[HN Gopher] Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
___________________________________________________________________
Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
Author : amichail
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-08-05 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (trial.medpath.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (trial.medpath.com)
| xeromal wrote:
| I can't open this link but I wonder if the weight loss or the
| medicine itself is performing the anti-aging
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I was just researching this myself before investing in LLY.
|
| For cardiovascular health, they see benefits even with people
| who are at a healthy BMI, which suggests therapeutic effects
| beyond just losing weight.
| xeromal wrote:
| Very interesting! Thanks for chiming in.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it could also suggest that BMI isn't a great metric, though,
| as has been in the news often lately.
|
| regardless, thanks too.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It isn't. Waist-to-height ratio is a much better predictor
| of cardiovascular issues - you want to stay below 0.5.
|
| I never went above 25 BMI but I wouldn't call myself a
| healthy person as it's obviously like that only due to low
| muscle mass.
| riku_iki wrote:
| what would be reversing biological age from regular running and
| eating chicken breast + veggies with olive oil.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| You can tell if that regime reverses aging when you instead
| start wanting to eat chicken nuggets and mac & cheese.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Wish I could run. Knee says no.
| avoutos wrote:
| Do you have an injury? Knees over toes exercises can do
| wonders for rehab. From a form perspective, it also helps to
| avoid heel-striking.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| This isn't really surprising at all IMO, but it's nice that it's
| been confirmed.
|
| > "The researchers believe semaglutide's anti-aging properties
| stem from its effects on fat distribution and metabolic health.
| Excess fat around organs triggers the release of pro-aging
| molecules that alter DNA methylation in key aging-related genes.
| By reducing this harmful fat accumulation and preventing low-
| grade inflammation - both major drivers of epigenetic aging -
| semaglutide appears to create a more youthful biological
| environment."
|
| In other words, being medically obese ages your body quite a bit,
| its stresses out your body with inflammation, etc. Taking Ozempic
| helps people lose weight, which also reduces inflammation. This
| is sort of like saying we proved rain (usually) increases
| humidity lol. A very obvious finding.
|
| The article even says " Randy Seeley from the University of
| Michigan Medical SchoolView company profile expressed little
| surprise at the findings" :)
| morninglight wrote:
| There is another study that comes to mind.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2420092122
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I have no idea why you're down voted. The replication crisis is
| real, and it is well known that fraud is a part of it
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Because it's a content-free dismissal. No attempt is made to
| link it to this study in particular.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Maybe because that is a whole different topic that is only
| tangentially related to this thread?
| V__ wrote:
| Any study which uses epigenetic clocks can be discarded. There is
| to my knowledge no test which produces reliably measurements
| which don't have big error bars. The only conclusion this study
| can really make is: Ozempic changes the 'thing' which the
| epigenetic clock test also measured.
| metalman wrote:
| it does seem that there is no reliable connection with
| "epigenetic clocks" where people are shown to be dying at the
| same bio age, regardless of calender age......all of the
| mortality estimating calculations rely on many "factors", so
| the "ozempic" effects will be just part of a puzzle, where I
| will bet anything that attitude, demenour, , basic personal
| conduct will weigh in as the hinge pins that everything else
| pivots around..........stress, and how that is delt with, and
| anyone who thinks that one compound is going to reset the whole
| clock on a complex organism is kidding themselves, which if
| done right, works ;) so....it's all for the good
| taeric wrote:
| It remains eye opening to see how much losing weight does to
| people.
| pitpatagain wrote:
| This is specifically a study on people with HIV-associated
| lipohypertrophy, which is associated with accelerated aging. Not
| clear what this would mean for people generally.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People on ozempic certainly look more like the crypt keeper
| than a younger version of themselves. You lose all that buccal
| fat that defines your young adult face.
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| Any means of attaining weight loss at a similar rate will
| tend to do the same thing. Especially if you're starting from
| quite-heavy, not just dropping 20lb or something.
| YokoZar wrote:
| It varies. People are often thinner in their twenties than
| their thirties and forties. If you browse some before and
| after pictures the ones who have had their skin tighten tend
| to look younger for that reason alone.
| pitpatagain wrote:
| Or that's who you notice. My husband takes ozempic for type 2
| diabetes and it completely fixed his blood sugar while
| causing very moderate weight loss.
|
| What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral
| fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes
| disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not
| respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment
| options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT
| is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline
| that is bad.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| I notice it in people who have never been the weight that
| they're suddenly walking around as, with them it often looks
| overdone, too thin for their features etc, but in those who
| have used it to get back to weights where I've seen them
| before...I didn't guess. They had to tell me.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how much of that is losing weight too fast and
| having floppy skin because of it.
| snug wrote:
| I've lost weight the natural way and people will tell me
| the same thing. People are just rude to fat people
| const_cast wrote:
| That's just what happens when you get skinny. People who have
| always been skinny just look sickly always so we don't
| notice.
| some_random wrote:
| I find it fascinating how much a pretty large group of people
| just hate semaglutides and seemingly need to believe that it's
| some kind of Faustian bargain. I'm not talking about the people
| who are cautious or suspicious, that's more than reasonable, but
| it's clear that it's not cautious optimism in many.
| jbentley1 wrote:
| Naturally skinny people hate Ozempic for the same reason I know
| many talented engineers who hate AI coding.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| As a talented engineer, I hate AI coding because it doesn't
| do what it says on the tin. If GLPs made people hallucinate
| weight loss that wasn't actually happening, I'd be angry
| about them too.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Ever seen "Shallow Hal"?
| amelius wrote:
| It is not fun when your superpower becomes a commodity.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'd wager that you can only call an engineer talented _if_
| they know enough to hate AI coding.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > I know many talented engineers who hate AI coding.
|
| People whos primary skill is coding, hate AI coding. No
| talented engineer hates AI coding. The distinction is this: a
| coder knows how to use their tools, an engineer knows how to
| work with people, understands product, process, users, and
| knows how to use their tools.
|
| Talented engineers hate the HYPE around AI. And those of us
| old enough to remember sigh and think "This is just
| dreamweaver all over again". It is ESB's with "drag and drop"
| workflow tools. AI is just another useful tool that a good
| engineer can pick up and put down where appropriate.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Thank you for your service
| devmor wrote:
| I think those engineers don't like you because you find
| unrelated subjects to justify your favorite scam.
| qgin wrote:
| There were even people who felt this way about anesthesia too.
| To survive in that era, they had to believe that suffering was
| somehow good for healing (or at least good spiritually) and
| talked about anesthesia as if it were cheating the natural god-
| given order.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Are you talking about MMother Teresa? She wasn't that long
| ago...
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I think this might be revisionism. A lot of people feared
| early anesthesia because it was far more dangerous than
| today.
|
| I also notice people will make note that 'eccentrics' from
| the 1940s-1950s hated air conditioning but it helps to
| understand it was a dangerous technology that regularly
| injured and killed people back then, especially in its
| earlier days the adults of that period were children during.
| AC didn't get safe until fairly recently in the 70s, 80s and
| 90s. It would catch fire or leak poison that killed people in
| their sleep. Some people just saw it as an unnecessary risk.
| Same with early fridges. When they leaked, that leak could be
| fatal as poison or explosion.
|
| It wasnt until later that these technologies got safer and
| even now today, we consider full anesthesia a last resort and
| will always try to get away with local or twilight anesthesia
| because full anesthesia does regularly injure, disable, and
| kill people. Evolution didnt design us to be trivially "shut
| off" like this. Injecting us with substances like that will
| always come with risk.
|
| In other words, a lot of those people weren't mindless
| luddites, but people who assessed their personal risk and
| said "nope, not worth it." I think that's perfectly fine.
|
| I'd argue the revisionism of today and the ego justifications
| of the time were just that, ego protection. Its far easier to
| say "Well, I'm tough, I don't need that," then "I'm scared of
| that." The former is rewarded in our individualist capitalist
| society. The latter is vulnerability and honestly which is
| often only punished in a society like ours. We see it today
| with people with limited access and affordability to
| healthcare in the USA putting off care or engaging in various
| home remedies, alt-medicine, supplements, or conspiracy-
| culture-esque pharma drugs gotten cheaply via the gray
| market.
