[HN Gopher] Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight ...
___________________________________________________________________
Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps
side effects
Author : pseudolus
Score : 344 points
Date : 2025-03-07 11:16 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medicalxpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicalxpress.com)
| cj wrote:
| What does "naturally occurring" mean in this context?
| Gys wrote:
| > Svensson has co-founded a company to launch clinical trials
| of the molecule in humans in the near future.
|
| At least not so natural that just 'anybody' can put it in a
| bottle.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I think this is not really a charitable take. For one, nearly
| everything medical needs certain purity and concentration so
| you need specialized equipment. For two, even if a chemical
| is easy to produce by industrial standards, you still need to
| run trials to prove that it's both safe and actually does
| what you hope it does.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I wonder what the distinction here is between supplement
| and pharmaceutical.
|
| Could they have chosen to bring it to market as a
| supplement?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| They could have, but they would have been seen as just
| another "weight loss supplement". Which I imagine is a
| real uphill communication battle to convince people that
| you're just not another scam.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I expect it has to be injected. Can you sell injectable
| supplements?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Well Trump just pardoned Ross Ulbricht who sold
| unapproved injectable drugs, so you can at least get away
| with shipping them into the United States, as long as
| you're not Mexican or Canadian.
| toast0 wrote:
| Supplements are often marketted with results from
| clinical trials; although typically not very rigorous
| trials.
|
| Raising money to do clinical trials doesn't indicate the
| path to market.
| connicpu wrote:
| Having to run trials has little to do with the whether the
| compound is naturally occurring and everything to do with the
| fact they intend to market it as a drug with specific effects
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Most people think "natural" means they can just go into
| backyard, dig up some root, and get this for free.
|
| But its " Gila Monster's venom".
|
| So natural, but you aren't going to just go out and eat it like
| resveratrol from wine.
|
| At this point, 'natural', just means made from atoms, yes atoms
| are naturally occurring.
| Clubber wrote:
| >At this point, 'natural', just means made from atoms, yes
| atoms are naturally occurring.
|
| That pretty much covers everything in the universe. I've
| always thought it was natural vs synthesized.
| momocowcow wrote:
| See food packaging laws. Natural versus artificial flavorings
| :)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Have you checked out what qualifies for 'organic' according
| to laws. The laws aren't a good standard.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| I may be missing some of your sarcasm, but "Gila Monster's
| venom" meets the strictest definition of natural.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Maybe, sarcasm was aimed at 'natural' being 'harmless'
| and/or common, because it is 'natural'.
|
| When really, just being 'natural', doesn't mean anything
| really. There are poisons that are 'natural'.
|
| Like resveratrol. Yes, it is natural and its in wine. But
| you need to drink many gallons a day to get enough to do
| anything. But people see 'Natural' and wine, and think it
| is a license to drink a lot.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| I would say that the prohormone BPM/retinoic which BRP is
| derived from occurs in the body and is therefore natural. If it
| would be a derivate of BRP chemically similar patentable then
| it would not be natural. Even if BRP is made in the lab it's
| still natural. AFAIK one can't patent natural occurring
| molecules, only the process to make them.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I wonder if it has to do with patentability
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I'm assuming it means occuring somewhere in nature, but then
| the question is where. Is there some edible plant that contains
| this, perhaps?
| cj wrote:
| According to the article they tested tens of thousands of
| amino acid chain peptides and used "AI" to find this one and
| synthesized it.
|
| Unless we expect that every protein combination exists
| somewhere in nature, this pretty much by definition isn't
| naturally occurring.
| tromp wrote:
| If this really has the potential to compete with Ozempic, then it
| should have a noticeable impact on Novo Nordisk's stock value
| [1], but we're not seeing that yet.
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVO/
| docdeek wrote:
| The article refers to results in animals which means it is
| probably years - maybe a decade - from being approved. Novo's
| patent protection expires in 2033 [0] so it could be that the
| market is not yet worried about a potential competitor that
| likely won't get to market before the IP protection runs out.
|
| [0]: https://www.reddie.co.uk/2024/08/30/the-year-of-ozempic-
| an-i...
| llamaimperative wrote:
| And Novo (like many others) is already working on next-
| generation GLPs that'll have new patent protection before
| Ozempic's ends.
| leereeves wrote:
| Even so, competition from other GLP-1 drugs and generic
| semaglutide should make prices and profits lower.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| If the companies combined can meet demand
| cdblades wrote:
| I really, really don't think that's a reasonable metric,
| especially on short timelines.
|
| In a few years, when this has been trialed, approved, there are
| a few manufacturers? Maybe.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I am reminded of the economist that wouldn't pick up a $20 bill
| at his feet because if there was a $20 bill at his feet the
| market would have already picked it up.
| lm28469 wrote:
| "The market" contains people like my dad who asked me if I knew
| about deepseek... 3 weeks ago...
| sn9 wrote:
| This assumes that NN won't snap it up themselves.
| timewizard wrote:
| The market is intelligent in the aggregate. In particular this
| means it's slow to adapt to new information and trends.
| boxed wrote:
| Isn't the molecule in Ozempic naturally occurring too?
| chpatrick wrote:
| As far as I know GLP-1 is a naturally occurring hormone but
| it's not something you can just give people directly. Instead
| you give them artificial things like semaglutide that work on
| the same receptors.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| GLP-1 is a class of drugs (or molecules). The first known
| GLP-1 was pretty much just a synthesized version of a
| naturally occurring compound from the Gila Monster's venom.
|
| Semaglutide is like a 2nd generation GLP-1 and there are 3rd
| generation ones in development right now
| chpatrick wrote:
| Semaglutide and co are "GLP-1 receptor agonists" that
| behave in a similar way to the naturally occurring hormone
| GLP-1.
|
| We can't give people GLP-1 itself because it breaks down
| really fast and you'd have to provide it continuously, so
| we use ones that effect the body the same way over a long
| period of time.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Ah ah, I see what your original comment meant now! I
| parsed that completely differently :)
|
| Yes you're right.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Yeah, halflife of GLP-1 is about 5 minutes.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Gila Monster is a pretty cool name for a lizard
| wincy wrote:
| You can but if I recall based on a book I read [0], you'd
| need to take a pill something like three or four times a day
| as your body naturally clears GLP-1 very quickly. The
| chemical has been known since the 90s, the Ozempic
| breakthrough was binding/mixing it with some chemical of Gila
| monster venom which makes your body take much longer to break
| down the chemical (days instead of hours).
|
| [0] Magic Pill by Johann Hari
| chasd00 wrote:
| Isn't everything naturally occurring? It all originates from
| earth, where else would it come from?
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Solar power isn't naturally occurring, originates from
| outside of earth.
| edf13 wrote:
| It is naturally occurring though.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| But does it come from earth?
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| But earth doesn't come from earth. It comes from
| interstellar gasses formed from stellar nuclear fusion
| and afterwards emitted when the stars turn into
| supernovae.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Then earth isn't naturally occurring I'm sorry
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Some elements don't occur naturally and need to be formed
| artificially / by force by smashing together atoms that would
| never smash together in nature (in some cases because those
| atoms in turn also don't exist in nature).
| n4r9 wrote:
| I suspect chasd00 is making a pedantic point that the atoms
| _are_ smashing together in nature. Because nature is just
| everything that happens.
|
| Although pedantic, it does challenge what we really mean
| when we say "natural". Just like what we mean when we say
| "chemicals". Everything is chemicals.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Everything is chemicals.
|
| No, not everything. Atoms, subatomic particles, light,
| electromagnetism, etc. are not chemicals. There are many
| things we experience in everyday life that are not
| chemicals.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Everything is chemicals.
|
| Free electrons and neutrons aren't chemicals. Free
| protons are Hydrogen ions though.
|
| With the exception of protons, isolated subatomic
| particle in general aren't chemicals.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Nicely up-pedanted. Ultimately I meant that saying stuff
| like "I don't want food with chemicals in it" is sloppy,
| because food itself is made of chemicals.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| As a presumptive juror I was once asked how I felt about
| "chemical evidence". I responded by arguing that pretty
| much all evidence is chemical evidence. I challenged the
| room to contradict me (which they could've, but nobody
| did).
|
| I ended up on the jury, so apparently this performance
| successfully masked my pro-defense bias.
|
| "Chemical evidence" turned out to mean measurements of
| pupil dilation as evidence of an inability to drive
| safely.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| "In nature" means "it would not happen if humans weren't
| around". So no, nature isn't "everything that happens".
| Calcium and californium atoms smashing together to form
| oganesson would never happen "in nature" without humans
| using a particle accelerator to drive the process.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I strongly suspect some supernova or black hole jet
| somewhere has formed oganesson without human
| intervention. "In nature" usually gets restricted to "on
| Earth" implicitly, partly for this reason.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Is wheat natural? Aren't humans themselves part of
| nature?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Since we're being pedantic:
|
| Light isn't chemicals. Sound isn't chemicals, it's the
| vibration of chemicals. The billions of neutrinos passing
| through you right now aren't chemicals. Etc. All the
| matter we interact with in everyday life is chemicals,
| but lots of things aren't chemicals.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| They did specify "molecule". Certainly not every
| pharmaceutical occurs naturally, and other materials such as
| Teflon don't either.
| criddell wrote:
| We're part of nature and so everything we do is occurring
| there. Is the real distinction things that wouldn't exist
| without human intervention? So, like Teflon and plumcots
| wouldn't be natural but water and plutonium are.
|
| Things that aren't naturally occurring would be
| supernatural, no?
| lores wrote:
| That's the original meaning of "artificial", something
| that occurs through art or skill. Humans have always
| distinguished themselves from the rest of nature, it's
| part of that. It's not a useless distinction, but it
| breaks down when 'natural' is considered healthy or
| otherwise good, and 'artificial' unhealthy or otherwise
| bad, when that's a non-sequitur.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Now we're arguing semantics. "Naturally occuring" in
| English means not synthetically produced / found
| naturally in the environment outside of human influences.
| Willingham wrote:
| This makes since, but I do like the idea presented before
| you, that humans are natural, and our evolution is natural,
| therefor the things that we make are natural too. But then
| where do you draw the line? If an alien drops a new element
| on earth, would this then be not 'natural'? Or is it
| impossible for anything to not be natural?
| pjerem wrote:
| Except the definition of natural is a human made concept
| which means "anything non-human made/consequence" ;)
| nkrisc wrote:
| Such a definition of "naturally occurring" is useless, and
| thus pointless to entertain.
|
| Besides, it doesn't "all" originate from Earth. If you want
| to be really uselessly pedantic, nothing on Earth originated
| on Earth.
| timbit42 wrote:
| "The unnatural, that too is natural." - Johann Wolfgang von
| Goethe (1749-1832)
| Integrape wrote:
| Semaglutide is grown on yeast then removed with a chemical
| "cleaver".
| thom wrote:
| Delighted to discover this kind of breakthrough is based on a
| gnarly regular expression:
|
| https://github.com/Svensson-Lab/pro-hormone-predictor/blob/m...
