As a kid in the 80s, I wondered how it made sense that my diabetic father was told to follow the same model as non-diabetics, which emphasized carbohydrates.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/09/academy-nutr...
I lost 90 pounds and now the heels of my feet are as soft and supple as a baby's bottom.
Being overweight causes all sorts of weird side effects.
It's all hyperpalatable foods and the effects of extra adipose tissue are know to be bad for pretty much every health metric under the sun.
The health problems that GLPs produce help people avoid are way more costly than the drugs will ever be. Especially now that the market is so competitive and will only get moreso.
Medication can be a slippery slope into side effects and rotating dosages/medicines. Especially for behavioral medicines.
I mean, they're mostly stimulants, which definitely lose effectiveness over time. It would be really weird if they didn't as that's basically how our bodies work in general.
Note: I have been prescribed said medication, but have not started taking them yet so I might be entirely wrong in the practicalities (and how would one disentangle the psychological impact of medication from the physiological impact?).
I'm not sure how one would even measure this. Like, back in the halcyon days of my youth I took a bunch of stimulants, and experentially there was definitely less impact over time (habituation is a thing).
And given that ADHD is predominantly a psychological issue, then the only measure that matters is that of the patients themselves.
Do you have some of the sources you mentioned available, I'd be interested to understand the details?
That's magnesium deficiency. Promise.
(Or side effects from getting worse sleep.)
I find that incredibly hard to believe (although my doctor did mention that magnesium supplements were worth taking).
Can you point me to some research that support this claim please?
You'd probably need a few different measures of attention/executive function and you'd need to counterbalance them across people to prevent habituation.
Given that the regulatory bodies don't require studies like this, it's unlikely to ever happen.
Anything that’s “starting tomorrow and until the day you die” just seems like a thing I shouldn’t take lightly.
Also I’m not badly, badly overweight. So it’s not like “it’s this or cardiac arrest in a year or two”, for me. I should probably be dealing with my issues the old timey way.
The stakes look very different for other people, obviously.
Importantly, this is different from "GLP-1 meds have been shown not to produce a net positive benefit-to-risk ratio"
Anyway nearly all of the side effects for these drugs are just discomfort. Not even really obvious they should be called "risks." Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans who are not already diabetic or have HTN will soon, and it would be quite a surprise to learn these drugs don't have protective effect.
I’m just really not what you’d think of as a model candidate for them, so I’m not quite ready to commit to my first and only, not exactly free, rest of my life pharmaceutical dependence.
That may not seem perfectly rational to some… but ya’know… I’m the one who has to live with my brain.
* uniform dose-response: easy to increase effect by changing dose
* reversibility: automatic reversion to pre-intervention in a short-term is gold standard - allows for regret escape
* low-cost
GLP-1 drugs have these properties which I like. I'm surprised to hear that someone would prefer the alternative, but I must imagine that cost and the dosing structure (sub-q injection is annoying) must dominate decision making here.
Because muscle is about 3x as expensive to maintain as fat, unless you are on some major strength training to maintain, muscle is the very first thing that your body gets rid of when losing weight.
So now you are off the GLP-1. But you also have to eat fewer calories to maintain a calorie deficit because you no longer have all that calorie burning muscle.
* And depending on when you start your GLP-1 journey, men when they hit 40 naturally lose between 5% and 8% of their total muscle mass ++a year++ a decade (women, probably earlier). In addition to the muscle loss due to weight loss.
* And it takes approximately 3 times longer in your 50s to create a pound of muscle that it does in your 20s.
* And you can't train like you did in your 20s or you will hurt yourself.
* And as you age, your body can't absorb the protein it needs to build muscle as efficiently as it did when you are young. So you need to eat even more food to compensate.
Ok. This is now more of a rant about getting older than it is about GLP-1s.
-- Edited to reflect that muscle loss % is decade, per the corrections in replies.
I think your numbers might be per decade, not per year?
We have to do the strength training. "Use it, or lose it".
In any case, we just don't know what kind of long-term effects these drugs have. No one knows what happens if you come out of them 30 years after you started.
maybe i could see something based on modified gut bacteria that produce GLP-1 drugs inside your body. that would run into problems with dose regulation but at least you can flush them out with antibiotics if you get a bad response.