| hollerith wrote:
| The drug companies are very good at making new drugs with high
| profit potential look better than they are. I'm worried
| semaglutides are another fen-phen, Vioxx, Quaaludes,
| Trovafloxacin or OxyContin.
|
| One thing to watch for is effect size: how big of an anti-aging
| effect does Ozempic confer relative to other good
| interventions? Were the subjects doing other solid anti-aging
| interventions like the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD)? If not,
| the 2 interventions might affect the same pathways with the
| result that if you are doing FMD, you get no additional benefit
| from Ozempic.
|
| Fen-phen is particularly interesting here because people
| reported that not only did it help them lose weight, it gave
| them more willpower and changed their personalities for the
| better.
| some_random wrote:
| I think that's a completely reasonable concern to have, it
| doesn't seem to be the case wrt obesity but for the myriad of
| other potential effects it's important to keep in mind.
| hollerith wrote:
| I'm not even ready to concede that it is a good weight-loss
| drug -- but then I haven't really investigated much, so I'm
| just repeating what I heard from researcher Ben Bikman and
| maybe other researchers. I heard that most people choose to
| discontinue it after 4 or 5 years or less, regain most or
| all of the weight, then refuse to go back on it.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| I've had a few friends on it. They definitely lost
| weight, but the GI issues were too much and when they
| went off of it they gained it all back.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I've read (anecdotes from people in the fitness/body-
| building space) that the default dosing could be too high
| for many people. And the side-effects seem to ramp up
| with the dose.
|
| IE, if you're getting weight loss at 1/2 the default
| dose, you might want to stay there, even if your MD wants
| you to increase to the default.
|
| [default uses loosely here - people build up from a low
| dose over the span of weeks/months]
|
| And the weight gain is due to a lack of lifestyle change.
| The drug just numbs your appetite, so you don't eat as
| much. If you go off the drug and return to over-eating,
| yep, you gain the weight back.
|
| I also suspect many people lose the weight too fast and
| go too far. "Ozempic butt" is a joke for a reason -
| people loose a bunch of fat, but the massive calorie
| deficit also means they aren't exercising (no energy, and
| they probably weren't before the drug either), so they've
| probably crashed their metabolism.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I tried it. I started down about 80 lbs from my heaviest,
| but a good 40 lbs from ideal/20 lb from healthy weight.
|
| The first time I tried it I followed dosing guidelines
| for ramp up; side effects were horrible, didn't lose much
| weight, and it just kept getting worse.
|
| Second time, after a few months off, I started at lowest
| dose and stayed there. Side effects were better to start
| but ramped up again. Eventually my digestion stopped
| entirely and I couldn't eat without pain; that actually
| was good for weight loss but very unhealthy (e.g. despite
| being hungry and lightheaded the pain kept me from eating
| more than 400 calories). Eventually it passed but I
| couldn't justify taking it after that.
|
| Basic side effects: exercise intolerance (higher starting
| rate, much faster increase exertion, chest pain after
| ~150bpm when previously I could run nearly an hour and go
| up past 180 without issue), fatigue in the morning
| (despite essentially maintaining my pre-ozempic
| nutrition), significant increase in resting heart rate,
| significant decrease in HRV, and digestive upset
| (basically alternating diarrhea and constipation).
|
| Many of these side effects are well known, others less
| so.
|
| Ozempic, when micro dosed, did help reduce hunger and
| make a weight loss diet easier to sustain, until the side
| effects got so bad I wanted to comfort eat. But
| mindfulness and healthy lifestyle are similarly effective
| without crippling side effects.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Have you looked into Tirzepatide? Basically a combo of
| ozemspic plus a GIP drug. Again, anecdotes from bro-
| science, but appears to allow lower dosing and reduced
| side-effects.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Try Zepbound. You lose more weight with far fewer side
| effects.
|
| Although, you may still have issues. It does just sound
| like there's something unique about your chemistry. I
| don't think that many of those side effects are even in
| the ballpark of normal.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I would like to try it, but I don't think it is available
| from shady internet doctors and insurance won't cover it
| because I'm not diabetic. Shady internet ozempic passes
| the cost-benefit test (barely, considering I can
| successfully lose weight without it it's just hard). Full
| cost out of pocket it does not. Maybe in a few years.
|
| I would worry that the side effects I care about are not
| the side effects that others report being improved on
| zepbound.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Protip: Get an ultrasound on your liver. Almost every
| obese person has (what used to be called) fatty liver,
| and that's usually enough to justify the prescription to
| your insurance company.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Very much the default is too high and the bro-science was
| indeed early on this. I'm super sensitive and had the bad
| negative reactions at 1/10th the starting dose. It's been
| a wonder drug for me though, finally able to put my life
| back together after ME/CFS all but destroyed it.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > when they went off of it they gained it all back.
|
| To make matters worse, even ibuprofen is a scam. I
| stopped taking it and my headache came right back!
|
| More seriously, if you stick to it the GI issues go away
| after the first month for most people.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Tirzepatide (and likely other GLPs) have limitations that
| are rarely brought up in the general media
|
| - Patients have about 72 weeks to reach maximum loss,
| they don't lose any more weight after 72 weeks even on
| the highest dose.
|
| - Patients appear to immediately gain the weight back as
| soon as they stop taking it.
|
| It's right in the phase 3 trial outcomes paper:
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10667099/
|
| I suspect that this info is intentionally down-played so
| that it doesn't affect sales.
| kion wrote:
| I've been on Zepbound for ~25 weeks now and one of the
| first things my doctor told me was that this was a
| lifetime drug. He pointed out that I had a choice, of
| lifetime drugs. I needed to do something to get my
| cholesterol under control. That meant start statins now
| and likely add blood pressure meds and diabetes meds in
| the next 2-5 years. Alternatively I could start Zepbound,
| which would likely address all 3 and result in better
| quality of life in the next year. So far it seems like it
| is doing exactly that.
|
| I'm sure some people are going into this without that
| knowledge, but people are being told this is a lifetime
| commitment. What you don't see a lot of is why people
| stop taking it. There's some cases of people losing and
| then stopping, but the majority are because insurance is
| forcing people off of it. Just look at the recent CVS
| Caremark forced switch from Zepbound (2nd Gen) to Wegovy
| (1st Gen) in July.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that literally every doctor tells
| literally every patient this. Mine sure did. It's also on
| the handout your pharmacy gives you, the website for the
| drug, and in fine print at the bottom of most
| commercials.
|
| Nobody expects a single does of ibuprofen to cure your
| headaches for life. Similarly, this doesn't "fix" your
| biochemistry for life, you have to take it in order for
| it to work.
| themafia wrote:
| > I suspect that this info is intentionally down-played
| so that it doesn't affect sales.
|
| Yea, hard to figure out why drug companies keep producing
| "Faustian bargains" in our current system. What galls me
| is people assume the best for new drugs instead of
| forcing the _for profit_ entity to prove it's actually
| safe and useful.
|
| To the extent that, reliably, the first comment on these
| posts on Hacker News are some wishy washy anecdotal
| emotional blackmail garbage that completely obfuscates
| the point and runs direct interference for these large
| profitable organizations.
|
| To the extent that it's hard to believe that these posts
| even on this tiny corner of the internet aren't bought
| and paid for. We live in a society that cherishes
| organized crime and denigrates hard work. I would not
| look forward to "new drugs" in this regime.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Many people (will only speak to America), view being fat as a
| literal moral failing. Gluttony or overeating are not the sin,
| but being fat.
|
| (From that perspective:)a miracle cure that allows someone to
| stop being fat is like an indulgence (in the Roman Catholic
| sense). It's a cheat, a shortcut that allows the unworthy to
| reach a state they do not deserve.
|
| My opinion is to wait long enough to validate there are no long
| term harms, but beyond that, yeah, adjust the priors, it could
| be a modern aspirin.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >My opinion is to wait long enough to validate there are no
| long term harms,
|
| What's your threshold on that? How many years is "long
| enough"? Trying to calibrate my own sense of risk.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Not OP but 10-15 years for most drugs. Took about a decade
| for the general consensus around Oxy to change.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Haven't these been out for a very long time, just not for
| weight loss?