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Beautiful yet terrifying. I'm glad that regex isn't something
| I'll ever have to touch.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| The good news is it's read only- if you're reading for
| understanding, you're doing it wrong :-D
| dleeftink wrote:
| It's not that bad. AutoRegex[0] and regex gen [1] make it
| more accessible than ever.
|
| [0]: https://www.autoregex.xyz/
|
| [1]: https://regex-generator.olafneumann.org
| janfoeh wrote:
| Heh, I just fed autoregex a regex from one of my projects,
| and it simply times out. It comforts me to know that
| billion dollar LLMs have to chew on those just as much as I
| do.
| dleeftink wrote:
| A proper litmus test, what's causing the hang in your
| case?
|
| Regex to me, is pattern finding and abstraction taken to
| the extreme. I like the challenge
| janfoeh wrote:
| Good question. The regex I tried is for extracting
| amounts in EUR and USD: / (?<=^|[
| \t]) (?<currency_prefix_with_space>
| (?<currency_prefix> EUR|EUR|\$|USD )
| [ \t]? )? (?<number> (?<integral>
| -? \d{1,3} (?:[\.,]\d{3}|\d*)
| ) [\.,] (?<fraction> \d{2,3}
| ) ) (?<currency_postfix_with_space> [
| \t]? (?<postfix_or_ending>
| (?<currency_postfix> EUR|EUR|\$|USD
| ) ) | (?<ending> [ \t]|$|\n
| ) )/x
| dleeftink wrote:
| I'd imagine many nested named capturing groups may trip
| even the best automated system! I do like the solution
| though.
|
| I would've probably approached it differently, trying to
| first get the 'inverted' match (i.e. ignore anything that
| isn't a currency-like pattern) and refine from there. A
| bit like this one I did a while back, to parse garbled
| strings that may occur after OCR [0]. I imagine the
| approach does not translate fully, because it's pattern
| extraction rather than validation.
|
| [0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/never-go-nuts
| janfoeh wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I have to admit I do not have the
| necessary brain cycles to spare today, but OCR processing
| is indeed of interest to me, and I will take a more in-
| depth look in the upcoming days.
|
| The idea of an exclusionary approach sounds interesting
| as well. I'll have to think about that a bit.
| tclancy wrote:
| I think what's causing the hang is using the site. I gave
| it [a-f0-9]{8}(?:-[a-f0-9]{4}){3}-[a-f0-9]{12} and it sat
| thinking about things for a few minutes. So I tried the
| reverse and asked it "Match a UUID" and it sat and
| thought about things.
|
| Now I am enlightened.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Aww shucks, and here I was feeling a wee bit proud of
| myself for managing to break it.
| sgc wrote:
| Regex is one of my favorite things to work with. It's
| surgery. I love having a very specific problem and a very
| sharp knife. What I hate is chasing down language or library
| bugs, or undocumented limitations. Of course I would hate it
| if I had never used it extensively. Its terseness is harder
| if you only have to pick it up occasionally.
| dleeftink wrote:
| You'll love this one then!
|
| [0]: https://cardoni.net/parsing-proper-nouns-with-regex/
| trehalose wrote:
| That regex detects things like "eeieiieeeiA __ 1 2 3__"
| as a proper noun. I'm confused by the decision to accept
| any number of leading [ei] and any number of trailing
| (?:\s+[_\d]+).
| dleeftink wrote:
| It's not perfect for sure, but perfectly suitable for a
| first pass and then a dictionary sweep or another set of
| regexes. I guess I like the compactness of it!
| jcl wrote:
| It only looks for a single leading "e" or "i", not any
| number. I'm guessing those tweaks were added to capture
| specific proper nouns that weren't captured by simpler
| "leading capital letter" regexes, like "iPad" or "eBay".
| Izkata wrote:
| "*" is "0 or more" and "+" is "1 or more", it looks for
| any number of "e" or "i" at the beginning and at least
| one capital letter. The diagram below the regex is wrong.
|
| Instead of [ie]*-?[A-Z]+
|
| it looks like they wanted [ie]?-?[A-Z]
| sgc wrote:
| I have done something similar before, to help form an
| index for a large book. This is what I would consider a
| relatively simple regex.
|
| The harder ones I have dealt with are those looking for
| malformed syntax where the closing mark that might be
| missing could be several thousand characters after the
| opening mark, or the opening mark itself might be
| missing, across a data set that is several hundred
| million characters. So you need something very complex to
| find all the distinctive characteristics of the content
| that is supposed to be enclosed - while avoiding the many
| similar structures that give false positives. Sometimes
| the technically easier solution is too slow to run (look
| ahead and look behind, etc), so you need to pivot and use
| other regex features. It can take a day or two to get
| right.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Remember to get a license for your code
|
| https://regexlicensing.org/
| jasonjayr wrote:
| On the list of disasters, they forgot "parsing html":
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
| open...
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Huh, I tried sharing the Zalgo answer here, but it didn't
| quite work, never knew HN wouldn't render those kinds of
| characters
| qingcharles wrote:
| It did, but I kinda went over the top with it once and
| dang had to tell me off, so it might be they added
| filtering.
| binarymax wrote:
| > Licenses: "No regex licenses have been issued at this
| time."
|
| Perfect
| sgc wrote:
| Just license 007: License to kill.
| alienbaby wrote:
| Yes, once you have a scalpel, everything looks like a very
| specific problem ;)
| sgc wrote:
| That is the temptation! No requirements, no conventions,
| no best practices, no nagging boss, just me and total
| root access to all the files :)
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I think it comes down to the syntax being used to make regex.
| It is borderline an assembly language level of making them.
| Better language tools would make it easier for people to
| grok. Basically instead of using chars like ?^()$ and the
| like lets use words people understand.
| aranchelk wrote:
| It's not just the syntax. Regex isn't directly composable
| (unless you just mash together strings). They cannot define
| nested structures, I.e. no recursion. They can't maintain
| context.
|
| We don't need better language tools. Better parsers can,
| and already have, been implemented in libraries.
|
| I'd have a look at parser combinators.
| dur-randir wrote:
| (?R) is very much recursion in there.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > They can't maintain context.
|
| Is true though, or perhaps "state"? I know I had to come
| up with an algorithm because regexp alone couldn't do
| what I wanted (not even advanced features like lookahead,
| lookbehind, etc.)
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I'm comfortable with it (having previously been paid to write
| Perl for several years), but what I don't like is how many
| other people I have worked with aren't, and just blindly
| paste in (totally incorrect) regexes from Stack Overflow.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Writing one that does exactly what you want is very
| satisfying. And with Python you can have named groups
| extracted into a dict and it just feels like magic.
| choxi wrote:
| Is this AGI?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| oh god, can you even imagine?
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Ask Deepseek to generate a regex for detecting python import
| statements.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Please, if you write regexes like these, comment them...
|
| A great way to do it is to split them up by concatenating them
| across a bunch of lines, and put a brief explanation at the end
| of each non-obvious part (to the right, on the same line).
|
| Plus that also lets you indent within nested parentheses,
| making it that much more understandable.
|
| I'm baffled when I come across a file like this where the code
| itself is heavily commented, but a gnarly regex is not. Regexes
| are not strings, they are code -- and with their syntax, they
| need comments _even more_.
| loginx wrote:
| One thing I always appreciated about CoffeeScript was its
| [heregex syntax](https://coffeescript-
| cookbook.github.io/chapters/regular_exp...), which made
| regexes clear and easy to document.
|
| Many CoffeeScript constructs were adopted into JavaScript and
| TypeScript, but unfortunately, heregexes weren't among them.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| I agree. I'm pretty sure jashkenas got it from Ruby, which
| got it from Perl, with the `/x` flag (for extended regular
| expressions).
|
| Later languages have added support for the `x` flag,
| including C# and Rust. There is also a stage 1 proposal for
| JavaScript: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-regexp-x-mode
| loginx wrote:
| Nice roundup, and thanks for sharing that proposal!
| rtkwe wrote:
| regex101.com is a lifesaver for parsing esoteric regexes
| after you've forgotten what they're supposed to do.
| PickledChris wrote:
| Great advice that is a bit redundant with LLMs, no? They're
| pretty great at all forms of translation.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First, I don't want to waste time feeding something into an
| LLM that should be commented in the first place.
|
| Second, not at all. An LLM can tell you how the regex
| _works_ (hopefully). It can 't tell you what each piece
| _means_ in terms of the program 's logic. Or at least not
| always and not reliably.
| flobosg wrote:
| Welcome to the fascinating world of academic code!
