Besides helping with addictions, it also seems to help with dementia, as well as a bunch of other things.
It’s a miracle drug, that should be available cheaply to everyone, but so far it’s only for rich people.
I would really hesitate calling it a miracle drug as there are documented side-effects and side-effects yet to be fully understood after long-term use.
Additionally while GLP-1 can reduce caloric intake, it doesn’t actually fix the poor dietary choices that got you there in the first place. Like a smoker people will misconstrue having a low BMI with being overall healthy, even though there could be a host of macro and micro-nutritional deficits from fiber to omega-3’s to vitamins to antioxidants, and still a relatively high consumption of processed foods with things like added sugar.
So sure it reduces the total amount of poor foods being consumed, but of course does nothing in promoting adoption of nutritionally-positive foods. In one respect, the caloric weigh-loss still is itself a net-positive, hopefully people don’t end up masking or cementing their other poor eating habits as a consequence.
This is all true, but if overweight is your most urgent health issue, and if the excess fat is causing other health issues, simply reducing weight by whatever means can improve health, and there are virtuous cycles too, if you are lighter you can move more, maybe you feel better about your body and treat it better, an upward spiral. The epidemic of overweight (or more specifically over-fat) is causing so many cascade effects here that it’s well worth treating aggressively.
What I’d like to know is are these beneficial side effects just due to the weight loss, or are they available to normal weight people who take the drug? Is it actually the drug, or would they get the same benefits by losing weight some other way?
Anecdotal, but I think this tracks with what you’re asking. I have never been obese, but due to family history of both connective tissue disorders and diabetes it has always been extremely important to me that I keep my weight in a normal range. It took an intense amount of mental effort on my part, religious food tracking and extensive exercise for decades.
When I started on a GLP-1 (due to a weird health situation that’s not really relevant), the amount of mental energy I needed to expend to maintain my weight was suddenly gone. I don’t feel sugar cravings like I used to, so I don’t need to stay so vigilant about my diet. I don’t spend my days monitoring my intake, planning out a rigorous fasting schedule, working out more than I’m naturally inclined to just to counteract that brownie I couldn’t stop myself from eating. It’s both a literal and emotional weight off. I am taking a very low dose but even so I honestly can’t believe the difference. I am one of the ones who was will-powering through calories in/calories out and it was miserable. Now it’s just…not.
Fair points, thanks! You raise a good point that if the weight-loss itself is inhibiting your capacity to otherwise want to, say, go running or be more active then you can break the destructive feedback loop and give it another go. In that respect, I’m curious if these drugs are generally prescribed with no limit or prescribed until reaching a target weight? I don’t know.
To your second paragraph, I’d like to know too. My guess is the benefits at least in the short-term are similar to what can be achieved by maintaining a healthy diet (Mediterranean / dash / mind diet, notably) — again, at least in the short-term. If poor eating habits persist even if at a lower caloric level, then eventually as those nutrients run out, things will wear down no differently than a poorly maintained engine.
I do agree with the consensus here - it’s weirdly moralistic to say fat people should just do willpower harder, if there a drug that works for so many. It’s a lot like telling an anorexic to just eat more. Eating disorders are complicated. A drug that fixes the appetite and improves blood sugar handling is an enormous improvement compared to what we had before.
I’ve never been fat, but have been eating disordered in the other direction and there is no way I could have been convinced to eat more just because it would have been healthier. If there had been some drug to fix my relationship to food back then, I feel like nobody would have said “just use willpower and eat better.”
It’s interesting that this strikes at the heart of left vs right mindset, at least in America. Conservatives have a tendency to romanticize the notion of free will and individual freedom; that you alone are responsible for the choices you make absent of anything else like — will over systemic forces or regions of your own brain working against you. Whereas the left has a stronger tendency to recognize these other variables that apply pressure in such a way as to shape the path of least resistance in what you may choose to do.