|
| A quick Wikipedia search shows Exenatide was FDA approved
| in 2005 for diabetes.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Ozempic itself has been in use for almost a decade now
| (originally approved for type 2 diabetes in 2017). Many
| millions of people have taken it, without much in the way
| of serious complication.
|
| Exenatide had been in use since about 2005, and by 2019
| had more than a million people on it. Some of those
| patients have literally been on it for 20 years. It does
| have a worse side-effect profile than Ozempic (or the
| more modern GLP-1's like zepbound), but even then the
| benefits outweigh the risk for those diabetics.
|
| Today it is hard to argue the benefits of modern GLP-1s
| don't outweigh their risks. They've been extensively
| tested, the class of drug has been around for decades,
| and they are used by many millions of people.
|
| I personally lost 120 pounds on Zepbound in a little less
| than a year. It's been life changing, and anyone who
| thinks I might be less healthy now is very clearly wrong.
| Literally every aspect of my life has been greatly
| improved.
| gryn wrote:
| I'm a late adopter to most things.
|
| my estimate would bigger than others and I would put it at
| 30-50years.
|
| I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning it
| was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a healthy
| activity that bring benefits with papers published to sing
| praises about it. my parents were even nudged by their
| teachers/doctors/etc when they were young to try smoking.
|
| now we all know that smoking is beyond bad and all that
| early "research" was just people paid off by big companies
| to promote it.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I think a lot of people share similar concerns, but the
| benefits of a successfully therapy are so extreme it
| would take quite a lot to derail ozempic. People easily
| gain 5 or more years of lifespan by not being obese,
| avoid myriad related health conditions, and are truly
| much better off. It would take a lot to reduce someone's
| life expectancy by a comparable amount and we haven't
| seen that much besides gastrointestinal issues.
|
| We performed the surgical options like stomach reduction
| before this which come with serious danger for comparison
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| Under-discussed benefit: being able to have all your
| clothes actually fit at the same time (no wardrobe
| scattered between your "skinny" weight and your "fat"
| weight and rarely being in the right place for more than
| a handful of pieces to fit entirely correctly) so you can
| spend up a little on nicer clothes without worrying
| you'll only be able to wear them part of the time. Worst
| case, you start to pack on a little too much and they
| start getting tight, you increase the dose or go back on
| the drugs for a week or three (or just do it the old
| fashioned way--hey, it works some of the time,
| temporarily) and ta-da, right back where you want to be--
| you're not going to pack on weight and find yourself
| _unable_ to lose, so buying "skinny clothes" isn't
| mortgaged against your future success at forcing yourself
| to eat less.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning
| it was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a
| healthy activity
|
| While i agree the gist of what you are saying, also
| important to mention that humans started cultivating
| tobaco when mamoths still roamed the Earth. There was
| indeed a concentrated pro-smoking publicity campaign by
| tobaco manufacturers in the 1930s, but it was hardly "in
| the beginning" of our tobaco use.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| There's two sides to that coin. Obesity has known long term
| harms. So what we are looking for in a deal breaker can't
| be a small but statistically significant increase in some
| cancer or other. We'd need something as bad as smoking to
| outweigh the benefits.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Many people (will only speak to America), view being fat as
| a literal moral failing. Gluttony or overeating are not the
| sin, but being fat.
|
| As an American with a sister with thyroid issues, I can say
| that is absolutely not true for the majority of Americans.
| People are mostly sympathetic to those who are not obvious
| slobs.
| drowsspa wrote:
| People are mostly sympathetic when it's physical issues.
| Psychological issues are treated as diseases of the soul
| that you only need God or willpower or whatever to fix. And
| most fat people are fat because of the incentives in our
| society, but admitting that also goes against certain
| political ideologies...
| jfim wrote:
| What are the incentives for people to be fat, out of
| curiosity? Do you mean farm subsidies for corn, for
| example?
| const_cast wrote:
| At a low level, yes, corn, but at a high level: more
| consumption = more money.
|
| Everyone benefits from you being fat. Your doctors, your
| car manufacturer, food manufacturers, everyone. Except
| maybe health insurance. But they're not hurt too too
| much.
| XorNot wrote:
| There is no doctor on Earth who goes to work and thinks
| "thank god for fat people or I wouldn't have a business".
|
| There's _plenty_ of doctors and surgeons who wish there
| were less fat people, because they enormously complicate
| doing surgery on and managing in hospitals.
| guizadillas wrote:
| How would you even know the cause of obesity of a stranger?
| This is why viewing being fat as a moral failing is mistake
| regardless of the cause. I'm pretty sure a lot of people
| view your sister the same way just because they have no
| idea she has thyroid issues
| jvanderbot wrote:
| With respect, neither of you are qualified to speak for
| majority of Americans, but given the amount of effort,
| money, ink, and television dedicated to looking better and
| losing weight _combined_ with the fact that there 's even a
| thing called _fat phobic_ that even _requires_ definition
| _just to push back on all that_...
|
| I think there's sufficient reason to believe that
| "Overweight = bad" is a common standard that at least
| people hold _themselves_ to.
| blitzar wrote:
| We must live on different timelines. Pre ozempic America
| was the proudest nation of fat people I have ever
| encountered (excluding the costal elites of course).
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's weird because I agree with you, but also have to
| acknowledge that the "pushback against fat phobia" was
| for some reason a thing.
| davorak wrote:
| Third American here, and the push for fat acceptance was
| so little of my media consumption that it surprised me so
| many people spent so much time and energy on the topic.
| cm2187 wrote:
| And also the idea that it is "easy" to lose weight is
| completely out of touch. If it was there wouldn't be millions
| of people trying hard, spending money on trying and failing
| for decades, and entire businesses addressing that.
|
| RFK Jr's "let them eat less" is paradoxically the modern
| version of "let them eat cake"!
| kulahan wrote:
| I think many people confuse simple with easy.
|
| It IS simple to reduce your weight. There are like, two
| things you need to do. It is, however, VERY hard to
| actually _do_ those things.
| morkalork wrote:
| Even then, limiting calorie intake isn't all that
| difficult; there's a reason why intermittent fasting took
| off and so many people were getting results from it.
| nosignono wrote:
| It is that difficult, otherwise everyone would do it.
| tsol wrote:
| Not necessarily. Some people respond well too
| intermittent fasting but not everyone. Some people
| respond to keto but not everyone. And just because you
| respond doesn't mean it's gonna take you to where you
| need to be.
|
| I've always been skinny but for some reason I've gained
| weight recently. Even with keto, intermittent fasting,
| tirzeptide, and workouts twice a week I have only lost 5
| lbs in months. When I was skinny and forgot to eat, I
| would feel a little crappy but still could function. Now
| I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep nor
| focus. This solidified it to me that there's a circuit in
| your brain that controls feeding and if it's out of whack
| it'll punish you until you eat. Dieting takes months and
| no one can go that long without sleep. So it's still a
| practical problem, its just hard to see if your system is
| well calibrated.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Even with keto, intermittent fasting, tirzeptide, and
| workouts twice a week I have only lost 5 lbs in months.
|
| If you're combining a ketogenic diet AND intermittent
| fasting AND a GLP-1 inhibitor AND exercise and you're
| still losing less weight than observed in the Ozempic
| studies, it's likely that there's more to this story.
|
| Ketogenic dieting does not automatically translate to
| weight loss. Keto simply makes it easier to reduce
| caloric intake. It's actually very easy to gain weight on
| a keto diet due to the high caloric density of consuming
| that much fat.
|
| > Now I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep
| nor focus.
|
| Honestly if you're having these dramatic negative effects
| from minor caloric restriction with GLP-1 inhibitors,
| something else is going on.