| ge96 wrote:
| Is that an anti-pattern to put the comment inside the function
| vs above
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Function documentation goes _inside_ functions in Python,
| explicitly making them self-documenting. That can then be
| automatically picked up by any other code (like tooling for
| automatically generating API documentation) formalized as PEP
| 257, https://peps.python.org/pep-0257
|
| Python will literally assign the content of your docstring (a
| triple-quoted string at the start of a function) to a special
| double underscored ("dunder") property called `__doc__` that
| any code can access; not just docs generators, but your own
| code as well (pretty dang useful for generating on-the-fly
| help output!).
|
| Which also means that if you run into weird behaviour where a
| function doesn't do what you think it should do, you can just
| fire up the REPL, import that function, type
| `print(function_name.__doc__)` and presto, you have the
| documentation right there, specifically for the exact version
| you're using. You don't even need to leave your IDE if it
| comes with an integrated terminal.
| ge96 wrote:
| interesting TIL too bad we don't have auto doc gen (fastapi
| what I'm working with atm)
|
| edit: not saying it can't be done but our org isn't using
| auto docs
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Yeah, it's one of those "Once you're used to writing doc
| strings, you have no reason to ever use anything else"
| but if you don't use them, it can be prohibitively
| laborious to move whatever alternative you're using over
| to "PEP-compliant".
|
| ( _lots_ of fun dunder functions in Python that make
| metaprogramming a lot easier, but someone needs to tell
| you about)
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Fluent Python covers a bunch of this stuff.
| lelandfe wrote:
| TIL __doc__! Pretty nifty.
| Wilduck wrote:
| > type `print(function_name.__doc__)`
|
| Or even easier: `help(function_name)`!
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| How is this not more well known? I thought I was a god for
| discovering dir() but you're showing that I was nothing but
| a peon!!!
| Izkata wrote:
| > Python will literally assign the content of your
| docstring (a triple-quoted string at the start of a
| function)
|
| Any string. Triple-quoted is just multiline strings and
| works anywhere.
| nilstycho wrote:
| I got lost at (?R). IIUC, this is a feature of the "regex"
| module that "tries to match the entire regex recursively". Fun.
| hedora wrote:
| That's only the tip of the iceberg. Here's "How Perl saved the
| human genome project" from 1996:
|
| https://bioperl.org/articles/How_Perl_saved_human_genome.htm...
|
| (And of course all the articles about excel renaming genes, and
| then people trying to clean up the mess...)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > The study would not have been possible without the use of
| artificial intelligence to weed through dozens of proteins in a
| class called prohormones.
|
| I see we're being fast and loose with the term "artificial
| intelligence"?
| cosmie wrote:
| Could be that they relied on AI to generate the gnarly regex
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| ddalex wrote:
| Any sufficiently advanced regex is indistinguishable from
| AI.
| wslh wrote:
| Even simple regex ones, since we don't know if they were
| created by a human or an AI.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I'm trying to think of a funny way to cite Clark's Law,
| but failing...
| Izkata wrote:
| Regexes occasionally get called "black magic", and there
| is is an inverse of Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently
| advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| With enough if statements, you could create a LLM.
| jajko wrote:
| I am still waiting for an LLM trained to focus on effin'
| regexes and their variants like sed, somebody please do a
| page with ads for this and you will have a nice little side
| income and warm fuzzy feeling on top of it.
|
| Natural language -> fully working one, I don't mean some
| email validators but way more complex stuff. Although, I've
| recently had a case which was too much even for regexes in
| any form or spec, then sort of grammar-based parser needed
| to be done from scratch.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| AI is the new, "Algorithm". It is an overly broad term that
| basically means, "Technology" to people who use it.
| swat535 wrote:
| For non-technical people, terms like Machine Learning,
| Algorithm, Automation, AI, Neural Networks and 'Magical
| Powers' are synonymous.. Journalists, marketing teams, and
| executives choose whichever term generates the most hype
| and clicks.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I like to describe my job as a software engineer as
| "wizardry" to people. With the way LLMs are writing code,
| it's only getting closer to writing actual spells.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > "Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak,
| men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is
| strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for
| magic."
|
| -- Thomas Szasz
| sporkland wrote:
| It is a somewhat though provoking question for me where you
| LLM's fall in automata theory? Are they non-deterministic
| finite automatons which would make regex's a cousin? Or does
| it require pushdown automata levels of capability?
| scarmig wrote:
| Regexes were invented by Kleene in 1951, to describe
| McCulloch-Pitts neural nets. So, artificial intelligence!
|
| https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand.
| ..
| nextos wrote:
| Jokes aside regexes being AI, _lots_ of protein motifs can
| be elegantly described by simple regexes. And their
| classification performance is sometimes perfect.
|
| See the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource:
| http://elm.eu.org/elms.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| unfortunately, if you do anything computational, when you
| need to explain it to a journalist/public audience/young
| person you want to hire/investor/trendchasing early user, you
| are incentivized to call it "AI".
| sunrunner wrote:
| Neat. I always thought Advent of Code 2015's Day 19 (Medicine
| for Rudolph) was just an exercise in parsing and validation of
| production rules against a grammar, and any use of regex in
| that puzzle solution was purely coincidental ;)
| y33t wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd:
|
| https://xkcd.com/208/
| rendang wrote:
| A very early one at that
| VagabundoP wrote:
| They mention AI used to weed out molecules but don't mention how
| it was used. I'd be interested in know did they use pre-trained
| models or train one from the ground up.
| lithos wrote:
| https://www.sciencealert.com/ai-experiment-generated-40-000-...
|
| For another example, and it actually calls out the name of the
| program.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| I would expect some custom training was needed in order to
| address this highly specialized use case.
|
| There are 2 primary uses cases emerging where LLMs are proving
| advantageous. 1) Summarization --- where the
| results can be nebulous and it don't really much matter. For
| example, casual web search. 2) Research based on
| trial and error where the nebulous results will be subjected to
| thorough verification --- i.e. this case.
|
| In any case, the statistical results can be nebulous and using
| them without verification is a recipe for disaster. For
| example:
|
| https://www.lawnext.com/2025/02/federal-judge-sanctions-morg...
| bitwize wrote:
| I don't think it's a matter of firing up an LLM and saying
| "Hey LLM, please find me a molecule that acts on human GLP-1
| receptors but does not have the negative side effects of
| semaglutide." And it's all like "Certainly! Here are some
| candidate GLP-1 agonists that blah blah blah..."
|
| It's probably more like AlphaFold -- a statistical model of
| molecular structure and action, not a language model.
| xhevahir wrote:
| It looks like it's this: https://github.com/Svensson-Lab/pro-
| hormone-predictor
|
| Annoying that journalists call everything "AI" these days.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Is the muscle loss a side effect of the drug or of the weight
| loss?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| eating less calories always has that side effect, you can train
| and eat protein to minimize it tho just like with regular diet
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| The loss. You eat less so you're probably eating less protein.
| And if you used to be heavy then it's safe to say you probably
| had some muscle mass and you're going to lose that with the
| caloric deficit especially if you're not exercising.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| Lean mass is just non-fat mass. That includes much more than
| just muscle.
|
| I can't find any evidence that GLP-1 are catabolic to muscle
| mass. There is no evidence I can find that GLP-1s do anything
| above what calorie restriction does.
|
| There is a linear relationship between calorie restriction and
| fat loss down to under 10% body fat. There is so much wrong
| information on calorie restriction from studies done on people
| who were literally starving with already very low body fat %.
| Then apply that to people with 25% body fat is just wrong.
|
| Westerners trying to lose weight don't have this problem. I
| think part of the obesity epidemic is this insane idea that
| calorie restriction is bad. Everyone kind of understands the
| thermodynamics of calories in / calories out. Everyone even
| kind of understands the benefits of fasting. At the same time
| though there is this nonsense that if you restrict calories too
| much you start burning all this muscle mass. It is patently
| absurd.
|
| Add up the calories of what a 250lb bodybuilder is eating for
| contest prep to lose fat and you will see they are "starving"
| too.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. READ ^THIS^, FRIENDS.
|
| In the end, it really is just metabolic math. As a former
| wrestler who did some insane weight-losing in my youth, the
| muscle mass loss is due to extreme calorie restriction.
| Besides, just sitting around starving is not a good way to
| become healthier in the long run, and that's where the muscle
| loss will be worst. To be a true journey towards better
| health, dieting should be accompied by at least a lot of
| walking and some light weight training, in the minimum.
|
| And don't forget your supplements, kids (addressing general
| readership), because our foods are less nutrient dense in
| 2025, so find out if some supplements help energy levels on
| the downslope. Me and my teenagers have taken a sip / mini-
| gulp of a product called 'Orgain' daily for a month or so,
| and I have found my energy better, while having less
| cravings. An entire little 11oz single-size drink is way too
| much for me (too many vitamins, makes me sleepy), having
| 'just a little bit' is not at all scientific, but we seem to
| be thriving on that little bit of supplementation.
|
| And, as always, avoid those processed sugars, kids! Whole
| sugar cane is very, very good for us, but only in moderate
| doses. Processed sugar is the crack cocaine of sugar cane, as
| opposed to just chewing a leaf of the coca plant.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| I only wrestled for 2 weeks in 8th grade but have ASICS
| MATCONTROL 3 on right now. My gym shoes :)
|
| High school wrestling though might push things too far.Many
| of those guys under heavyweight do not have the bodyfat %
| to be restricting so much so are actually losing muscle
| mass.
|
| I know Jordan Burroughs diet that I have seen seemed like
| maximum micro nutrients for the calorie because how else
| can you eat to be a 4 time world champion at 74kg?
|
| I am probably half an inch taller than Burroughs and 163lbs
| is impossible. It is too far. Way too far.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, I just went down a rabbit hole re-looking this up
| myself.
|
| It seems that there's nothing unique about semaglutide, and
| %FFM loss is just a function of how rapidly you lose weight.
|
| The most rapid losers on semaglutide have the same %FFM loss
| (30%) as bariatric patients, for example.
