> If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them?
Evolution favored this level of GLP1, then we invented agriculture, and cooking, and bliss points. Now it’s far easier to ingest massive numbers of calories in ways that our old world systems can’t properly signal against. Evolution hasn’t caught up and maybe never will.
He could have lost all that weight and still had bread, sugar, and potatoes but instead he gave up what he clearly enjoyed. Now he gets to live out the rest of his life fighting cravings, telling himself he's not allowed to enjoy food. How utterly sad.
Believe me, cutting out bread and sugar completely is 10x easier than some kind of lifelong moderation for a person that has struggled for it already for most of his life.
And he is extremely happy with his new sugar and bread free life of increased mobility, less pain, and much lower blood pressure. At 64, he's learning how to ride a dirtbike and doing pretty well at it.
The choice is no longer between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "some kind of lifelong moderation for a person that has struggled." The choice is now between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "removing the struggle to moderate bread and sugar."
You're clearly an advocate for your father making healthy choices. So why would you advocate against the use of a drug that makes that easier?
Telling your mind to do a thing is only ever easy in retrospect and when you find a "trick" that works for you. For some people that trick is getting clear feedback about glucose levels in your bloodstream. But any trick that works for one person might not work for the next. So it is good that there are many approaches.
Obviously it’s not much easier or the drug wouldn’t be so valuable.
People make such a moral crusade of this - the drug works, people will take it. Behavior modification works in theory and fails for most in practice. Even for those that can make it work usually don’t hold out indefinitely.
I made no moral statement. Behavior modification has worked great for several formerly obese people that I know. They made permanent lifestyle changes without relying on drugs. I really don't care whether people take weight loss drugs or not but the reality is that there are cheaper and safer alternatives.
You’ve been here since 2007, you’re not dumb. Stating it’s “much easier” when it’s obviously not betrays something.
We likely agree that doing it without drugs is probably better, but it’s definitely harder and it’s not clear yet how much better it will even be.
I’ve successfully lost 70lbs (250->180) three times and gotten fit, but it’s a constant effort and psychic drain to maintain the lower weight. If the drug (which I haven’t taken yet) made it easy that’d be a relief. It’s much easier to just manage exercise.
I suspect people that don’t have as much difficulty just get a different amount of joy from eating. For me I felt I could relate to the way an alcoholic described trying to quit drinking, except it’s harder in a way because you have to eat.
If changing your habits was much easier then we wouldn't need these medications and the world wouldn't keep getting fatter. People have known how to not be fat for a long time, yet the obesity rate has been rising worldwide, even in countries that have traditionally been skinny.
It's not like fat people on the whole are ignorant of how to become not-fat and never attempt to do so.
Because people are choosing deliberately to get pleasure to eat unhealthy stuff instead of being healthy. And that’s a reasonable thing to do. Immediate pleasure trumps future hypothetical gains.
And it’s exactly the same situation with financial education, debt, university degrees, or in general any long term endeavors that requires the sacrifice of the immediate pleasure.
Of course, we still have a non trivial percentage of people that suffer from eating disorders, and use food as a way to emotionally regulate themselves because that’s what they learned as children (child is unhappy, give him a candy…).
None of which addresses the point. Combating all of those urges and changing your habits via willpower is still far more difficult than a weekly injection that provides huge help in combating said urges.
As someone who in the past lost ~50lbs and has mostly kept it off for more than a decade this is just horse shit. It's incredibly hard even as someone who was only a bit overweight and not obese and it is still a struggle 15 years later, even more so than it was when I was younger
> Now he gets to live out the rest of his life fighting cravings, telling himself he's not allowed to enjoy food. How utterly sad.
I don't understand what drives people to write such intentionally asinine comments. Do you get off on hurting others or something?
There were quite a few foods I let go of when I decided to drop weight. Can't say I miss them much, certainly not to the extent to say something like "wow, i can't enjoy food anymore" or "now i'm fighting cravings all the time!!". And I legitimately have no interest in reintegrating them into my diet.