It’s like a story I heard about the mindset of Americans vs. Germans when they have a vehicular accident. In America, blame is often quickly pointed to the person for skidding off the road while in Germany they may send a team of engineers to assess how to reduce the environment to prohibit this from being possible in the first place (e.g., putting up a guard-rail). This is surely exaggerated and America of course has civil engineers, but you get the idea of a default state of responsibility.
Maybe the reality of executive responsibility and external forces is somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, a systemic problem tends to require a systematic solution. So I definitely don’t fault obese people for not being able to get skinny. I agree: definitely the wrong mindset!
My main concern is that if the cost of this weight loss is a masking of symptoms and warning-signs of other poor dietary habits, could that result in even more people suffering ailments kicked under the rug just because they perceive themselves to be healthy when looking in a mirror? (e.g., the smoker arguments of old).
All drugs have side-effects, so what?
You are focusing on the weight loss issue, which is a miracle in itself. So what if they still make unhealthy choices? They are still losing massive amounts of weight, which is us already a HUGE improvement. You can’t let perfection be the enemy. So it doesn’t solve 100% of the problem, solving 75% is still a worthy improvement.
Then there are all the other things it does. It reduces cravings in addicts of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, making it much easier to quit. So an unhealthy person with addictions and diabetes can take this drug, get their diabetes under control, lose a ton of weight, and quit smoking and drinking and whatever else, and we’re supposed to avoid this drug because there might be some side effects? As long as the side-effects aren’t dying 20 years sooner, they’re better off with the drug.
It also seems to help with dementia, and other drugs.
You know, all those things like weight loss and addiction control are side-effects, right? They are an unintended consequence of taking the drug, which is what a side-effects is. Sometimes side-effects are bad, sometimes they’re good.
All drugs have side-effects, sure, and key to note 1) some drugs have more; some have less. 2) some have extensive longterm research. Others do not. While ozempic-like drugs have been around for 20 years, for the vast majority of that time they were centered on treatment of diabetes, which as you said they realized it had beneficial side-effects alongside the bad like weight-loss. This is simply why I say to caution anything as being a “miracle drug,” unless you wish to define that yourself — because that at least to me implies no side-effects and implies a comprehensive resolution of the problem as opposed to a masking of the root causes, while also having been thoroughly studie. At least with say antibiotics, sure, there are some serious side-effects; but they get to the heart of the issue and eliminate the bacteria. Moreover it’s a solution to a problem we cannot yet resolve in any other way. In the vast majority of cases where ozempic is being prescribed, weight-loss, that is not the case.
I’d rather not repeat myself too much but it is again like smoking. Tobacco and pharmaceuticals would hail cigarettes as “miracle drugs” because the long-term research had yet to bear out what many had long feared: that the weight loss comes with a hefty a price. Well, in kind, I am concerned there is a hefty price and anything too good to be true usually is — especially when it comes to pharmaceutical marketing.
Again, I just want to again reiterate: Literally everything Ozempic does positively, from dementia to cravings to weight-loss, can be achieved by eating a healthy diet. Period. Full stop. This isn’t like antibiotics where you can just take vitamin C and eliminate C-diff. Unless you have problems creating GLP-1, all the benefits of Ozempic — KEY POINT: AND MORE because you’re actually avoiding anti-nutrients and taking in a diverse array of nutrients — can be achieved by simply eating what scientists have already concluded as being the healthiest diet: A Mediterranean plant-based diet. (and that doesn’t even mean excluding all meats).
And no, I’m not saying it should be taken off the market; only that I’m practicing skepticism and not calling it a miracle drug because it masks a poor habit; it doesn’t fix it. If Ozempic caused someone to stop eating all poor food and start eating their leafy greens and stop chugging starbucks coffees and adopt the scientist-recommended Mediterranean diet, then sure, I might be more likely to call it that. It does not.
Generally, most people we’re talking about here don’t have dietary nutritional deficiencies. You’d have to specifically eat an unbalanced diet, like chicken nuggets for every meal, for that to happen.
I would bet that anyone prescribed ozempic has also talked with their doctor about their diet before starting.