|
| And if you don't want to lose weight that fast, you can just
| temper the dose (unlike with bariatric surgery).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Or eat protein and exercise.
|
| I think it's extremely probable that the most rapid losers
| are running the largest calorie deficit and also the
| largest protein deficit.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| There is an age/hormone variable too.
|
| I would have said just eat protein and work out when I
| was in my teens, 20s and early 30s too.
|
| I am 48 and not on testosterone, yet. I actually can't
| recover at this point from workouts that burn enough
| calories vs working out less but more calorie restriction
| in terms of fat loss. Even 60 minute walks cause me to be
| more hungry to be able to recover from than what I can
| restrict without walking.
|
| I am at the final death throws of natural and not being
| on TRT basically. I have been pushing TRT out since my
| late 30s but have gone way too far.
|
| I think the TRT threshold probably be when you can't
| outrun calorie restriction by working out. For me, that
| has probably been since 43 or 44. By 46 for sure.
|
| Personally, I don't need GLP-1s. So many people though
| do.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| Keep in mind I am not using GLP-1s myself because I am
| unsure of the long term risks.
|
| What worries me is if what if in 20 years of use, something
| with insulin gets blown out?
|
| There is a chance it could be a drug for life like
| testosterone. We know though how devastating obesity is on
| health so it is really going to be up to the individual to
| take the risk. Not really my business at that level.
| lores wrote:
| The drug does not directly affect muscle mass (unless you are
| already very lean), but heavy people are doing resistance
| training against their own body weight all the time, so they
| are strong in the absolute, even if not relatively. Weigh less
| and your muscles have it easier, so weaken, unless you keep
| them strong with exercise.
| wincy wrote:
| I'm not sure that's exactly what's happening with GLP-1
| drugs. I lost 40 pounds very quickly on them and hurt my hip
| then my shoulder then my wrist. Felt like I was constantly
| getting muscle strains and random injuries.
|
| I started drinking a protein shake once a day and the random
| mysterious injuries stopped.
| lores wrote:
| I'm on them too, and after being seriously grumpy for a
| while it dawned on me that not being hungry doesn't mean my
| body doesn't need satisfying food. I think it's easy to
| fall into 'don't need to eat, won't eat' and then get some
| form of malnutrition. I force myself to make good food and
| just eat less of it, so far it worked *fingers crossed*
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| What you described doesn't seem to be in conflict with what
| he described
| wincy wrote:
| If the muscles had been reducing in concert with the
| reduced musculature needs of my body I wouldn't be
| injuring myself.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| the caloric restriction that these drugs engender can
| indeed lead to various forms of under-nourishment. as you
| point out, your protein needs (as a proportion of calorie
| sources) go UP when you are in caloric restriction; see
| PSMF.
| olalonde wrote:
| A single protein shake typically provides around 22g of
| protein, which is a small portion of the recommended daily
| intake for maintaining muscle, generally close to 1g of
| protein per pound of body weight. As an example, I'm
| currently on a weight loss diet and have a 180g of proteins
| target per day. Unless you were significantly under-
| consuming protein, it's unlikely that the shake alone made
| a major difference.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Such high recommendations are for people that want to
| maximize muscle retention / growth not people that just
| want to be healthy. You can get by on much less.
| olalonde wrote:
| Right but even on the low end of recommended daily
| protein intake, 22g would probably still be a small
| fraction.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The RDA is 0.37 g/pound. For a 180 pound guy, that means
| 67g of protein. That might sound low, but wait... At
| least according to this one page I found, 25% of American
| adults eat _below_ RDA. It 's not hard to imagine then
| that there are many people for whom 22g extra could make
| a decent difference.
| olalonde wrote:
| 0.37g/pound is on the very very low end though, far from
| optimal on a weight loss diet.
|
| See this article:
| https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/high-protein-diet-
| plan#...
|
| > The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of protein is
| 0.8 g per kilogram of body weight (g/kg/bw), or 0.36 g
| per pound of body weight (g/lbs/bw).
|
| > However, the authors of a 2019 review suggest that this
| number is often misinterpreted as the ideal number. It's
| only the minimum amount of protein required to prevent
| nutrient deficiencies and muscle loss in most healthy
| individuals.
|
| > A 2017 study found that participants who ate a high
| protein diet of 1.34 g/kg/bw (0.6 g/lbs/bw) for more than
| 75% of the 6-month duration experienced significantly
| more weight loss than the group who followed the RDA
| requirements.
|
| > A 2016 review found that eating up to 2 g/kg/bw (0.9
| g/lbs/bw) may help promote strength and prevent muscle
| degeneration.
|
| etc.
| sn9 wrote:
| But strength training is required anyone who wants to be
| healthy [0]. The RDA is just for avoiding clinical
| deficiency.
|
| [0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-
| priorit...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't think that's the mechanism. A caloric deficit causes
| your system to metabolize whatever it can. It likes fat
| because that's energy dense, but muscle is also a good source
| of energy as well, and the more rapid the weight loss, the
| more body mass it has to burn.
| lores wrote:
| As far as I know, muscle is only used when fat reserves are
| depleted or you don't eat enough protein for the brain's
| personal amino acid supply. I'm not particularly
| knowledgeable about this, though, maybe an expert can weigh
| in.
| coffeecantcode wrote:
| Not an expert, but from my own research muscle will
| always atrophy to its functionally base necessary mass,
| there are of course genetics involved in muscle mass
| retention as well that can't be overlooked. But you can
| be in a caloric deficit and your body is burning
| fat(which often times this leads to lower energy and less
| intense resistance training) while still losing muscle
| mass. I don't believe they're mutually exclusive.
|
| You're 100% right though, the key to retaining muscle
| mass while in a caloric deficit is consuming sufficient
| protein, or even over-consuming protein. In starvation
| situations muscle is next up after fat when getting
| consumed for energy but it seems like for the most part
| the muscle mass deterioration during significant weight
| loss periods is a natural side effect of the process and
| lifestyle required to accomplish it.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| >1) compared with persons with normal weight, those with
| obesity have more muscle mass but poor muscle quality; 2)
| diet-induced weight loss reduces muscle mass without
| adversely affecting muscle strength; 3) weight loss
| improves global physical function, most likely because of
| reduced fat mass; 4) high protein intake helps preserve
| lean body and muscle mass during weight loss but does not
| improve muscle strength and could have adverse effects on
| metabolic function; 5) both endurance- and resistance-
| type exercise help preserve muscle mass during weight
| loss, and resistance-type exercise also improves muscle
| strength. We therefore conclude that weight-loss therapy,
| including a hypocaloric diet with adequate (but not
| excessive) protein intake and increased physical activity
| (particularly resistance-type exercise), should be
| promoted to maintain muscle mass and improve muscle
| strength and physical function in persons with obesity.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5421125/
| guestbest wrote:
| Any calorie deficit of 500 under BMR and the body will
| not just consume the fat stores but also muscle. That's
| what I learned on the bodybuilding forums at least. Some
| people went too high on the deficit and ended up losing
| some muscle definition
| sn9 wrote:
| It's more likely to happen if your deficit below TDEE is
| greater than 500 Calories. If you're 500 below BMR,
| you're almost definitionally losing weight at an
| unsustainably unhealthy rate, like much greater than 1%
| of your bodyweight lost per week.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The body needs protein to function (the body is partially
| built out of protein, and also proteins perform many
| important functions in the body), and it cannot be
| synthesized from fat or carbs. The body also has no store
| of protein. This means that outside of dietary protein,
| breaking down muscles is the only option.
|
| Secondary to that, the body needs some amount of glucose.
| The best option for that is stored glycogen. When those
| stores run out the body can enter ketosis which reduces
| but does not eliminate the need for glucose. Fat consists
| of three fatty acids joined by a glycerol part. Most of
| the energy is in the fatty acids, but the glycerol can
| serve as a limited supply of glucose. However that is not
| really sufficient, so to get more glucose, and the other
| option is breaking down protein.
| znpy wrote:
| Both. Muscle loss is due to not eating enough proteins to
| maintain muscle mass.
|
| You can lose muscle mass without drugs just by eating poorly
| (and not doing adequate movement)
| pajamasam wrote:
| According to this article, it's a side effect of Ozempic
| itself. The article goes on to say that the newly discovered
| molecule can side-step the side-effect and metnioned that
| "obese mice treated with daily injections of BRP for 14 days
| lost an average of 3 grams--due almost entirely to fat loss..."
| stavros wrote:
| We don't know yet whether the muscle loss is caused by the
| drug itself or due to the weight loss, there are some studies
| but I haven't seen any conclusion yet one way or the other.
|
| Anecdotally, a friend of mine was on a diet and exercise
| regime, then at some point he switched to Mounjaro to reduce
| cravings, while keeping the same diet and exercise regime
| (he's a data geek so he documented things pretty well), and
| his muscle gain maybe slowed a tiny bit, but didn't reverse
| on Mounjaro.
|
| Sample size of one, but at least it's not zero.
| malfist wrote:
| Also sample size of one, but with the weight loss from
| semaglutide, I've gotten back in the gym and I can now lift
| more weight than I ever have. It feels fantastic (both the
| weight loss and being strong)
| stavros wrote:
| I envy you. I tried three times and got bad side effects
| each time, so I've given up :(
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I feel for you, friend. The safest way, however, is to
| make hunger your friend, and walk an hour or two a day.
| That may not work well with your work schedule, but you
| can override your body with your mind, unless your mind
| suffers because of our tech work's energy needs.
|
| And, it takes me a day or two to get past a processed
| sugar addiction. After those couple of days, the body
| starts getting used to not having that "crack" energy
| source be a part of its desire-base.
|
| Good luck, stavros, you can do it! And the sooner you
| start, the quicker you can get over the initial hump of
| resistence. Perhaps you can carrot yourself along by
| knowing that you _WILL_ feel much, much better as the
| pounds start coming off and your body starts being able
| to walk a bit further or lift a few more weights. Fight
| the food inertia, my brother.