Turns out, some kinds of food are just dumb to consume, and my enjoyment of them is legitimately secondary. To the extent that discovering how harmful they were, they became inherently less enjoyable, and it was well possible for the habits and the cravings to subside over time. You don't try to go hit a balance with crack addiction, why would you try to hit a balance consuming 5 bazillion calorie rubbish?
Cutting out certain classes of foods from one's diet is absolutely possible and there's nothing necessarily wrong with it.
Additionally, some of us give up foods for reasons other than weight loss. I have no weight issues today, nor have I personally struggled with it in the past, yet I also gave up stuff like drinking soda because diabetes runs in my family.
While I do miss it sometimes, I'm perfectly fine with sparkling water. Sure I'll have soda once in a while, but it's now officially a "treat", and not all that sad about it.
If I ever struggle with weight gain in the future, I see no reason to skip a tool that makes that much easier.
>There were quite a few foods I let go of when I decided to drop weight. Can't say I miss them much, certainly not to the extent to say something like "wow, i can't enjoy food anymore" or "now i'm fighting cravings all the time!!". And I legitimately have no interest in reintegrating them into my diet.
Your story has been told over and over and over. We get it. Congratulations. You win. You don't need GLP1s to sustain your weight loss. You don't experience food noise. You made all the right choices. Your brain and genetics are superior to the 30% of American adults who have been told to eat less and move more and still haven't managed to improve their health through weight loss.
Now that you've been properly congratulated for your superiority, are you interested at all in understanding the complex systems that prevent 100 million Americans from achieving the success you have? Like, any intellectual curiosity at all about a problem that causes untold suffering for almost one third of Americans? That costs literally billions in healthcare costs? About stress, anxiety, access to healthy foods, or the novel mechanisms by which a drug which was discovered through studying the venom of a Gila monster operates on the human gut and brain? Or are you only interested in re-telling the world how you don't have the problem that we're trying to solve?
I'm pretty okay with semaglutide and I understand its prospective benefits, both on a personal and societal level. My point was that the father of this person clearly has that oh-so-superior and elusive brain chemistry you suppose I have based on the account shared, so it was both immensely asinine to write what you did, as well as straight up false. That you could have went through all these other points without being an asshole about it, from the get-go. That there's a person on the other side of the screen too, and maybe, just maybe, they weren't meaning unwell, and didn't deserve a fucking brainwash about how they're actually torturing their loved one - you know, just like how people don't deserve one about how they can totally lose weight unassisted and are just being "weak willed" or whatever. That you escalated, and that thinking you're justified in doing so doesn't actually make it any fucking better.
You made the story about you, when nobody asked. Check the comment I responded to. You did exactly what people always seem to jump out of their seats to do when this drug is mentioned: crowd the conversation with anecdata about how you did it better.
It's blatantly obvious that what I said was an anecdote and what benefits semaglutide harbors. I'm well aware and am in full agreement with it. Always has been. Now if only you condeded to having been unnecessarily and disproportionately hurtful.
Bread, sugar and potatoes exist on a spectrum from highly processed/refined (truly problematic) to minimally processed whole food versions (nutritionally valuable). There's no reason to give up minimally processed whole food versions of these.
What a bizarre, illogical comment. Did you even read what @throwawaylaptop wrote above? While most of us can handle she carbs just fine, some people have to pretty much eliminate them (regardless of processing level) in order to lose fat.
The rule of law generally refers to societies where everyone is subject to the same set of laws. China, for example, does not and has not had the rule of law. Instead they have rule BY law, where laws are simply to control certain people’s behavior.
Nor has Russia, North Korea... and many others. Now the United States, which once stood apart as a beacon of liberty and due process, has chosen to dim that light. The rule of law has given way to rule by law - where laws are no longer shields for the weak, but weapons for the powerful. The light on the hill has not just flickered; it has been extinguished, not by foreign enemies, but by domestic choices. The world watches, not with hope, but with a growing sense of betrayal.
That you have the means to make that distinction inside the justice system illustrates the dichotomy. In places that never had the rule of law to begin with, what you described is the standard expectation of the individuals living it. To question it, or to comment on it at all, would be akin to asking a fish “how’s the water”? If it could talk, it’d respond, “what the hell is water”?