Can you elaborate? If you’re taking Ozempic for obesity, then in the vast majority of cases there is generally a nutritional deficiency at the heart of your diet — that includes missing nutrients like fiber, or adding anti-nutrients in the realm of added sugar. Unless you have some thyroid issue or are already diabetic, etc., which would require a different sort of intervention.
In dealing with my mom’s ailments and navigating the medical system, most general doctors don’t know jack shit about nutrition, and there is no mandatory referral to a dietician before prescription for ozempic.
Expecting NO side-effects is an unrealistic objective.
You contradict yourself when you claim there have been no long-term studies, then say it’s been used for 20 years, and that’s how they discovered the weight loss SIDE-EFFECT.
It certainly does get to the bottom of one of the worst aspects of obesity - overeating. You are assuming that all obese people are eating poor quality food, but that isn’t always the case. Often they are eating high quality food, they are just eating too much of it. This address that issue, reduces cravings, and teaches them to eat less. It also seems to help in reducing cravings for poor quality food.
And you are avoiding the addiction issues. That alone makes this drug worth exploring further.
The real issue with this drug isn’t the lack of research, it’s the fact that it is difficult to access for the average person. Here is a drug that could go a long way in reducing some of the most pressing health issues in our society - obesity, addictions, dementia, etc., and yet insurance companies won’t cover it. The cost of the drug would be far cheaper than the associated costs to a society who allows those serious health issues to exist unchecked.
We know that overeating — barring aforementioned edge-case scenarios — is primarily a result of societal stressors and junk/processed-food intake.
- Ozempic does not reduce those cortisol stressors
- Ozempic does not resolve dopamine sinks you expose yourself to.
- Ozempic does not resolve over-eating induced by the consumption of poor food
- Ozempic masks existing poor dietary nutritional intake.
- Ozempic does not suddenly make you put down your starbucks and eat a green salad.
I repeat: Every single thing ozempic does, a healthy diet can do and more.
Often they are eating high quality food, they are just eating too much of it.
No, this is not true. There is no evidence of this. Some people indeed do have some thyroid problems or are already diebetic and this causes problems with their hormones, true; but I already addressed this and this is an extreme edge case relative to the vast majority of those prescribed drugs like ozempic.
Obesity is a symptom; ozempic addresses the symptom — not the root problem that caused that symptom. The symptom should be a signal to resolve the root problem. If you lose a big symptom, you’re less likely to address the problems under the hood. If you never resolve the root problem then you are likely still engaging in the same poor dietary habits that will lead to OTHER problems down the road. This, itself, is an inherent side-effect.
I work a job and people are often angry, frustrated, and sometimes yelling. I get these cortisol spikes daily as a result. I can’t afford to quit the job right now.
The cortisol spikes lead me to crave low quality food. I have considered a GLP-1.
For someone like me, I realize that in a better situation, I wouldn’t deal with many cortisol spikes at work and then crave eating garbage and too much garbage. I understand the rationality behind your logic.
But still I am not sure I see a better option. My job is a 40 hour a week job and pays the bills. I don’t have major skills in another area and have some problems in my resume.
I suppose I could retrain, but the problem is there would eventually be a period with no cash coming in and then things become risky.
I believe these cortisol spikes are directly causing some of my cravings. They probably have other horrible impacts too. I take antiinflammatory medication every day that I work to try to prevent inflamation, but that is also risky.
Do you suggest for me a GLP-1 is a bad idea? In our capitalist society, in which I can’t temporarily opt out of working without fear of homelessness, GLP-1 seems like a necessary evil.
Economic class factors into the equation. I can afford the cheapest GLP-1 while working. I can’t afford to stop working.
Up front: I’m no doctor or dietician. Only that nutrition is a big interest of mine both personally and along helping my aging parents with their ailments.