|
| If you really want extra help, contact the Creator of the
| universe in the morning and evening, and ask It for help.
| If you do that with an intention to be able to better
| help others, you will find that the universe, itself,
| will become your ally.
| collin128 wrote:
| Same for me. Though I started weightlifting 3x a week to
| combat any potential muscle loss.
|
| I cycle frequently and the impact of the weight loss and
| added strength has made me feel much faster this year
| (and it's still rainy/cold season).
| solumunus wrote:
| It's just absolutely not the case though. These drugs are now
| rife in the bodybuilding community, combined with a high
| protein diet and resistance training muscle will be retained.
| There is no mechanistic action to suggest that muscle loss
| would be caused by these drugs, quite the opposite actually.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You can't answer the Ozempic case without looking at research
| that compares people who rapidly lost weight with vs without
| the drug, and then looking at the %FFM difference between
| them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's nearly always a side effect of weight loss, and it's a
| _good_ thing. It 's confusing how people act like it's bad.
|
| If you're obese, your legs are enormously strong with crazy
| amounts of muscle. Have you ever seen someone obese do leg
| presses at the gym? They can handle tons of weight.
|
| When you lose weight, you _don 't need all that extra muscle_.
| If you're carrying around 180 lbs instead of 300 lbs on your
| frame, all that extra muscle goes away because there's no point
| in keeping it. This is a _good thing_.
|
| Even if you go from 200 lbs to 180 lbs, there's a level of
| muscle you don't need anymore.
|
| Losing muscle as you lose weight is natural and good. Now,
| obviously you don't want to lose so much that you become weak
| for your size, but that won't happen if you continue to be
| physically active. Your body is exceptionally good at
| maintaining the exact right level of muscle to meet the regular
| stresses it undergoes. (Provided you are eating enough protein,
| but that's easy.)
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think the downside is that you don't just lose muscle in
| your legs and core, but rather you lose muscle mass all over.
| Yes, this is the expected result of calorie restriction but
| the issue is that when people lose a lot of weight without
| taking action to build and maintain muscle the amount of
| muscle loss they experience can cause other problems. Someone
| relying on a GLP-1 drug is often someone who isn't very
| active at all.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but rather you lose muscle mass all over._
|
| Well, you lose weight all over. You lose fat in your arms
| and your shoulders don't need to be quite as strong. You
| lose weight on your face and your neck muscles don't need
| to be quite as strong. You lose _more_ in your legs, but
| you 're _supposed_ to lose muscle mass all over.
|
| > _Someone relying on a GLP-1 drug is often someone who isn
| 't very active at all._
|
| Sure, but that's a completely separate issue. It doesn't
| have anything to do with weight loss. Being in good strong
| physical shape is great, but nobody should expect weight
| loss to magically result in _strength_. That 's like
| thinking you can stop going to the gym but won't lose any
| of the muscle you'd previously built up. It's got nothing
| to do with _weight loss_ though. It 's got to do with the
| fact that you're not working out.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The problem is that fat, sick people lose a lot of weight
| and muscle mass and then become skinny and frail. It just
| puts you at risk of other medical issues. In older
| individuals this can cause decreased mobility and raise
| the risk of falls. Its well documented in medical
| literature, that's why people worry about it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But my point is that _this is no different from being
| skinny and frail in the first place_. It has nothing to
| do with losing weight.
|
| Yes, that puts you at risk. That's why you should
| exercise, even if it just means daily walks.
|
| The point is, you're not winding up with too little
| muscle because you lost weight. If you're winding up with
| too little muscle, it's because you're not being
| physically active enough. If you're physically active,
| _you won 't lose the muscle that you still need_ even as
| you lose weight.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > The point is, you're not winding up with too little
| muscle because you lost weight
|
| Imagine someone eating only candy and pastries, but
| because they eat so huge amounts, they actually get a
| half-decent amount of protein. Then they decrease portion
| size with the help of appetite suppresants.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I explicitly made clear in my original comment:
|
| > _Provided you are eating enough protein, but that 's
| easy._
|
| If you're trying to lose weight eating only candy and
| pastries, then we're having an entirely different
| conversation...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| If you were physically active enough and careful about
| your diet you likely wouldn't be on a GPL-1 drug. That's
| the point. People end up in bad shape for a lot of
| reasons, including injury. The search for a mechanism to
| burn fat without losing muscle is to help support people
| who are on GLP-1 drug because for whatever reason they
| were insufficiently active.
| sn9 wrote:
| Spot reduction of fat is a myth.
| architango wrote:
| This is exactly why hand-to-hand combat instructors will tell
| you that fighting an obese person will go very differently
| than you might think it will.
| mikenew wrote:
| That is absurd. Muscle mass is a huge predictor of mortality
| and anyone who isn't actively strength training and
| maintaining higher levels of muscle would see a health
| benefit by doing so. The idea that an overweight person has
| "too much muscle" is nonsense.
|
| The side affect of muscle loss from these glp-1 agonist drugs
| is a serious downside that everyone should be aware of and
| try to mitigate if they choose to take them.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _The idea that an overweight person has "too much muscle"
| is nonsense._
|
| I think you've misunderstood GP. He's not saying they have
| too much muscle when they're overweight. He's saying that
| take that exact same amount of muscle, subtract a ton of
| fat from their upper bodies, _then_ they have "too much
| muscle" as typically needed for their body mass. I don't
| agree with their phrasing, but the point isn't "nonsense."
| mikenew wrote:
| I understand the point. Mine is that an ordinary
| untrained person will see health benefits and a
| statistically longer life from more muscle. An overweight
| person would have more muscle than their non-overweight
| counterparts (mostly localized to the legs, not upper
| body), and that is the one and only positive of being
| overweight. Willfully throwing that away will harm your
| health, full stop. The muscle loss problem with these
| drugs is talked about a lot because it is in fact a
| problem. Not because the medical field is mistaken in
| thinking it's a bad thing.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Your complaint doesn't make sense to me. The negative
| health impact of being obese isn't equalized by having a
| little more muscle mass.
|
| Also, if this is your stance, then GLP-1 is a red herring
| because you have the same issue with weight loss in
| general. Weight loss, without increasing resistance
| training, leads to muscle loss.
| Retric wrote:
| There's negative cardiovascular effects from excess
| muscle just as with excess fat.
|
| Normally that's offset by the health effects of the
| exercise required to gain and maintain them as well as
| the lack of medical conditions that prevent exercise etc.
| But a fat person losing weight should inherently lose
| muscle mass long term assuming no changes to lifestyle.
| obvi8 wrote:
| I was looking for this comment! Not a doctor, but as I
| understand it muscle is roughly equivalent to fat as far
| as your heart's workload is concerned. I thought I also
| read that muscle movement helps with blood return.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > _then_ they have "too much muscle" as typically needed
| for their body mass
|
| It's a leap to suggest that it's "good" to lose this
| muscle mass. If you're obese then it's good to lose fat.
| It's even better to do so while maintaining muscle mass.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, but whether you do resistance training while losing
| weight so that you have proportionally extra muscle mass
| than you had when you were overweight has nothing to do
| with the GLP-1 drug.
|
| Every time GLP-1 drugs come up, the convo splinters off
| into topics that have nothing to do with anything unique
| to the drug. Now we're just talking about general weight
| loss and that it's good to exercise. Which is a trivial
| claim.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah that's obviously better. They really meant it's "not
| bad" rather than "good".
|
| When people read "muscle loss" they think "oh it's going
| to make me weak and feeble".
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Yea what you're replying to is just pure fat-logic that
| isn't really backed by science. You will lose muscle from
| calorie restriction - that isn't really in doubt by anyone.
| However, when cutting weight, you can do a routine that
| maintains/builds muscle as you cut, to reduce the effect. A
| body with more lean muscle mass will be able to keep weight
| off for longer - this has been known, settled, and accepted
| in weight loss and fitness science for decades now. I've
| never heard anyone, anywhere posit that muscle loss is
| _good_ - and would love to see a source, so I can laugh at
| it.
|
| One insidious thing with these GLP1 drugs, is that they
| also seemingly affect muscles like the heart. I would not
| be willing to take one unless the risk of me carrying my
| weight far outweighed (no pun intended) the risk of the
| side effects. However, a lot of people seem to be treating
| it as some kind of miracle fad diet drug, which is
| concerning.
|
| It also has other side effects like reduced elasticity on
| skin, etc. I suspect we'll see longer term issues in the
| next decade from these drugs, and I'm glad alternatives are
| being explored.
| cma wrote:
| Don't you also need a bigger heart when you gain weight
| and not need as big of one at less weight? Liposuction
| and amputations can also result in muscle loss in the
| heart from it having less work to do.
| badosu wrote:
| You don't want to have too much hypertrophy in the heart
| for sure. My understanding though is that it's very hard
| (almost impossible?) for it to be a problem without
| exogenous hormones, or some other condition that allows
| you to accrue an abnormal amount of muscle mass (e.g.
| myostatin defficiency).
|
| Edit: I mean someone with a healthy fat percentage body
| composition. Of course having to pump blood to a
| 300lb-140kg body is problematic for the heart, be it a
| mostly fat or mostly muscle body composition. My point is
| it's just much easier to be fat enough for it to be a
| problem than muscular enough without exogenous hormones
| or an abnormal condition.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Yea what you 're replying to is just pure fat-logic_
|
| I can't even imagine what that's supposed to mean.
|
| > _However, when cutting weight, you can do a routine
| that maintains /builds muscle as you cut, to reduce the
| effect._
|
| I literally talked about staying physically active.
|
| The point is, you're going to have _however much muscle
| your workouts and physical activity build /maintain_. And
| you're going to _lose_ whatever extra muscle isn 't
| needed in your workouts. And that's fine, because you
| probably want well-balanced strength rather than legs
| that can carry around 300 lbs all day long.