You missed the point. Enforcement of laws is irrelevant for the question whether a society has "rule of law" or is just ruled by laws. "Rule of law" is a specific concept, it does not mean that a society has laws and executes them.
You may have heard of "no one is above the law" or "all are equal before the law", this is the quintessence of it. There is no king above the law, if there is the rule of law.
The point of the comment, I understand the point of the article and the point of no king above the law if there is rule of law.
The comment was about the abuse of “law” towards minorities. So go learn about how police departments are trained to seek and destroy these communities.
>It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?
The difference is order of magnitude as proportion of net worth and the necessity of the purchase.
The U.S. is really far behind on this front. Going to even casual restaurants in Germany, I see a menu that has a dozen or so symbols, representing everything from gluten to alliums to lupins. In the US you're lucky to get "May contain nuts"
I wonder if, like the precision fermentation process, these engineered bacteria can be fed into existing dairy processing machines that make ice cream and other derivative products. The win there is huge, it means practically replacing a very difficult to produce / maintain biological component (cows) with relatively stable component (vats of bacteria), with little impact to the rest of the production pipeline.
>What is the target audience for these bi-annual shots?
In the US, there are certain patients who are at high risk for HIV infection. They are men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users, and people who have sex for money or housing.
In Southern Africa, young women experience some of the highest incidence rates of HIV infection in the world [0], so that would be the high risk population there.
In terms of side effects, there are practically none for the once-every-two-months drug Apretude, which is prescribed in the US for the high risk population I mentioned. They are mostly around the physical injection itself/
Slightly off topic, but I have this exact feeling every time I visit the US and buy stuff in a store.
"Sorry, we don't include tax in the price that is displayed, so you'll need to either figure that out in your head or just pull the slot machine of what you are actually gonna pay at the register."
And don't give me the "taxes are different from place to place" cuz the store ain't gonna change place while I am in it. So much is just psychological warfare in the US, which just has no reason to be...
Sure that mildly annoys me but does it really matter? Everything in the store is taxed according to the relevant laws for the region. It's not as though this TV will have 10% tax but that TV will have 50% tax. They'll both be taxed according to the item category they fall under.
It's not as though most people are in a position to shop around when it comes to tax authorities.
I don’t think that it generally true. At least, I just wait to get to the register to discover how much I’ll be spending. I mean it is usually within 20% or so of the advertised cost.
>"Sorry, we don't include tax in the price that is displayed, so you'll need to either figure that out in your head or just pull the slot machine of what you are actually gonna pay at the register."
Canada, where I lived for years, has, or at least when I was there had, the same thing with taxes not being included in posted prices, and yes, it's annoying, i'll grant you that. I especially realized how annoying when I eventually moved to a country where all posted retail prices include all taxes. However, if you're in a supermarket with $150 in groceries in your cart and can't muster the neurons to roughly remember what sales taxes in your area are (their percentage is indeed often mentioned in price tags) and do the tiny bit of mental arithmetic necessary to know what 15% on $150 or etc is, you've got bigger problems than a specific grocery bill.
Also, markets are supposed to have associated prices. In US healthcare you learn the price later, sometimes weeks or months later, in the form of balance billing. For those not in the US -- you pay six ways:
1 - Premium
2 - Co-Pay
3 - Deductible
4 - Co-Insurance
5 - Balance Billing -- you dont learn the full cost until weeks/months later
6 - Non-covered items -- you dont learn the full cost until weeks/months later
A quick online search revealed that the HIV prevention drug Yeztugo (lenacapavir), is priced at $28,218 per year in the US. This translates to $14,109 per injection, as it is administered twice a year.
I wonder what this will look like worldwide, especially in countries where this is needed the most, once production ramps up.
In practical terms it means public subsidizing gay lifestyle in US by 28k/year - it’s the only demographic outside of sex workers for whom this drug make sense and will be routinely offered.
Evolution favored this level of GLP1, then we invented agriculture, and cooking, and bliss points. Now it’s far easier to ingest massive numbers of calories in ways that our old world systems can’t properly signal against. Evolution hasn’t caught up and maybe never will.