilly.com/en-US/trial/580035

As one might imagine though, capitalism found a way. A LOT of compounding pharmacies are now very good at manufacturing GLP1s (not necessarily the case that the knowledge transfers, but I imagine networks/knowledge sharing groups do), so gray market has sprung up to supply adventurous people with Retatrutide.

And 100%, using Retatrutide right now is illegal/not a good idea. It is super risky.

That said, anecdata from people with that risk tolerance is certainly worth looking at.

Any other significant differences you felt/noticed? Also, do you find Tirz to be an imiprovement over Sema?

https://trials.lilly.com/en-US/trial/580035

Just to be very explicit here, my profit incentive is selling newsletter subscriptions not selling drugs, if that was the worry.

The thing is that we just won't get any high quality data from the official trials for a very long time, but it looks like it's going to be even better than Tirzepatide which is the current king.

Outside of being simply well-researched, the best thing about GLP1s is that they are safe enough to be taken by millions of people (and they are) -- so anecdata is valuable. It's valuable to know what the "first adopters" are doing and what they're finding and what trends show up there.

[EDIT] Maybe I'm reading the comment wrong -- to answer with good intent assumed, I think GLP1s are basically the answer to obesity on any reasonable time frame.

GLP1s not the answer we wanted (most people would have preferred better food ingredient regulation, more people choosing healhtier lifestyles, etc), but it's the solution we're getting, it seems like.

Right now the only thing I think most can do to help this wave along (unless you're a drug manufacturer, insurer, or politician) is to share as much information as possible on positive and negative side effects, how the drugs work, why they work, etc.

[EDIT2] - Clearly there was no positive intent. I guess it's my own fault I took the time to seriously respond.

The original comment (now edited) was a question about me seeming like a disinterested third party and asking why I am discussing a gray market drug.

Many, but not all. Losing weight through diet and exercise has no effect on alcoholism, for example.

But sure, it's MY fault I didn't figure out what several doctors didn't over the course of that second-third year or so.

I gather it's extremely easy and basically fool-proof, as far as producing the desired drug and not producing some other, undesired drug. Much easier than, say, home-brewing beer. The risk is all in contamination, which presents a vector for infection.

[EDIT] I don't mean to downplay the risks or suggest people go do this, only to highlight that there's enough demand for this that we're well into "life, uh, finds a way" territory, and also just how lucky (assuming these hold up as no-brainers to take for a large proportion of the population) we are that these things are so incredibly cheap and simple to make, if you take the patents out of the picture.

Since about 1/4 of the people in the US are on medicaid, close to 90 million, that means the drug manufacturers will probably raise the price for everyone else in the US because they got to get their profits somehow...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...

The predecessor of semaglutide, liraglutide has been sold since 1998. GLP-1 has been studied since the 70s. The first human was injected with GLP-1 agonists in 1993 IIRC.

If you're allergic to peanuts it doesn't mean everyone is going to suffer some huge medical crisis from peanuts in 20 years.

She stopped using the drug and the problems disappeared.

regardless, thanks too.

IE, if you can self-restrict, you get the same benefits. You just have to deal with that little voice in your head that keeps yelling "feed me a pizza!!!" (at least that's what mine usually says).

But, yeah, I hear ya, I wouldn't mind doing a few months at a low dose to get my body fat % back down near 10%, but I'm nowhere near "needing" the drug and the only way I'm getting a prescription is probably through a shady online doctor.

Being fat really, really sucks, so most fat people have tried to make lifestyle changes, but they've gotten a lot of bad advice over the past half-century. They've cut back on fat, especially healthy animal fats, because that's what the government/medical/nutritional complex said to do, replacing them with "healthy grains," and only gotten fatter. They've tried to trim calories or portion sizes, which is difficult and ineffective for a lot of reasons. They've tried so-called weight-loss products promoted by corporations with millions to spend pushing them. They've thrown themselves into exercise plans, and while exercise is great for a lot of reasons, it doesn't have much effect on weight loss.

Even when they go outside the mainstream and try something that can actually work, like cutting carbs or fasting, it's difficult because losing weight isn't just the reverse of gaining weight. Fat cells aren't just buckets that fat falls into and can fall out of. Once energy is stored in the form of fat, it has to be burned to be removed, which requires a different set of hormones and enzymes than storing it did. Maintaining that metabolic mix generally requires an enormous amount of willpower, not just some lifestyle tweaks. People who have plenty of willpower to succeed in other areas of life like career or relationships can be defeated by it.

I don't like big pharma either, and I'm losing weight (slowly) with fasting rather than trying these drugs. But it's hard to blame people for using them, if it's a temporary fix and they're going to maintain their new weight through diet. I'm skeptical that it'll go that way for many, but I suppose there's hope.

It’s easy to say “make better habits,” but at this point, Ozempic has likely saved more lives than AA.

It’s nearly 100 years old and widely used after Pseudoephedrine was more restricted so people couldn’t make meth as easily.

Yet, studies not conducted by pharmaceutical manufacturers find it mostly ineffective. Of course, the drug companies publish studies showing it to be effective…

Have you ever taken each (not together)? I’ve never heard someone say Phenylephrine did anything for them. Anecdotally, it’s utterly useless for me…

I suspect drug companies didn’t want restriction of Pseudoephedrine to decrease sales, so they pushed crap forward to maintain revenue.

(Yes, it still isn’t all that hard to get Pseudoephedrine, but one can’t just pick it off the shelf — a significant mental barrier)

Obesity - symptom. Usually the illness is a bad diet, lack of movement, or very rarely some serious health condition. Instead of targeting obesity, fix your habits or see a doctor to see why your body accumulates excessive amounts of fat.

Dopamine issues, lack of concentration, etc. - symptoms. The illness is ADHD. By taking medicines you are targeting illness, which is correct. Targeting symptoms would be me standing behind you with a metal pipe and hitting you every time you lose focus.

Only the morbidly obese should be using these drugs to get down to a healthy enough (overweight) level to lose the rest with sensible discipline, healthy/less eating (mostly this), and exercise (less this, but important for the mind, strength and cardio).

Discipline and basic understanding of nutrition and fitness are important life skills. At some point everybody should be developing them. If people can't be arsed doing that and we give easy shortcuts for everything in life, what's the point in being alive?

This argument comes up time and time again because it's common sense, yet people always seem to want to ignore it because deep down they are being lazy and undisciplined.

If I can take ozempic, eat poorly (just less volume), and still lose weight then my and most people's lazy brain will say keep doing what you're doing.

When people get off ozempic they go back to the larger volume eating, and gain weight back which is mostly fat.

It's the epitome of a pharma solution: quick results, don't address underlying issues, hook the customer for life.