|
| None of this has _anything_ to do with weight loss,
| except that simply walking around and daily movement
| becomes less of a workout as you lose weight because you
| 're moving less mass. But _it 's not the weight loss
| directly_ that makes you lose muscle (assuming you're
| eating protein), _it 's the reduced physical strain
| because you weigh less so you're not needing those
| muscles_. Do you get the distinction?
|
| You don't need to work out _even more_ to "reduce the
| effect" as you say. There's no effect. There's just
| working out to have whatever muscles you want. Weight
| loss will never lead to losing the level of muscle you
| need for your workout.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > I can't even imagine what that's supposed to mean.
|
| Where are you getting your information from?
| sn9 wrote:
| The reason you want to keep all your muscle on a cut is
| because that means a higher proportion of the weight that
| you do lose will be fat tissue.
|
| This is the strictly superior outcome.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you're "cutting" as part of bulking and cutting, then
| obviously.
|
| But if you're going from obese to healthy, then your goal
| isn't to retain all your leg muscle, that's absurd. Your
| goal is to get to a healthy weight with overall
| _balanced_ healthy muscle -- not disproportionately large
| legs.
|
| Nothing is "strictly superior". What is best depends on
| what your goals are. Bodybuilding and not being obese any
| more involve wildly different measures of success.
| sn9 wrote:
| No this is absurd.
|
| The goal for anyone obese is to lose as much fat as
| sustainably possible.
|
| For any given rate of weight loss, losing a higher
| proportion of body fat is always better.
|
| This notion of "balanced" healthy muscle is one you've
| made up that no one else thinks of. I've been on fitness
| forums for well over a decade and have literally never
| seen a single case of this.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The goal for anyone obese is to lose as much fat as
| sustainably possible._
|
| Correct.
|
| > _For any given rate of weight loss, losing a higher
| proportion of body fat is always better._
|
| That is in direct contradiction to your previous
| sentence. No, losing the higher _absolute_ amount of body
| fat is better. While being sustainable healthy.
|
| > _I 've been on fitness forums for well over a decade
| and have literally never seen a single case of this._
|
| You may be on the wrong forums then. Most forums don't
| think all your days should be leg days.
| Izkata wrote:
| > One insidious thing with these GLP1 drugs, is that they
| also seemingly affect muscles like the heart.
|
| Okay so I don't know where I picked this up - it was a
| decade or more ago - but I always thought the problem was
| losing weight _too fast_ is what causes bad muscle loss
| such as from the heart, or from leg /other muscles beyond
| what's no longer needed from the weight loss. Something
| like, you're starving yourself so your body starts
| drawing energy not just from your fat but from anywhere
| it can.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is a huge conflation of cause and effect with respect
| to muscle mass and longevity.
|
| Low muscle mass is associated a broad swath of illnesses,
| low activity, and generally poor health.
|
| Muscle mass's power as a predictor is not the same as it's
| utility as an intervention.
| naasking wrote:
| As long as you're not using exogenous hormones, muscle
| mass can only be achieved with exercise that builds or
| preserves muscle. I'd say that's a pretty good predictor
| against frailty, which is strongly associated with
| mortality among the elderly.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Exactly my point! you have a chain of 3 associations
| right there. One is nearly tautological and another has
| backwards causality. Correlation =/= causation.
|
| Something being a good a good predicative indicator does
| not mean it is an effective intervention.
| sn9 wrote:
| "Muscle" isn't an intervention.
|
| "Building muscle" is an intervention and has extremely
| well-documented mechanisms that have a causal role in
| improving health.
| naasking wrote:
| There is no backwards causality in the implication that
| building or preserving muscle that would otherwise be
| lost can prevent or delay frailty, nor is it backwards to
| imply that frailty can lead to death (from falls,
| disease, etc.). I really don't understand what you're
| trying to say.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| True, but frailty in the old age has a reason that cannot
| fully be mitigated with exercise: depletion of stem
| cells. The same mechanism will make our blood vessels
| thin and prone to bursting etc.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "The idea that an overweight person has "too much muscle"
| is nonsense."
|
| Our bodies like to have a balance of everything.
|
| "Muscle mass is a huge predictor of mortality"
|
| In biology, most such predictors work only up to a point.
| Massively muscular people don't live to be 120. Bodies
| don't work in a straightforward fashion, and there are
| other effects to consider. For example, activation of the
| mTOR pathway, associated with tissue growth, is associated
| with shorter lifespan, and mTOR inhibitors like rapamycin
| seem to be modestly prolonging lives of many species.
| solumunus wrote:
| Complete nonsense.
| BSOhealth wrote:
| My read on past studies is that one area of muscle mass loss
| that is problematic is around the heart.
|
| Obviously it's not a problem if an obese person's quads
| shrinks 2x because they lift 2x weight every day.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I would think any drastic change to body composition would
| have its risks, and should be mitigated through healthy
| diet and exercise. I suspect the detractors are quick to
| overemphasize such risks because users of weight loss drugs
| aren't 'earning' it. My counterargument would be that it's
| better to be underexercised and _normal weight_ than to be
| underexercised and _overweight_. And I suspect being normal
| weight makes exercise more pleasant.
| naasking wrote:
| > Losing muscle as you lose weight is natural and good.
|
| It's natural but that doesn't make it good. In particular,
| muscle loss can cause heart problems because the heart is a
| muscle. The body's catabolic processes don't distinguish
| between different kinds of muscle.
| consteval wrote:
| I don't think this is true. My understanding is that the
| heart is a very unique muscle because it doesn't grow. If
| your heart does grow, either by genetic defect or anabolic
| abuse, it works much worse. So you'll live a shorter life.
| naasking wrote:
| Heart muscle can shrink in extreme calorie deficits which
| can lead to heart issues, therefore it must grow when
| leaving such calorie deficits, even if that growth has an
| upper bound.
| sn9 wrote:
| Hypertrophy of the heart is a well-known and desired part
| of improving cardiovascular fitness.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise#Health_eff
| ect...
| timewizard wrote:
| > Have you ever seen someone obese do leg presses at the gym?
| They can handle tons of weight.
|
| They can't handle reps. It's almost as if muscle has several
| different properties that are important beyond just "mass."
| jleyank wrote:
| Remember, weight loss is a side effect of the Ozempic family of
| drugs. It was intended as a type 2 diabetes drug and it's quite
| successful in that area. Once alternate applications are
| revealed, drug design gets involved to develop alternatives.
| Medchemists and marketeers are clever...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > weight loss is a side effect of the Ozempic family of drugs.
| It was intended as a type 2 diabetes drug and it's quite
| successful in that area.
|
| You can't call it a side effect simply because the drug was
| first studied for a different condition.
|
| Weight loss is a primary effect of the drug and it's the
| indication it was approved for after extensive research.
|
| Many drugs are first discovered while looking for some other
| effect.
| poidos wrote:
| Viagra is a famous example.
| jleyank wrote:
| As I said, marketeers are clever.... And physicians can
| prescribe for anything they'd like - pharma is restricted
| to approvals before advertising.
| derektank wrote:
| That's not quite right. The clinical indication for Wegovy (and
| Zepbound for that matter) is, "As an adjunct to a reduced-
| calorie diet and increased physical activity for chronic weight
| management in adult patients with an initial BMI of 30 kg/m2 or
| greater (obesity)". Obesity itself is the disease the drug is
| approved to treat.
|
| Now, Wegovy has the same active ingredient as Ozempic
| (Semaglutide), ditto for Zepbound and Mounjaro (Tirzepatide),
| and the latter have been prescribed off label for weight loss
| in the past but it's not just a marketing gimmick. These are
| different drugs in the eyes of the FDA because they are
| prescribed for different things (obesity vs. type 2 diabetes).
| jleyank wrote:
| Different indications and approval to market. Different names
| for, umm, clarity in the marketplace. Same generic if/when
| they're released. I would think this would be way easier than
| biologics as it's not that big.
|
| As I said above, they ran it through some amount of clinical
| trials and got approval to mention it directly. Same drug
| matter, possibly the same formulations.
| zzzeek wrote:
| "The study would not have been possible without the use of
| artificial intelligence to weed through dozens of proteins in a
| class called prohormones."
|
| "the researchers designed a computer algorithm they named
| "Peptide Predictor" to identify typical prohormone convertase
| cleavage sites in all 20,000 human protein-coding genes."
|
| so look, when I have to go around talking to normies, they're
| like, "don't you think AI is going to take over everything?" and
| for these folks, "AI" means *one thing*: chatgpt or similar LLMs.
| So when they read this, they're like, "see? AI! we need AI
| everywhere! chatgpt assistants!" and then I pretty much have to
| lose my shit and they think I'm crazy, because they have no clue.
| This is also kind of like how it is deep inside all the corporate
| hype departments so many of us have to endure where our
| management is chucking shitty LLM garbage at us all day ordering
| us to "integrate this ! integrate that! we need AI (by which they
| mean hallucinating chatbots)".
|
| That is NOT what they used here. They wrote their own algorithm
| which we'd assume uses some straightforward machine learning
| approach such as bayesian filtering (edit: it's literally just a
| python + R script with some training data:
| https://github.com/Svensson-Lab/pro-hormone-predictor/tree/m...)
| . and in fact, I bet the researchers are calling this short
| script "AI" because _their_ investors /bosses/managers are
| demanding they "use AI". Machine learning is a WAY more accurate
| term than "AI" which IMO is a completely useless hype term at
| this point, and it's making our lives as engineers worse having
| to deal with the whole world thinking robots are taking over and
| making our bosses obsessed with our having to "use AI" for
| everything (which is of course because they'd eventually like to
| have fewer employees).