You raise fair points and I want to bring this section back from where the other user and I were going: I don’t think GLP-1 drugs inherently bad. It seems you have a good grasp as to the bigger picture and consequences of perhaps masking root problems. Mind you, cortisol spikes can be a result of all kinds of things. Generally-speaking (and with the caveat I’m no expert), most things I’ve read seem to suggest that cravings start with outside stressors, which then lead you to look for short-term fixes; you then can trapped in this feedback loop of rising stress -> quick dopamine hit. Without taking away the key stressors like your work or lack of time to engage in other positive habits (exercise, sunlight exposure, healthy sleep schedule), that craving will likely persist with or without GLP-1; the only difference is at LEAST it would be in less total quantity. At LEAST your obesity won’t inhibit your ability to exercise (which itself reduces cortisol). The bad news is it doesn’t alter your eating habits and compel you to suddenly start eating salads on its own; that will still take some willpower and a healthy state of mind. But perhaps you can surf the wave of confidence that comes with weight-loss? I don’t know.
Thank you for your candid comment!
Again - So What?
So it’s not perfect. So it doesn’t solve the entire obesity issue. So what?
Do you think think that obese people haven’t tried every diet, changing their lifestyles, changing their eating habits, pledged to eat healthier, etc.? You act like all you have to do is inform these ignorant fatsos that they should eat better and all their problems will be solved.
They know all this, and have tried over and over, and still couldn’t beat it. So if a new drug comes along, and accomplishes what years of heartbreak couldn’t, what’s wrong with that? With their cravings under control, it will be easier to make the rest of the improvements they need to make. I doubt there are too many people who have used their Ozempic weight loss to INCREASE their intake of junk food. Generally, it has encouraged people to improve their diets, when all previous attempts had been discouraging.
Bottom line: It is still the tool that has worked for thousands of people, when nothing else has. That will contribute to an overall benefit to the health of society. It may not be the only answer, it may not be the perfect answer, but it is still a net benefit to society.
Generally, it has encouraged people to improve their diets, when all previous attempts had been discouraging.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
Can you please explain what you’re actually trying to argue about and why one is so vehemently defending the perceived perfection of Ozempic? Are you on it? Is someone you know on it? I’m curious because it seems you are vociferously defending it when I’m being quite reasonable and even citing sources that went completely and utterly ignored.
To your, "“So what?” — Turns out I’m simply echoing what experts have already said:
It’s also important to remember weight is only one part of the health equation. If you suppress your appetite but maintain a diet high in ultra-processed foods low in micronutrients, you could lose weight but not increase your actual nourishment. So support to improve dietary choices is needed, regardless of medication use or weight loss, for true health improvements.
I already explained the So-What part several times; the consequences of masking root problems by simply addressing symptoms. Thought I was pretty clear, which again, I even cited medical experts warning of the same thing — that, too, went ignored.
I’m not saying that obese individuals haven’t tried to change their habits; if it was always easy then of course nobody would be fat. That doesn’t change the underlying health risks of poor dietary habits and might make it even LESS likely that they conquer this challenge given the facade that is their BMI has improved; but that is of course a facade; a thin veil masking the nutritional needs underneath. Like getting a paint job when you car needs an oil change.
Put another way: Go back to my very original comment and point out anything I wrote that was factually incorrect. I’m growing tired of playing these rhetorical games and selective-hearing; time to start using sources.
Factually correct and wrong in every way that matters.
Have you struggled with oveeating? Food is as addictive as nicotine but you have to have it every day, just not too much.
That’s not realistic. Not for the majority. It’s just not.
Sorry, but still no sources.
Perhaps more importantly, still attacking a straw-man argument that I never personally made.
I will repeat the following that keeps conveniently being ignored:
Again, I just want to again reiterate: Literally everything Ozempic does positively, from dementia to cravings to weight-loss, can be achieved by eating a healthy diet. Period. Full stop. This isn’t like antibiotics where you can’t just take vitamin C and eliminate C-diff. Unless you have problems creating GLP-1, all the benefits of Ozempic — KEY POINT: AND MORE because you’re actually avoiding anti-nutrients and taking in a diverse array of nutrients — can be achieved by simply eating what scientists have already concluded as being the healthiest diet: A Mediterranean plant-based diet. (and that doesn’t even mean excluding all meats).