| const_cast wrote:
| Ive heard this same sentence, verbatim, repeated
| throughout the course of decades for particular fad
| diets. _Decades_.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The irony is that all that
|
| "it's so easy"
|
| "it's just calories in, calories out"
|
| "if you eat according to this plan and make sure to get 8
| hours of sleep a day, you won't even feel the cravings"
|
| Is stuff that fat people say. They totally buy into it
| and buy all of the products to help them convince
| themselves this is true. Then they get disillusioned when
| it doesn't work, have a crisis of faith, then go to the
| next fad to get over the self-hatred caused by their
| failure at sticking to something _so easy._
|
| Intermittent fasting is great. It got me from 225 to 165,
| kept it off for the past few years with no effort (my
| entire metabolism recalibrated to 165-175, I guess.) I
| also know people who cry actual tears when they're very
| late for a meal, or panic. Those people need therapy
| and/or maybe an injection to artificially lower their
| appetites to the level _where I also artificially lowered
| my own appetite._
|
| Intermittent fasting is no more natural than injections.
| Dieting is modernity.
| kulahan wrote:
| I'm certain IF more closely resembles how humans ate for
| millions of years, not knowing when our next meal would
| come before becoming an agrarian society, and we haven't
| had much time to evolve since then.
|
| So, yeah, dieting is modern, but so is an abundance of
| food. Both are equally unnatural.
| blitzar wrote:
| Limiting calorie intake is easy. Consuming near unlimited
| calories is even easier and a lot more fun.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| But it's not.
|
| What you're referring to, is the basic concept of
| thermodynamic calorie in/calorie out. Yes, you can "just"
| reduce food and lose weight if you hit deficit numbers.
|
| But if you don't do it correctly, you'll feel like trash,
| you'll suffer bad cravings, and put yourself in a
| stressful mental situation for days, possibly putting
| your job at risk.
|
| You have to:
|
| - Eat less than what you're already eating
|
| - But enough to nourish yourself so you keep being in
| good shape for your work and hobbies
|
| - Manage hunger
|
| - Make the change sustainable so you can keep doing it
| for the rest of your life.
|
| It's specially hard when your work is entirely sedentary,
| you live alone and, ironically, when you have a salary
| that let's you order food every day.
|
| A lot of people don't have it hard. Maybe because they
| have someone cooking for them at home, because they meal
| prep the entire week, or because their work is so
| physically intensive they can just wing it and burn
| everything with what they need to do for a living anyway.
| kulahan wrote:
| Right, so exactly like I said, it's very simple. If you
| want to lose weight, reduce calories.
|
| If you add extra modifiers like "I want to feel great
| while doing it" and "I want to lose weight while
| sedentary" and "I want to continue eating whatever stupid
| thing I want" and "I need to be able to scroll tiktok for
| at least 3 hours, leaving no time for cooking", it gets
| much more complicated.
|
| Side note: LOL at "but if you're craving food you might
| get fired!!1!" - this is professional victimhood at its
| finest.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Inaccurate in my opinion. Let's say you eat 2500 calories
| a day usually. But you want to lose weight so you reduce
| it to 1800.
|
| Except your calories are from pop tarts.
|
| If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're
| awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the
| month you'd be fatter.
|
| If you ate 1800 calories of pop tarts once a day in 1
| hour, you might maintain weight or loose a little. Maybe.
|
| If you had 3600 calories of pop tarts in a few hour
| window, and then didn't eat again for 48 hours, you'd
| lose weight in a month.
|
| Insulin control is 99% of losing weight. Yes
| thermodynamic blah blah, but unless you pay attention to
| hormone control that controls metabolism in general, it's
| not going to work without insane willpower to keep your
| 'calories out' higher than your body wants.
|
| If you repeated the 3600 calories every 48 hours with
| beef instead, you'd lose weight like never before.
| XorNot wrote:
| > If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're
| awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the
| month you'd be fatter.
|
| This is thermodynamically impossible unless your daily
| calorie use is less then 1800 calories.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Are you saying raising your insulin levels hourly, 18
| times a day, will not do anything to your metabolism? Did
| you even read my post, or did you just instantly reply
| with the same pedantic reply which my post was
| specifically meant to address?
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Insulin control is about managing hunger more than a
| direct cause for weight.
|
| You don't even need to do keto or wacky "just meat" diets
| to handle insulin. Protein consumption prevents insulin
| spikes for around 1-2 hours after eating. Also, proteins
| and fats slow down digestion.
|
| Turns out, the good old Mediterranean diet is spot-on for
| a healthy lifestyle.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| ? Insulin is not about management of hunger. I think you
| got your hormones mixed up.
|
| But yes, meat and vegetables is basically what I'd
| recommend. Never pasta or bread or sugar unless you need
| help gaining weight.
| dawnerd wrote:
| That's exactly why I liked being on keto. Never felt
| hungry, had way more energy, mental health improved a
| lot. No other diet had those effects. I've been off it
| for a while and I feel gross again.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And also the idea that it is "easy" to lose weight is
| completely out of touch. If it was there wouldn't be
| millions of people trying hard, spending money on trying
| and failing for decades, and entire businesses addressing
| that.
|
| This is a touchy topic, but I would like to point out that
| you're missing the obvious confirmation bias that comes
| with this observation.
|
| There are many people who modulate their weight by changing
| what they eat, how much they eat, reducing snacking, meal
| planning, and changing their shopping habits.
|
| You don't see them among the millions of people failing to
| lose weight or paying for expensive solutions because they
| quietly solve their problem.
|
| I'm also not suggesting it's easy, but we should
| acknowledge that many people _do_ successfully control and
| modulate their weight through dietary and habit changes.
| There 's a survivorship bias problem that occurs when you
| only look at the remaining sub-group who has the most
| difficulty with this.
| cm2187 wrote:
| and there are people who don't get fat no matter what
| they eat. Not sure what difference it makes to the
| millions of people I am refering to. Not even sure what
| is your point.
| XorNot wrote:
| With 40% of US adults overweight, that is a substantial
| plurality though. It's not confirmation bias when it's
| more then 1 in every 3 people.
| naravara wrote:
| The weight loss mechanism largely just comes from suppressing
| appetite though, so it still lines up with the penance for
| sin narrative. It's not that different from wearing a hair-
| shirt and whipping yourself if you find yourself having
| lustful thoughts. Only instead of a whip you just feel kind
| of uncomfortable and nauseous if you eat too much.
| cheald wrote:
| That's true of semaglutide, but newer peptides like
| tirzepatide (a dual-agonist) and retatrutide (a triple
| agonist) have additional effects like improving insulin
| sensitivity, and simultaneously slowing the release of
| glucagon and activating glucagon receptors, which directly
| increases fat oxidation and thermogenesis.
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| I'd describe the effects as basically the opposite of self-
| torture. Self-torture is dieting/fasting without the drugs.
| With them, it's great. No afternoon light-headedness and
| difficulty concentrating, no hunger pangs, no "hangry"
| effect, no cravings you have to keep suppressing. Just
| smooth sailing. (though experiences do seem to vary--as do
| dosage levels)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Gluttony or overeating are not the sin, but being fat.
|
| This is a strange thing to say. If you do something normal,
| and you end up in a normal state, why would that be a moral
| failing? There's no such thing as "overeating". Different
| people eat different amounts. The same person eats different
| amounts at different times.
|
| > (From that perspective:)a miracle cure that allows someone
| to stop being fat is like an indulgence (in the Roman
| Catholic sense). It's a cheat, a shortcut that allows the
| unworthy to reach a state they do not deserve.
|
| This is incoherent. If you believe that being fat is a sin,
| but that the things you do that make you fat are not sins,
| then a miracle cure that makes you thin removes the only sin
| you were committing. You can't be unworthy if you're not fat.
| In order for a miracle cure to be "cheating", it is
| _necessary_ that the sin is in the behavior and not the
| result.
| frumper wrote:
| Everyone defines normal differently and people are quite
| good at judging those that are not their normal.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'm not a Catholic, but wasn't the idea of an indulgence that
| God intentionally allowed an alternative path to redemption,
| such that if you buy an indulgence, you are (at least by
| their definition) worthy and deserving?
|
| I always thought of this as essentially the same idea as with
| Civ allowing you different paths to victory.
| swat535 wrote:
| Yes indulgences mean something different in Catholicism,
| they remit the "temporal effects" of Sin ie its spiritual
| consequences but don't "forgive" it like "Sacrament of
| Reconciliation" would..