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I wonder how this molecule will compare with gold nanoparticles
| [1]. Headline: _Gold outperforms common weight loss drugs - and
| leaves muscles alone_
|
| [1] https://newatlas.com/disease/obesity/gold-nanoparticles-
| obes...
| Procrastes wrote:
| > and leaves muscles alone
|
| But might destroy your bone marrow's ability to create blood
| cells[1].
|
| 1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/aplastic-
| anem...
| catigula wrote:
| Does anyone actually believe that GLP-1s directly target muscle
| tissue?
|
| Losing a ton of weight, especially very quickly, is extremely
| catabolic. Any substance that prevents this would by definition
| be an anabolic substance.
| braza wrote:
| Maybe this one relates more with the Americans because Ozempic
| became a trend there: Why are most people jumping on this drug?
| At least for me, besides all the cliches and stereotypes about
| the USA people, there's huge access to nutrition, gyms, surgical
| procedures, capital for buying healthy food, and medicine in
| general.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _At least for me...there 's huge access to...capital._
|
| This is not true for more people in the US than the populations
| of most other countries.
|
| It's also weird to ask why people would do the obvious easy
| thing that takes no time or effort over the thing that takes
| more time and more effort. I bet you also make the exact same
| decision in a bunch of other contexts every day. Just use the
| pattern matching part of your brain to apply the same
| motivation to a new context.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Nutritious food is harder to prepare and/or doesn't taste as
| good in some cases, surgeries and other drugs have side
| effects, gym is a pain to go to.
|
| Also even though the US has high wages, everybody feels vaguely
| poor and stressed about money for some reason. There are a lot
| of little nickel-and-dime fees because we don't have a good
| safety net, consumer protection, and we don't have public
| healthcare.
|
| (I'm not on Ozempic and I recently lost weight by just eating
| less, but I get why people want it, the alternatives are
| annoying).
| derektank wrote:
| Exercise is great for your health, but it generally has a
| negligible effect on weight loss because exercise doesn't
| actually consume that many calories. The biggest benefit of
| exercise on weight loss is the temporary exercise-induced
| anorexia that occurs in _very_ high intensity workouts.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You are so full of shit.
|
| I get on the treadmill for 1 hour and consume 700 calories in
| that hour.
|
| Heavy exercise also causes improved appetite and sleep
| regulation as it fixes your blood sugar levels. This leads to
| your demand for food and especially the worst kinds to
| paradoxically go down for most fat people (they were already
| eating too many calories)
|
| Calories in and calories out shows that I will durably lose
| weight over a several month period with 1 hr on the treadmill
| every other day - a totally doable number for motivated
| people.
|
| I swear to gosh that all the people who say "you can't outrun
| your fork" are fatties.
|
| The issue is that the willpower to exercise for most people
| is trash. Most people who claimed they did high impact
| exercise and didn't see weight loss simply didn't actually do
| high impact exercise.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Most obese and very overweight people cannot sustain the
| output of 700 calories an hour, cardiovascularly (spelling)
| or with the state of their knees and muscles.
|
| Also, it's very easy to eat an extra 700 calories
| especially if you are in the "I worked out so I deserve a
| treat" camp.
|
| Your lack of understanding comes across in your stance as
| well as the attitude.
|
| Yes exercise is fantastic for your quality of life years
| and all cause mortality, but it's not the whole story.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Americans are overweight.
|
| Our entire food chain is full of preservatives, carcinogens,
| and things that should not be consumed by living beings .
|
| I've spent small amounts of time in Europe, and each time
| literally just eating whatever junk food I wanted, I came home
| losing 10 or 20 pounds. The food outside of the US is just
| fundamentally better.
|
| Let's say you're a teenager and you want to buy yourself some
| soda, in America the vast majority of the time you're not
| getting real sugar, you're getting hyper processed corn syrup.
| Before you know it all types of weird crap isn't everything you
| eat. And this has disastrous effects .
|
| Ozempic is really a shortcut to an extremely complicated
| problem. Realistically if you want to eat quality food you have
| to move to another country, it's that bad.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| This is basically a meme at this point -
|
| Sandwich, US >:|
|
| Sandwich, Japan :O
|
| I don't know what to believe anymore. I think sugar isn't
| good for you, whether it's "real" processed sugar, or HFCS
| which is a fructose ratio that is the same as honey, or agave
| syrup which has even more fructose.
|
| And, other countries have obesity problems too - e.g. Mexico
| and the UK. Are they tainted by... whatever... is the actual
| problem (or problems) with the US's food supply?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| In mexico (and south and Latin americas) case it's
| primarily due to taking our obsession with sugar and
| multiplying it. They drink even more sugary soda than we
| do, and their deserts like tres leche cake are so delicious
| because they are diabetes on a plate.
| artemsokolov wrote:
| There's some misinformation here.
|
| The US does use more additives like BHA or potassium bromate
| (possible carcinogens--can you name others you're thinking
| of?), but their link to obesity isn't clear. As for soda,
| 'hyper processed corn syrup' I suppose just means high-
| fructose corn syrup (HFCS)--what's the big difference you see
| from sugar? Research, like this meta-analysis
| (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/), shows
| HFCS and sugar are metabolically similar in typical amounts,
| no disaster there.
|
| Your weight loss in Europe might be more about activity than
| food quality. Short trips often mean more walking and
| exploring, which burns calories, even if you're eating junk.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This is the truth - and it's infuriating that assholes like
| RFK purport to want to remove nasty stuff from our food
| supply, but outside of total meme shit like a few red dyes
| and fake nonsense about seed oils being uniquely bad, he's
| doing nothing to fix our insanely low quality and under
| regulated food supply.
|
| I have had exactly the same experience as you every time I
| travel outside of the USA (luckily I'm already in good
| shape). I always come back skinnier than I left.
|
| It's infuriating that the only politicians who I can rely on
| to significantly regulate the ingredients in our food supply
| to remove slop will be hard left folks like Bernie Sanders -
| a breed of politicians which are going extinct.
|
| But yes RFK, moving us to butter and tallow instead of fking
| seed oils will fix everything!!! (eyeroll)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I think there's just too much money in the way things are
| set up .
|
| And that goes for almost everything in the United States.
| It doesn't take a rocket scientist to say food created
| using natural ingredients is probably better for you than
| something that came out of a lab. In the name of extending
| shelf life, everything is just saturated with as many
| preservatives as possible.
|
| While this is great for something like emergency rations
| you shouldn't eat this stuff every day.
|
| It's all about maximum profit. They sell us food that's
| optimized to remain sellable later.
|
| Then this food makes you sick and depressed, so they sell
| you a bunch of drugs to "treat" that. The goal isn't
| healthy happy people. It's all about return customers.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > junk food I wanted, I came home losing 10 or 20 pounds.
|
| Maybe you caught some bug or something?
|
| > The food outside of the US is just fundamentally better.
|
| Meh... I'm from Europe and it's about the same, if you are at
| least somewhat selective about what you eat (and it might be
| much harder and/or expensive to do that in some places).
| consteval wrote:
| It's a very complicated issue, but I think, at its core, it's
| because those other solutions just don't work.
|
| I mean, they work for a lot of people all the time. But they've
| existed forever, and over the past 50 years the obesity
| epidemic has only gotten worse.
|
| Clearly, just offering things as available to people is not a
| systematic solution to this.
| moduspol wrote:
| I lost ~55 pounds on a similar drug over about 10 months during
| 2023-2024.
|
| The drug avoids the need for any kind of willpower. You don't
| have to go out of your way or make lifestyle changes to lose
| weight. You don't even have to eat different food, but you'll
| almost certainly eat a lot less of it.
|
| That's just a dramatically preferable proposition than changing
| one's lifestyle, diet, and habits manually, and then keeping
| all that going for the rest of one's life.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I'm disappointed that a lot of the GLP-1 drugs are losing the
| emergency compounding rules that lowered the price to about
| $200/month, instead of $500 to $1000/month it will be by April.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| On Google I find that this is already used to treat diabetes:
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/semaglutide-sub...
|
| here are the side effects;
|
| Side Effects Along with its needed effects, a medicine may cause
| some unwanted effects. Although not all of these side effects may
| occur, if they do occur they may need medical attention.
|
| Check with your doctor immediately if any of the following side
| effects occur:
|
| More common Belching Bloated, full feeling Constipation Diarrhea
| Excess air or gas in the stomach or intestines Gaseous stomach
| pain Heartburn Indigestion Nausea Passing gas Stomach discomfort,
| fullness, or pain Vomiting Less common Recurrent fever Yellow
| eyes or skin Rare Burning feeling in the chest or stomach Stomach
| upset Tenderness in the stomach area Incidence not known Anxiety
| Blurred vision Chest tightness Chills Cold sweats Confusion Cool,
| pale skin Cough Darkened urine Difficulty swallowing
| Discouragement Dizziness Fast heartbeat Feeling sad or empty
| Headache Hives, itching Increased heart rate Increased hunger
| Irritability Lack of appetite Large, hive-like swelling on the
| face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat, hands, legs, feet, or sex
| organs Loss of consciousness Loss of interest or pleasure
| Nightmares Pains in stomach, side, or abdomen, possibly radiating
| to the back Puffiness or swelling of the eyelids or around the
| eyes, face, lips, or tongue Redness of the skin Seizures
| Shakiness Skin rash Slurred speech Tiredness Trouble breathing
| Trouble concentrating Trouble sleeping Unusual tiredness or
| weakness Some side effects may occur that usually do not need
| medical attention. These side effects may go away during
| treatment as your body adjusts to the medicine. Also, your health
| care professional may be able to tell you about ways to prevent
| or reduce some of these side effects. Check with your health care
| professional if any of the following side effects continue or are
| bothersome or if you have any questions about them:
|
| Less common Hair loss Rare Bleeding, blistering, burning,
| coldness, discoloration of the skin, feeling of pressure, hives,
| infection, inflammation, itching, lumps, numbness, pain, rash,
| redness, scarring, soreness, stinging, swelling, tenderness,
| tingling, ulceration, or warmth at the injection site Change in
| taste Loss of taste Other side effects not listed may also occur
| in some patients. If you notice any other effects, check with
| your healthcare professional.