And no, I’m not saying it should be taken off the market; only that I’m practicing skepticism and not calling it a miracle drug because it masks a poor habit; it doesn’t fix it. If Ozempic caused someone to stop eating all poor food and start eating their leafy greens and stop chugging starbucks coffees and adopt the scientist-recommended Mediterranean diet, then sure, I might be more likely to call it that. It does not.
It’s also important to remember weight is only one part of the health equation. If you suppress your appetite but maintain a diet high in ultra-processed foods low in micronutrients, you could lose weight but not increase your actual nourishment. So support to improve dietary choices is needed, regardless of medication use or weight loss, for true health improvements.
Edit: Correcting a negative.
Have you taken it?
It absolutely reduces craving for l sorts of “bad food”.
Try it before being a doomsayer.
No I stimulate GLP-1 the good old fashioned way, by eating a balanced diet.
Not doomsaying. Turns out I’m simply echoing what experts have already said:
It’s also important to remember weight is only one part of the health equation. If you suppress your appetite but maintain a diet high in ultra-processed foods low in micronutrients, you could lose weight but not increase your actual nourishment. So support to improve dietary choices is needed, regardless of medication use or weight loss, for true health improvements.
Note, read this article in full as it strikes a good balance of caution between recognizing the potential of drugs like ozempic but also looking at the bigger picture.
God damn you sound like a moronic Luddite who thinks Gatorade is what plants crave.
I see you’re using personal attacks to substitute a lack of substantive rebuttal; perhaps this is a reflection of your own personal insecurities?
Considering I’m pro-vaccine and actually generally pro-AI (probably unpopular in these parts?) in the same way I would be pro-printing press in terms of the liberation of knowledge and potential of the masses, no, I don’t think I’m being an anti-tech Luddite.
What does being pro ai have to do with this conversation?
Se… Seriously?
Explain your first raising of Luddites and then perhaps the answer will hit you.
Though that you didn’t mention my raising of vaccines in kind, I’ll venture a guess that I just revealed yourself to be a Luddite with respect to AI. Is that right?
Miracles don’t exist
No, but metaphors do.
Why you butt hurt and downvote my comment then agree with me? Fucking weird dude.
Maybe because you’re acting like an dick.
No, I’m being a dick.
I didn’t agree with you.
So miracles exist?
I feel that a lot of discussion is by people who have never taken ozempic or have and are successful with its treatment. For what it’s worth, I’d like to give some insight to my own experience with it and why I’m not on it.
I won’t talk about all my medical issues, but to make it very broad - I have type 2 and a genetic disorder regarding my ability to metabolize. I was put on a trial of ozempic because of its apparent effectiveness.
While on it, one of the first things I noticed that no one seems to talk about (so I don’t know if it’s just me or not): the feeling of being sated and hungry are two different feelings. It was weird being hungry and full all the time. A bit torturous, but something I felt was manageable.
Unfortunately, even on the lowest dosage, the sated feeling was so strong I felt nauseous all the time. It eventually became a problem when I started becoming dehydrated because I couldn’t even keep a glass of water down.
I was removed from the medication and I had persistent side-effects afterwards. It’s been years now and while the side effects have diminished, I still get random bouts of nausea for no apparent reason. It’s unrelated to when I eat or drink, but it’s something I’ve never experienced prior to being on ozempic.
As weird as it sounds, there are some days I wish I could go back on ozempic. It is effective, but now doctors know I retained some side effects, they won’t let me try it ever again.
And I guess that’s it. Nothing too horrible I guess, but even miracle drugs have side effects. Everyone is built differently, so there will always be outliers.
they’re less thirsty, less heavy, less happy, less attractive, less wealthy, less strong, less resilient, less hopeful, less honest…
it truly IS a miracle losing drug!
Why did you post this exact, inane comment in two threads?
Lol luddite
