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Comment by gryn | Hacker News Reader

I'm a late adopter to most things.

my estimate would bigger than others and I would put it at 30-50years.

I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning it was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a healthy activity that bring benefits with papers published to sing praises about it. my parents were even nudged by their teachers/doctors/etc when they were young to try smoking.

now we all know that smoking is beyond bad and all that early "research" was just people paid off by big companies to promote it.

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> I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning it was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a healthy activity

While i agree the gist of what you are saying, also important to mention that humans started cultivating tobaco when mamoths still roamed the Earth. There was indeed a concentrated pro-smoking publicity campaign by tobaco manufacturers in the 1930s, but it was hardly “in the beginning” of our tobaco use.

I think a lot of people share similar concerns, but the benefits of a successfully therapy are so extreme it would take quite a lot to derail ozempic. People easily gain 5 or more years of lifespan by not being obese, avoid myriad related health conditions, and are truly much better off. It would take a lot to reduce someone's life expectancy by a comparable amount and we haven't seen that much besides gastrointestinal issues.

We performed the surgical options like stomach reduction before this which come with serious danger for comparison

Under-discussed benefit: being able to have all your clothes actually fit at the same time (no wardrobe scattered between your "skinny" weight and your "fat" weight and rarely being in the right place for more than a handful of pieces to fit entirely correctly) so you can spend up a little on nicer clothes without worrying you'll only be able to wear them part of the time. Worst case, you start to pack on a little too much and they start getting tight, you increase the dose or go back on the drugs for a week or three (or just do it the old fashioned way—hey, it works some of the time, temporarily) and ta-da, right back where you want to be—you're not going to pack on weight and find yourself unable to lose, so buying "skinny clothes" isn't mortgaged against your future success at forcing yourself to eat less.

> with papers published to sing praises about it

There is no modern-style research touting the benefits of smoking qua smoking. I will grant you there might've been some crank self-publishing something, like some of Aristotle's writings.

But you won't find what we'd consider today an acceptable, reputable form of research saying this.

> with papers published to sing praises about it

Links to these papers? I’ve always been curious because I’ve seen this claim many times, especially on HN but no one has ever managed to actually provide a source on one.

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