|
| I think that parent is perhaps confusing it with the sin of
| Gluttony.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| My point was that many people view ozempic and other drugs
| like Martin Luther viewed buying an indulgence: a cheat for
| the undeserving.
| j2bax wrote:
| I thought Martin Luther's issue was more with the
| organization selling indulgences than the undeserving
| buying them. He preached justification by faith alone.
| Not some org selling justification.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Many people (will only speak to America), view being fat as
| a literal moral failing. Gluttony or overeating are not the
| sin, but being fat.
|
| I feel like I've seen and heard more of the opposite: The
| trend is to avoiding anything that might make someone feel
| blame for arriving in their situation.
|
| With obesity the trend is to blame some combination of "our
| food supply", trending science topics like microplastics or
| the microbiome, and genetics.
|
| I've heard countless people explain to me that dieting
| doesn't work for them. It's not hard to find people claiming
| they ate <1000 calories per day and still gained weight. Even
| Eliezer Yudkowsky, a figurehead of the "rationalist"
| movement, has written about "metabolic disprivilege" and
| claimed that his genetics do not allow him to lose weight
| through dieting. This thinking runs deep.
|
| What's interesting about GLP-1 inhibitors is that they
| modulate the intake portion of the diet, which shatters these
| previous notions that some people had "metabolic
| disprivilege" and simply could not lose weight by reducing
| caloric intake. They just make it easier to reduce food
| intake.
| nxobject wrote:
| > I feel like I've seen and heard more of the opposite: The
| trend is to avoiding anything that might make someone feel
| blame for arriving in their situation.
|
| > I've heard countless people explain to me that dieting
| doesn't work for them.
|
| I think you're being a tad reductive - "dieting right now
| doesn't work for me for reasons I can't control" and
| "reducing calorie intake will help me reduce weight" aren't
| necessary contradictory, and don't imply "I'm going to
| attribute it all to biology/blame it on something general".
|
| Anyway, let me assert the opposite: as a partner of a
| nutritionist who's talked (with anonymity) about her
| clients, the majority of the people she's worked with, who
| struggle with sustainably reducing calorie intake over the
| course of years, come to dieting with that logic, and
| _then_ struggle against specific barriers, and _then_ blame
| themselves. (A recent example: "because of my work schedule
| I don't get enough sleep, which leads to weight gain and
| time only for frozen food - on top of my predispositions".)
|
| In that case, GLP-1 inhibitors as an intervention
| _complements_ the way her clients think about dieting.
| davorak wrote:
| > Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, a figurehead of the "rationalist"
| movement, has written about "metabolic disprivilege" and
| claimed that his genetics do not allow him to lose weight
| through dieting. This thinking runs deep.
|
| I thought EY's point was different. Am I misremembering? I
| thought it was about not being able to do mental work
| productively when dieting enough to loose weight(maybe
| maintain a low weight too, though I do not remember that
| being mentioned explicitly).
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I agree with you, but it's important to remember that
| "dieting down" is way harder for a lot of people. I am and
| always was skinny through my life. Whenever I need to eat
| less, I can do it without much effort. However, I have
| friends who would faint if they tried to diet down the way
| that I do. I don't know why that happens, but I've seen
| happening and it changed my perspective about this subject.
| If Ozempic can help with that, I will never criticize
| someone who uses it.
| snek_case wrote:
| Genetics do factor. It's not just a question of genetics
| affecting metabolism. People literally don't feel hunger
| with the same intensity as one another. It's like sex
| drive. There are both very horny people and asexuals out
| there. There are also people who routinely forget to eat.
| For many people though, the notion of "forgetting to eat"
| seems completely alien, because those signals are much
| stronger for them.
| trhway wrote:
| >My opinion is to wait long enough to validate there are no
| long term harms, but beyond that, yeah, adjust the priors, it
| could be a modern aspirin.
|
| it can be more than aspirin. Such an effect on glucose
| should, among other things, be affecting cancer, probably in
| a very positive way.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| You can be gluttonous and still thin. I eat 2 lbs of ground
| beef a day, with tons of cheese on it. For breakfast I have
| 6-8 eggs, with cheese. I have my morning coffee with heavy
| whipping cream. For desert, I whip up some of the heaving
| whipping cream and have it with frozen berries thawed out. It
| drives gfs nuts but they're too anti fat to try it.
| gameman144 wrote:
| I think there's a justifiable fear/dread when things that used
| to demonstrate virtues no longer do so.
|
| For instance, being in shape used to (usually) demonstrate
| discipline. Art or music used to demonstrate attention to craft
| and practice. Knowledge demonstrated time devoted to study.
|
| This isn't to say that the world is worse with these advances
| (I'd be hopeless without search engines, and I am grateful that
| people get to live longer and healthier with semaglutide), but
| I think a little bit of mourning is understandable: what used
| to be the fruits of hard work are now a dime-a-dozen commodity.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >seemingly need to believe that it's some kind of Faustian
| bargain
|
| I mean, that's because that's literally what they need to
| believe. A majority of people has been brought up on an
| incredibly moralized account of human behavior, and if it turns
| out you can just pour some GLP-1 drugs into the drinking water
| and basically fix a whole bunch of issues it will become
| obvious that a therapeutic framing is the appropriate way to
| look at these things.
|
| For people who live in a world of vices and sinners who have to
| swear off the devil, this throws a pretty big wrench into the
| whole story, it's much more than just a drug.
| losvedir wrote:
| I think it's a similar thing to those who are morally
| invested in human overpopulation and not consuming resources
| for climate change reasons and such.
|
| The techno-optimist GLP analogs like solving these things
| with clean energy and other modern marvels throws a wrench
| into that story.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I agree, and I am a consumer of those myself, which did
| absolute wonders. And of course I will assign vastly more
| weight to my own experience, than to the opinion of some random
| guy on the internet who only read about it.
|
| However, we also need to be conscious that this is a very very
| big business, and given the size of the market, is happy to
| pour billions into some studies that will demonstrate that it
| has all the benefits in the world and cures everything.
| Addressing obesity is a humongous benefit in itself, and helps
| with all the medical conditions that result from it (which in
| balance makes most mild side effects irrelevant). I am a lot
| more skeptical about those dozens of claims that it improves X
| by Y% (often low single digit). Most medical studies in general
| are dodgy, show minor benefits on small samples in a massively
| multivariate environment, which more often than not are
| statistical noise carefully selected, when the approach don't
| have outright flaws or fraud.
| jjice wrote:
| I was kind of scared of these when Ozempic starting picking of
| steam for weight loss. I was worried that this would be having
| more negative effects. Turns out, generally speaking, if used
| with you doctor, these things are pretty safe, especially
| comparatively to some of the negatives of being overweight.
|
| And then I saw some of the stories on HN about how it's changed
| peoples lives for the better. And then people in my life
| started taking it and singing its praises. I'm very bullish on
| GLP-1s now and I've very excited to see all the lives it
| improves. I'm not saying this thing is 100% miracle with no
| downsides, but this seems to be a generally large net positive.
|
| It's a bit hard for me to comprehend how big of an impact this
| can have for someone since I've been very fortunate to never
| struggle with my weight, but I'm (slightly embarrassingly)
| tearing up writing this because of how many people I've seen
| have huge positive effects on their physical and mental health
| (due to body image).
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| It's great because _we had no other way_ to address this
| problem at a population level. Not any realistic ones,
| anyway.
|
| Like, I figured we were just never going to solve it, given
| the two possibilities were "radically re-engineer US culture
| such that moving to the US doesn't make previously-skinny
| people fatter" (with other countries heading the same
| direction as us needing to make similar moves, one supposes)
| or "find a miracle drug". Neither seemed likely. Turns out,
| decent odds we've managed the latter! Which was always the
| more likely of the two, but I still wouldn't have rated it as
| very likely.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I helped my dad lose 50 lbs by finally, after 10 years,
| getting him to give up bread, sugar, potatoes. It took
| buying him 2 months of a bluetooth glucose monitor. Once he
| saw what certain foods do, he believed me finally. At 65
| years old, healthier than I remember since he was 40 and I
| was a teen. It doesn't require some weird injection.
| XorNot wrote:
| No but its a lot easier for people who've had trouble and
| gets results, which is all that matters.