| thayne wrote:
| Since it is naturally occurring, it isn't patentable. Which means
| it is less likely that companies will develop a commercial
| product from it.
|
| Why pay to get FDA approval, if you don't get a government
| granted monopoly on it afterwards?
|
| This is one problem with using patents as the mechanism to
| incentivise development of medicine.
| ramoz wrote:
| The article did refer to patents.
|
| https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Katrin+Svensson
|
| It would seem they are modifying peptides. Which is patentable.
| nine_k wrote:
| If the molecule itself is not patentable, the process of
| efficient extraction or synthesis may be. So, if somebody can
| come up with it, they may have a thriving business.
|
| The substance in question is a peptide. It's not something you
| simply extract from a plant using a solvent. OTOH, being a
| peptide, it's likely easy enough to produce in a genetically
| engineered bacterium or yeast. Efficient extraction may remain
| a problem though, because you'll need to select a particular
| protein fragment (the peptide) from reams of other protein
| fragments of the bacterial / fungal cells you process.
| catigula wrote:
| I've always been very, very skeptical of this claim.
|
| If there's an actual natural, identified substance with huge
| benefits to people, it's going to go gangbusters and you're
| going to make a lot, LOT of money selling it, even if you're
| doing it via roadside lemonade stand.
|
| It feels like this claim is usually used to promote cures and
| treatments with extremely low quality RCTs backing their use as
| a sort of panacea.
|
| I used to believe the "just do shrooms to cure depression"
| claims on principle until I looked into the quality of those
| studies, which is very low. At that point, you're just making
| stuff up.
| robbs wrote:
| Caffeine is an example. Coffee and energy drinks are doing
| well I'd say.
| nepthar wrote:
| That's an excellent point
| throwup238 wrote:
| Caffeine is grandfathered in as a Generally Recognized as
| Safe food additive. If energy drink companies had to go
| through clinical trials with no patent protection for each
| drink formula, they wouldn't make them.
| catigula wrote:
| Why was caffeine studied? Why does it continue to be
| studied?
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's a lot cheaper to study something in academia than to
| do a full clinical trial.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think the current regulatory regime in many US states
| allows companies to make a killing off of selling
| naturally occurring bioactive substances as dietary
| supplements with few regulatory hurdles.
|
| Kratom, CBD, and delta-8 THC are naturally occurring
| bioactive substances that are newer to the US market.
| Both have carved out a pretty nice economic niche with a
| bunch of claimed health benefits.
|
| A couple of years back, I saw a sign outside a fancy
| legal highs shop in Fishtown, Philadelphia touting the
| benefits of kratom as a pre-workout supplement. The
| insanity that a business was advertising an addictive
| opioid to healthy, opioid-naive people for better gains
| in the gym almost makes me want more regulation in this
| area.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Isn't it relatively easy to sell anything "naturally
| occurring" as a supplement? I think there is very little
| regulation (of course if you want to claim it's a drug
| and presumably charge much more for it it's another
| matter).
|
| Even synthetic research chemicals are generally legal as
| long as you add a "not for human consumption" label (and
| they aren't explicitly banned or analogous to other
| illegal/regulated drugs).
| marpstar wrote:
| I'm skeptical of your claim because if there's any additional
| margin to be made doing it artificially, at big-pharma scale
| history shows that they plenty willing to squeeze every penny
| out that they can even if it's less effective/natural.
| catigula wrote:
| That's true, but doesn't really squeeze natural
| alternatives out of the market if they're effective.
|
| For example, there's a prescription engineered version of
| melatonin.
|
| Melatonin is still a huge business.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Red Yeast rice exists, and so does lovastatin (Altoprev)
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Right, but there is a free rider problem. Why should a
| company spend $100 million doing clinical trials to get FDA
| approval if once it is approved, all other companies can sell
| it, even though they didn't pay anything? Even if every actor
| in the market thinks there will be a good return on
| investment if they get FDA approval, there is a strong
| incentive to instead wait for someone else to do it and free
| ride on them. The result is no one acts.
|
| Clinical trials are a significant expense in developing a
| drug. Kind of makes me think we should award patents not for
| coming up with some molecule, but instead award them for
| showing a molecule is safe and effective.
| catigula wrote:
| CBD, which doesn't appear to have a fraction of the
| therapeutic efficacy of something like Ozempic, is a multi-
| hundred billion dollar industry now with a lot of active
| research.
| tokai wrote:
| Lithium is a good counter. It is by far the best treatment
| for bipolar 1, and its cheap and easy to source. Prices for
| lithium carbonate and other lithium medicament's are not at
| all cheap, and there are not a lot of medical companies
| producing it. There has even been shortages. Instead
| antipsychotics have been pushed as a preferred treatment,
| even though the outcomes are worse than with lithium.
| hollerith wrote:
| Lithium in dosages effective in treating a mood disorder is
| quite toxic (e.g., to the kidneys) so most of the price is
| probably to offset the risk of lawsuit awards.
| astura wrote:
| But antipsychotics cause movement disorders and metabolic
| syndrome.
| tokai wrote:
| With regular blood checks its not an issue. You can catch
| it before the kidneys take damage. Antipsychotics are
| literally neurotoxic (first gen atleast).
| ac29 wrote:
| > Prices for lithium carbonate and other lithium
| medicament's are not at all cheap
|
| You can buy a 3 month supply of Lithium Orotate for like
| $10. I certainly wouldnt recommend self prescribing this
| kind of thing though.
| virtue3 wrote:
| It's not enough dosing to treat bipolar.
|
| You have to dose relatively high in order to have an
| effect. You're disrupting your neural sodium-potassium
| pumps with it.
|
| But it's still pretty cheap. Hard to charge a lot for a
| fairly abundant element.
| thayne wrote:
| Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) is both significantly cheaper,
| and less risky than epidurals for reducing pain during
| childbirth. Yet, in the US, most hospitals don't even offer
| it as an option, and I think a major part of that is that
| patented epidurals have much higher margins, so that is what
| the medical suppliers push.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I doubt it. It's very commonly offered in the UK and while
| it's cheap and safe, based on what I've seen it's also not
| effective at all. Forget the same league, it's not even
| playing the same game as an epidural. An epidural is a drip
| of opioids right to your spine. Proper hardcore.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Other mentioned extraction and such, but semaglutide had been
| known for some time, the other half of the problem is delivery.
| You'll notice the article says the calorie intake was decreased
| _an hour_ later. You need to make it stable, long lasting, and
| via a delivery method that people can tolerate.
|
| Giving yourself an injection an hour before you eat or an hour
| before you are hungry isn't going to work.
| nerdponx wrote:
| If only there was a way for the people to pool their collective
| resources, maybe each contributing a fraction of their annual
| income (with a greater contribution proportion at higher
| incomes), and put those resources towards development of thins
| that benefit the common good but lack a direct profit
| incentive. Hmm...
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| CRISPR is naturally occurring, but got patented to hell.
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Nestle is making billions of dollars -- off water.
| cwmma wrote:
| this is 1000% not true, plenty of naturally occurring
| substances are turned into profitable medicine, aspirin and
| insulin are examples off the top of my head.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's not exactly true. Cannabidiol (CBD) is naturally
| occurring and there's a commercial FDA approved drug for
| epileptic seizures in children called Epidiolex. If I remember
| correctly, the patent is for "Oral cannabinoid formulations".
|
| Even without a patent, companies can get FDA exclusivity but
| for not as long as a patent grants them so unless the
| addressable market is huge, it's a financially riskier bet.
| greggsy wrote:
| Keyword there being 'formulation', not 'molecule'
| xracy wrote:
| I'm sorry, your hypothesis is that people will be _less_ likely
| to try and build products around a naturally occurring weight-
| loss drug?
|
| Like, less likely than they would be to pay Ozempic to use
| their patent? I mean, I could believe that if there weren't
| like Billions of dollars being funneled into weight-loss
| programs and foods that don't have any demonstrative weight-
| loss capabilities.
|
| If this actually works and is naturally occurring, I'd be
| surprised if there weren't like enterprising startups and food
| companies adding this to existing products within a year or 2.
| conductr wrote:
| I feel like the natural occurring property makes it more likely
| a supplement company will bring it to market without FDA
| requirements. The path to market should be simpler from my
| understanding of this space, please correct me if that's
| incorrect
| raylad wrote:
| This is the press release that is being republished with ads in
| the post link https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-
| news/2025/03/ozempic-rival...
| anotherpaul wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08683-y
|
| This seems to be the paper, but its behind a paywall.
|
| Anyone with access can tell me if they publish the 12mer amino
| acid sequence? Is there more to it (post translational
| modifications)
|
| Or is it just the peptide?
| archimedes237 wrote:
| Note, I have access but this is not my field. I just asked
| ChatGPT your question after have it read the paper. This is
| what the response was:
|
| Yes, the paper provides the 12-mer amino acid sequence of
| BRP: THRILRRLFNLC .
|
| Regarding post-translational modifications, the BRP peptide
| was synthesized with a C-terminal amidation, which was
| critical for its bioactivity. The non-amidated version of BRP
| was inactive in vitro . Additionally, the paper mentions that
| the C-terminal cysteine (C12) was synthesized as a free thiol
| .
|
| So, BRP is not just a simple peptide--it has a key post-
| translational modification (C-terminal amidation) that
| influences its function.
| anotherpaul wrote:
| Very nice, thank you. This indeed answers my question.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| I read the article, didn't see what foods contain that molecule.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| They are not gonna tell us the source of the molecule? I wanna
| know which berries or legumes to consume... damnit!!!
| steele wrote:
| sarm goblins will find a way to ruin this
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