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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

And if diet alone isn't getting you to a healthy weight, the GLP-1 drugs are miraculously effective and don't have a lot of downsides aside from cost.

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Is way too early to know about any downsides of these drugs. I’m afraid too many people are gonna find out the downsides when it’s too late.

These drugs have been around since 2005. Exenatide was approved by the FDA for use in 2005.

We've had plenty of time. Only their approval for weight loss is new

Exenatide was a very small population base. The approval for weight loss means this drug is being taken by millions of more people which leads to a larger sample size. The larger the sample size the more negative effects will be revealed. I’ll just leave this here for the future m. I have no evidence other than common sense that it is ridiculous to think that injecting a hormone randomly in your body does not lead to side effects.

Besides, who is going to be the one that links thyroid cancers and pancreatic cancers to these drugs? My father died of pancreatic cancer, no one really thought to ask why.

The majority is gaining literal years of healthy lifespan. It would take a lot of damage to even approach this gain for the average person. Like we used to do very invasive and impactful gastric surgery to try and get weight loss and nobody batted an eye, no?

> The majority is gaining literal years of healthy lifespan

You’re saying this like it’s true already. Let’s give it 10 years.

> You’re saying this like it’s true already

Because it is true already? You take an obese person who has a lower quality of life because of their obesity and give them a drug that helps them lose that weight and keep it if, they're literally gaining function and a higher quality of life from it. Today.

Phen-fen helped people lose weight.

Yeah, and? Fen-phen was a drug controversially approved in April 1996 and withdrew from market September 1997.

GLP-1s aren't remotely similar. Their approval was 20 years ago and have been in used by diabetics since.

I think for myself, regardless of what the downsides are - the likely alternative was death, which is still an option.

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