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| There's anecdotes, and there's science.
|
| Individually, there's (previously) been nothing better to
| suggest than "try harder (and, maybe, smarter)".
|
| Statistically it was almost useless, but it's the best we
| had. It's not _bad_ advice exactly, it 's just extremely
| unlikely to work for long-term, sustained weight loss.
|
| It also very much appears to be the case that weight gain
| and loss are heavily influenced by environmental factors.
| Skinnier countries aren't skinnier because the people
| there have more willpower, it seems, but because _they
| live in a skinnier country_ and are surrounded by the
| culture, laws, physical layouts of the created world, et
| c., that come with that. It 'd be kinda weird if we
| expected "just try harder" to work very well when that's
| evidently not the mechanism by which skinny countries
| _are_ skinny. Alternatively, if it _is_ willpower doing
| it, we 're just adding a step, because then it appears
| that environment strongly influences willpower, instead,
| since the same observations hold.
|
| Sure, sometimes it works for individuals. In fact, it
| _often_ works temporarily, causing a yo-yo effect. It
| _can_ work for long periods (many years without a slip)
| but that 's rare.
|
| If your solution to the obesity crisis is "people need to
| try harder" your solution is demonstrably not helpful.
| Can it work for one person? Yes. Over a population, will
| it? No, it won't, it's _amazingly_ ineffective, even very
| expensive high-touch interventions involving multiple
| experts aimed at weight loss and lifestyle change and
| such are wildly less effective than "inject GLP-1
| agonists" or "move somewhere skinnier".
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| My dad was never told by a single doctor to cut out all
| processed carbs/grains, and even potatoes, by a single
| doctor in his life.
|
| So "try harder" isn't going to work when the doctors
| don't even know what they're talking about.
|
| I'm losing faith in this forum. People would prefer to
| give people pharma bs because no processed carbs is too
| much of an ask. Pathetic.
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| Run a study of your approach and show good results over a
| cohort for 2+ years and you'll make an entire sub-field
| of medical scientists very happy.
|
| [EDIT] It's not that your approach _can 't_ work, it's
| that if (for example) people had as hard a time following
| the directions for condoms as they do following diet &
| workout plans, we'd never allow condoms to be sold as
| contraceptives, they'd not even be _close_ to being OK to
| promote as useful for that purpose. It wouldn 't matter
| if a few people _could_ follow the directions and it
| worked 100% of the time for them.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I assure you, not buying bread and pastries for your
| family is a lot easier than correctly using a condom in
| the heat of the moment. Which is why most people don't
| use them and use pull out instead. Because even that is
| easier and better if done right. (I know when to pullout,
| I don't know if a condom broke before it's too late).
|
| Anyway, it does work, people just aren't told to do it
| firmly. Doctors dance around it.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| Just scale that solution to millions of people and the
| comparison will be relevant.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| If you told millions of people that bread, sugar, pasta
| and bread are basically killing them, and to flat out
| stop eating them.. you probably would help people lose
| weight (and save many lives too).
|
| My dad has finally understood that grains are for people
| that need help maintain weight or gaining weight.
|
| No fat person should ever be eating them.
| parineum wrote:
| If I told you billions of people eat bread, sugar and
| pasta and it wasn't "basically killing them" (whatever
| that means)...
|
| It's strange to make the culprit of a modern epidemic
| foods that have been with us for millenia.
| stavros wrote:
| I helped my dad lose 50 lbs by finally, after 10 years,
| getting him to give up bread, sugar, potatoes. It took
| buying him 2 months of Ozempic. Once he saw what stopping
| the cravings for certain foods can do, he believed me
| finally. At 65 years old, healthier than I remember since
| he was 40 and I was a teen. It doesn't require some weird
| bionic arm implant.
| matwood wrote:
| And not just weight loss, but the people I know on GLP-1's
| have also significantly cut back on alcohol. I think there
| are ongoing trials around GLP-1's and general addiction.
| nosignono wrote:
| I find my compulsion towards videogames is decreased. Not
| eliminated, but I feel much less _compelled_ to be playing
| all the time.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm curious if this affects smartphone usage. E.g.,
| "compulsive" feed-checking and doom scrolling.
| garbawarb wrote:
| I wonder how it compares to Adderall.
| nosignono wrote:
| Adderall produces a very, very different experience and
| is prescribed to address a very, very different root
| cause.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The cynic in my thinks this will its undoing. Some huge
| fraction of alcohol profits come from a small portion of
| drinkers. If these G* peptides help these poor people their
| drinking under control, it would take a huge wrecking ball
| to the profits, and thus to the taxes. Can't have that.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Reduced healthcare, policing, and other costs that are
| paid for with tax dollars from lower alcohol consumption
| would almost certainly be a net gain over the piddly tax
| revenue from alcohol consumption sales.
| mullingitover wrote:
| So you're saying it's also going to harm the revenues of
| the health care industrial complex _and_ the police
| state? That 's not going to help its case.
| snek_case wrote:
| They're very expensive drugs so it would be one lobby
| against another. However given that they're so expensive,
| I would think that broke, uneducated alcoholics just
| won't have access to them, so those profits are safe...
| jjice wrote:
| I've heard similar for gambling, and as one of the sister
| comments said, things like video games. I'm so curious to
| understand _why_ that effect is there, but I've heard this
| so many times now that I do believe that it exists in some
| capacity. Such an interesting world we're opening up here.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Every person I know who tried to give up smoking has the
| same story - they were successful for a while and then
| they encountered some stressful moment (exam, work
| deadline, etc) and they fell off the wagon. One
| explanation could simply be that normally we have food
| stresses which manifests in general stress which we
| relieve via video games or whatever else. If these drugs
| turn down the volume of hunger then maybe this has the
| benefit of reducing the need for stress relieving
| behaviours in general.
| VectorLock wrote:
| It helped me cut back on my drinking significantly. I'm not
| an every day drinker but a weekend binge drinker and the
| amount I drink when I drink is down by I'd estimate by
| around half or more.
| dawnerd wrote:
| The same thing with keto. People will swear it's unhealthy
| but like, the alternative (outside of Ozempic and co) is
| being overweight...
| y-curious wrote:
| I am one of those people to some extent. For me, it's the
| naturalistic fallacy I can't get over. I drink caffeine daily,
| but the idea of hijacking my hunger with an injectable induces
| dread. I would like to believe that there are no long-term side
| effects, but:
|
| 1. We have to trust the data of for-profit pharmaceutical
| companies and their trials. They are incentivized to produce
| optimistic results.
|
| 2. It's relatively new (insofar that a lot of people are taking
| it). Opiates were touted in a similar way until the other shoe
| dropped. There exists an undefined line in time where I would
| feel more comfortable.
|
| 3. It is/was made of a poison from an animal.
|
| 4. The extreme benefits are overwhelmingly in obese candidates.
| Keto is the same way; I tried it and it was not for me because
| I am not obese.
|
| I'm actually open to any sort of evidence that will change my
| mind. No name calling please.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| >It is/was made of a poison from an animal.
|
| Caffeine is an insecticide.
| genewitch wrote:
| every time in recorded human history when there's be a panacea
| or cure-all it's generally been snake-oil.
|
| There are a lot of side effects, of this type of medicine -
| many which were not really prevalent when it was prescribed on-
| label.
| smt88 wrote:
| There are lots of miraculous, life-saving drugs that have
| minimal side effects and aren't snake oil.
|
| Metformin, insulin, many vaccines, some statins, and some
| antibiotics are clearly on that list.
| genewitch wrote:
| > panacea or cure-all
|
| specifically, is what i said.
| smt88 wrote:
| "GLP-1s are beneficial for many conditions downstream of
| liver dysfunction and metabolic disease" is a much milder
| claim than "cure-all".
| const_cast wrote:
| > every time in recorded human history when there's be a
| panacea or cure-all it's generally been snake-oil.
|
| That's just not true at all. Like, not even close.
|
| Almost everything we've invented in medicine has been free.
| As in, little to no downsides and just makes things better.
| And not just in medicine - look around you, compare it to 100
| years ago. A lot of stuff is safer, for free.
|
| Think about infant mortality. We went from 1/4 100 years ago
| to 1/1000s. For free. Surely birth must be more painful now,
| right? No... we got rid of the pain too. Well surely mothers
| die more, right? No... They die orders of magnitude less too.
| Well surely the Vitamin K shot must have SOME downside?
| Pretty much no, it just pevents bleeding out.
| genewitch wrote:
| does HN not know what the word "panacea" or the phrase
| "cure-all" mean?
| Petersipoi wrote:
| Just about every single adult woman in my wife's extended
| family is on Ozempic. None of them are obese at all. Or
| diabetic. They are all using it to "lose a few pounds" (we're
| talking like less than 20 pounds; Yes, as you might expect,
| there are some unrealistic beauty/success standards in my
| wife's family). So I think there are a lot of people who are
| annoyed by that, because of the message it sends to completely
| healthy-weight girls/young women who don't look like
| professional super models in a swimsuit.
|
| Since we have young daughters, that aspect of Ozempic really
| bothers my wife. Though she would have no issue with
| obese/diabetic people using it to get healthy.
|
| Personally I do think it is a miracle drug and I'm glad people
| are getting healthy because of it.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| I fall into the same category as your wife's extended family.
| I used it to get to the weight I feel most comfortable and
| I've gone back on it periodically (like after 5 weeks of work
| travel) to get back within 5 lbs of that weight (where I can
| manage the additional weight loss on my own).
|
| When being fat becomes more of a deliberate choice (due to
| the drug accessibility) I do wonder how society and society's
| expectations Will change. Will women be even more pressured
| to "bounce back" during postpartum? Will the "baby fat" we
| only get to have during adolescence be eliminated and drop
| out of the shared experience of growing up?
|
| There's also a lot of concern within the eating disorder
| community about the potential for abuse, because these drugs
| are so easy to get a hold of by lying on telehealth (could be
| argued that I've abused them by getting them when they're not
| truly necessary).
| kulahan wrote:
| Purdue Pharma created the Opioid Crisis. Martin Shkreli bought
| AIDS drugs and increased the price 5000% LEGALLY. IG Farben set
| up a factory next to Auschwitz for slave labor while making
| Zyklon B and their own personal concentration camp. Bayer sold
| HIV-contaminated blood in the 80s to developing companies.
|
| Anyone who isn't incredibly cautious of drug companies claiming
| perfectly safe "holy grail" medicines is insane. The number of
| crimes committed by this industry is hilarious and depressing
| simultaneously. The lack of moral guidance in this industry is
| incredible. The incredible greed in this industry is unmatched.
| I can't think of a more devil-like industry.
|
| If news came out tomorrow that everyone who's taken GLP-1
| started bleeding out of every orifice until dead, and that this
| outcome would've been impossible to miss during trials, I'd
| STILL be more shocked at the people who didn't see it coming.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Semaglutide is a signaling peptide, these are basically in a
| different class of medication that has traditionally been
| largely ignored. Partly due to difficulty defending patents
| for a class of medication that the body produces naturally,
| I.e. the instructions are in the DNA. Even if a drug company
| patents one GLP-1A they can't patent all of them and any of
| them will work much the same way.
|
| Because it's a naturally occurring signaling peptide there
| already exist people who have too much of it and too little
| of it due to normal genetic variation.
| kulahan wrote:
| We didn't even know what "junk DNA" did until like 25 years
| ago. We've discovered a couple new body parts in the last
| 50 years. We don't have any real understanding of how
| basic, foundational parts of medicine work - things like
| anesthesia and antidepressants and _even pain differences
| between men and women_. Tests are regularly performed on
| highly homogenous groups, or even tested on groups
| completely different from the target audience. The US
| allows us to advertise medicines on TV, and this gets
| people thinking they have some vague understanding of
| medicine - which they do not. I mean, maybe the
| unreasonably smart audience of this site may, but for the
| extreme majority of Americans, they do not.
|
| I think our massive advancement in the computer industry
| has confused people into thinking other industries which
| _use_ computers are _also_ advanced, but this is not the
| case. Pharmacology is an extremely immature field.
|
| Edit: I think the only field more immature than this would
| be psychology? And I don't think many are silly enough to
| trust a field who still worships a dude that believed every
| thought you had was somehow actually about sex, and has
| made zero advancements beyond borrowing meditation and a
| few other ideas from other cultures.
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm not a fan because it's expensive and once you go off of the
| drug the weight comes back on (at least from what I've read).
| That's not a trade-off I want to take lightly.
|
| There's also something to be said for gaining the discipline to
| do it yourself along the way, which may lead to keeping more of
| the weight off in the long run.
|
| We also don't know what the long term side effects of it will
| be, if any.
|
| I don't find any of that unreasonable to me. I'm saying this as
| a type-2 diabetic who could stand to lose a lot of weight.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > We also don't know what the long term side effects of it
| will be, if any.
|
| The first GLP-1 receptor agonist was commercially released in
| April 2005, meaning 20+ years. People who often repeat this:
| If 20-years, and tens of trials, isn't long enough to "know"
| then where is the line exactly?
|
| Thalidomide by contrast was available for 4-years, Vioxx for
| 5-years, and Rezulin for 3-years by contrast.
|
| > There's also something to be said for gaining the
| discipline to do it yourself along the way, which may lead to
| keeping more of the weight off in the long run.
|
| That doesn't work; we know it doesn't work both from small
| and large scale studies, and population evidence since 1970s.
| So you're promoting the same thing we've been doing, and
| failing at, for beyond all of my lifetime. Feels like a
| religious belief at this point, rather than following the
| data and what we know from it (i.e. that objectively does not
| work, and has never worked).
|
| Is there something new you know that health experts haven't
| known as Obesity as increase up through 40.3%+ (with
| overweight being 73.6%+)?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There are people who are going to hate anything like that,
| because it makes a very difficult task (losing weight)
| significantly easier. And we hate it when the damned kids,
| what, with their Tok-Clock and deadass rizz, have it easier
| than we did back in the day.
|
| That being said, the fact that we let our society in North
| America get to the point where something like semaglutides are
| such a huge deal is something to honestly hate, and I think
| some of the misdirected hate is really a hatred for that.
| hinkley wrote:
| You've got a crowd of people raised in a Calvinist society who
| think nothing good comes without suffering, you've got people
| who feel this is a cheat where discipline should win out, and
| you have a bunch of people who are used to all easy solutions
| coming with either a bad lottery ticket or externalities on
| other people/the environment.
|
| They can all agree that they're waiting for the other shoe to
| drop.
|
| That said, we are at a point where people are overweight enough
| that getting exercise has its own risks, and taking a
| medication that allows you to be more active is likely to
| cancel out some of those downsides. As long as you do both I
| have no problem with people taking ozempic, mounjaro, etc.
|
| I would prefer if we figured out what other than cultural
| changes is making everyone have symptoms of inflammatory
| dysfunctions. There is more than one thing going on. Processed
| foods, contamination, some microbe that doesn't culture in
| agar. And it's spreading to more of the world.
| rglover wrote:
| > That said, we are at a point where people are overweight
| enough that getting exercise has its own risks, and taking a
| medication that allows you to be more active is likely to
| cancel out some of those downsides.
|
| And yet we rarely ask or say "maybe I should just eat fewer
| calories?" Unless you have some other disorder that prevents
| normal bodily function, that does work (and would be viable
| I'd imagine for the majority of people being prescribed).
|
| But it requires patience and discipline which are basically
| non-existent for the majority of the population.
| ninwa wrote:
| > I would prefer if we figured out what other than cultural
| changes is making everyone have symptoms of inflammatory
| dysfunctions.
|
| I personally hope it's just cultural and sugar/hfcs. Because
| some alternatives might be grim to reckon with just from a
| humanistic/grief perspective:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34484127/
| nomel wrote:
| > Calvinist society who think nothing good comes without
| suffering
|
| Or, some of us older folks have been around long enough to
| understand that _we_ are, in an uncontroversial and factual
| way, the long term medical trial, and long term effects found
| in that trial, along with the eventual market withdrawal, may
| not show up until 10 to 20 years later, creating a _healthy_
| distrust in the money /corporations behind the, sometimes
| outright _crafted_ [1], early medical trials.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
| Levitz wrote:
| You've also got the crowd who would argue that there's
| nothing wrong with being fat in the first place and that are
| scared of society pressing on this matter again after years
| of pushback.
| rglover wrote:
| Well, considering that the drug was originally developed not
| for weight loss but for type 2 diabetes management, it's not
| terribly radical to be skeptical or outright dismissive of it
| as some miracle weight loss drug (even if that _is_ a
| consistent side-effect).
|
| The whole rush to get people on the thing feels like an
| opportunistic pharma grab (because it is). The outcome of those
| sorts of things is never in favor of the individual or their
| well being.
| bsder wrote:
| > I find it fascinating how much a pretty large group of people
| just hate semaglutides and seemingly need to believe that it's
| some kind of Faustian bargain.
|
| Some of us also remember previous weight loss drugs which had
| similar levels of hype and later got pulled because of really
| bad side effects.
|
| If I needed to lose 100+ pounds, I'd be at my doctor tomorrow
| asking for it. The side effects of 100+ pounds are way worse
| than anything semaglutide might cause.
|
| For people who are using it to lose 10-20 pounds, the tradeoff
| isn't as clear.
|
| I am cautiously optimistic and hope that semaglutide lives up
| to the hype. _lots_ of people will benefit if it does.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| Is the term "biological age" even well defined?
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Presumably it is in the narrow context of the study, since they
| need something they can consistently measure and compare
|
| > The researchers used epigenetic clocks to assess biological
| aging - sophisticated tools that identify patterns of DNA
| methylation, chemical tags that affect gene activity and shift
| predictably with age
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I think you're very correct to identify the gulf between what
| the average MedPath headline reader understands "biological
| age" to mean, and the very specific chemical tags being
| measured and reported
| lysecret wrote:
| It's so fascinating that we just keep on finding more positive
| effects.
| thurn wrote:
| Are we close to having generic semaglutides e.g. available in
| India? Or locked into high prices for the foreseeable future?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Generic Semaglutide is already produced on a massive scale
| throughout the world. However, it is unlawful to import and
| sell and will remain so until 2032 in the USA.
|
| In other markets, where it is under patent, it is significantly
| cheaper than the $500/month or more in the US currently. For
| example in the UK it is roughly $150/month USD privately (i.e.
| not through the NHS).
|
| In China it will be out of patent within two years.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Iirc, that pricing will change in the US as Trump will
| require that the price of drugs to Medicaid patients must
| match or be less than that of any other developed nation.
|
| Since about 1/4 of the people in the US are on medicaid,
| close to 90 million, that means the drug manufacturers will
| probably raise the price for everyone else in the US because
| they got to get their profits somehow...
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-
| pr...
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Unfortunately, per the link, it sounds like a voluntary
| arrangement. Essentially they're asking drug companies
| nicely to stop ripping off Americans.
|
| If they're serious about this, they would introduce
| legislation rather than send strongly worded letters to
| pharma companies.
| radiofreeeuropa wrote:
| There's a whole little online subculture of people in the US
| importing the precursors and making it themselves at home for
| dirt-cheap.
|
| I gather it's extremely easy and basically fool-proof, as far
| as producing the desired drug and not producing some other,
| undesired drug. Much easier than, say, home-brewing beer. The
| risk is all in contamination, which presents a vector for
| infection.
|
| [EDIT] I don't mean to downplay the risks or suggest people
| go do this, only to highlight that there's enough demand for
| this that we're well into "life, uh, finds a way" territory,
| and also just how lucky (assuming these hold up as no-
| brainers to take for a large proportion of the population) we
| are that these things are so incredibly cheap and simple to
| make, if you take the patents out of the picture.
| tsol wrote:
| Not just the current generation of drugs, but they also
| import and use the next generation that is still in
| clinical trials and won't be on the market for at least a
| year. I had it reccomended to me online in a very casual as
| if it were a supplement. The risk with the is not just
| contamination but also if you get side effects there's no
| recourse to sue because you bought it from a chemical
| factory in China. The new generation of glp peptides is
| similar to the old one, but still can have unintended side
| effects as they do work on three receptors rather than the
| two that the current generation does
| neves wrote:
| Be very cautious with these miracle drug headlines. There's a
| strong financial incentive to highlight only the good news.
|
| My mother, a healthy and active 87-year-old, started taking
| Ozempic because she was overweight and her doctor was impressed
| by the drug's supposed miracles. She ended up suffering from
| severe intestinal motility issues, went through a lot of pain,
| and had to be admitted to the ICU.
|
| The long-term systemic effects of these drugs are still largely
| unknown.
| jorts wrote:
| Haven't these types of drugs been in use for ~15 years?
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > Haven't these types of drugs been in use for ~15 years?
|
| The predecessor of semaglutide, liraglutide has been sold
| since 1998. GLP-1 has been studied since the 70s. The first
| human was injected with GLP-1 agonists in 1993 IIRC.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Further, Ozempic itself is nearly 10 now and some people
| have been on Exenatide for 20+ years continuously now.
|
| These drugs are not novel, or new and we absolutely know
| the long term health impact.
| jsbg wrote:
| > The long-term systemic effects of these drugs are still
| largely unknown.
|
| The long term effects of obesity are very well known though and
| unlikely to be better than any still unknown negative effect
| semaglutide might have.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| You don't think her being 87 might have something to do with
| her complications?
| jsbg wrote:
| Doesn't biological age normally go down with weight loss? Is it
| just a corollary of the off-label effects of the drug?
| HocusLocus wrote:
| I guess maybe I'm one of the few who consider "reversing 3.1
| biological years" to be a personal insult. Something that polled
| well in a group of pre-kindergarteners. What happened, some
| statistical bloodwork metric was tortured to produce such a
| claim? A mouse population survived the lab a little longer?
| tzs wrote:
| Here's an article that answers your question [1]. It in the
| second bullet point near the top.
|
| [1] https://trial.medpath.com/news/5c43f09ebb6d0f8e/ozempic-
| show...
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Yes, epigenetic clocks discovered in 2010 and even the
| researcher who discovered them might feel insulted by the
| phrase of a prescription drug declaring "reverse biological
| aging 3.1 years"
| aswegs8 wrote:
| If you're really interested in that and not just trolling,
| these are the measures used by the study:
|
| After adjustment for sex, BMI, hsCRP, and sCD163,
| semaglutide significantly decreased epigenetic aging:
| PCGrimAge (-3.1 years, P = 0.007), GrimAge V1 (-1.4 years,
| P = 0.02), GrimAge V2 (-2.3 years, P = 0.009), PhenoAge
| (-4.9 years, P = 0.004), and DunedinPACE (-0.09 units, [?]9
| % slower pace, P = 0.01). Semaglutide also lowered the
| multi-omic OMICmAge clock (-2.2 years, P = 0.009) and the
| transposable element-focused RetroAge clock (-2.2 years, P
| = 0.030).
| charlie0 wrote:
| It it ozempic specifically or just the side effect of eating less
| (which also has tons of evidence for extending life)?
| getpost wrote:
| In a recent podcast[0], Ben Bikman explained some of background
| and pitfalls of GLP-1 drugs. When the drugs were first
| prescribed, dosages were much smaller than the dosages now
| prescribed for weight loss. Microdosing might be a better and
| safer strategy.
|
| The podcast is only 3 hours long! The GLP-1 discussion starts at
| 2:09:53.
|
| [0] https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/ben-bikman
|
| EDIT: ycopilotFYT version https://www.cofyt.app/search/dr-ben-
| bikman-how-to-reverse-in...
| scrozart wrote:
| Lots of anecdotes and opinions in the thread. Read the post and
| the science.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Fasting is good. I do it without medicines and crap. 24h-48h
| fast. Skip meals. BMI back to 19 and it feels GOOOOD BABYYY.
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