• theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Did you read the article? It is warning about over-prescribing to people who already naturally produce GLP-1 correctly.

    If a patient’s body is already producing GLP-1 at normal or elevated levels, prescribing a long-acting agonist isn’t correcting a deficit; it may be amplifying a signal that’s already there. Are the potential effects of that a risk the prescriber and patient are willing to take on?

    I am not arguing that these drugs are dangerous and should be restricted. I am arguing that the question of who should receive them has not been asked with nearly enough precision, and that a baseline GLP-1 measurement is an obvious, low-cost starting point.

    Seems pretty reasonable?

    • BanMe@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      GLP-1 has already been exploited for 50 years, you know it as the processed food revolution, aka why half of you reading this have problems with your own refined sugar consumption but feel powerless to change it. We need more research but this is a weapon in a war that started a while ago.

    • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I think it’s well understood that people who produce glp1 correctly can still be obese and need weight loss and these drugs help with that. That’s the whole point of the drug. To provide more glp1 than is needed to lose weight easily.

      • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        these drugs help with that

        or they cause gastrointestinal conditions in these people, resulting in weight loss (and malnutrition) that is a symptom of the new problem rather than the drug itself. If you don’t have GLP-1 problems, then GLP-1 is not a solution, and dieting will be effective.

        • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          The entire point of glp1 is to prescribe when dieting isn’t effective.

            • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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              2 months ago

              Have you read any of the other comments here? People aren’t just “refusing” to change their diets. I’m not going to type my response again but see my comment here. Or maybe this comment by someone else. Or maybe this one. The point is that when 20+% of the population are afflicted with something, it’s not a problem of them “refusing” to fix it themselves. It’s a systemic issue.

          • lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Dieting is literally effective 100% of the time, thanks to Newton and his second law and all that.

            Sticking to it is another thing entirely - but let’s not pretend words don’t have meaning anymore

            • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Dieting is effective in a vacuum. Much of the time dieting isn’t effective because people are too busy, uninformed, too stressed, working 2 jobs, have mental disorders, don’t live near accessible sources of healthy food, have incredibly low willpower, are being lied to by food companies, lied to by their governments health systems, coerced into an unhealthy but profitable lifestyle, or all of the above.

              Sure you could say “well just fix all of that and you’d be healthy” and you’d be right. But we all know that’s not going to happen, especially en masse.

              Semaglutide helps people in those situations avoid the consequences of obesity. Sure it may have its own downsides. But it’s the easiest of many solutions, often the only one that will feasibly work for someone.

              Not everyone can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and get healthy without help. If they could, the world wouldn’t be so obese on average. You have to acknowledge this is a mostly global issue and traditional solutions would have fixed it by now if they always worked.

                • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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                  2 months ago

                  How about you actually do some research before you make claims like that? It’s a bit worse in the US, but obesity is a global problem. Any country with an obese population of 20% or more of the total population I would consider as having a serious national obesity problem. Several first world countries are at above 30%. A couple are above 40%, including the US. Even half of that is still in “crisis” territory.

            • ChexMax@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Studies show dieting doesn’t work for most of the population. Studies have shown this for the last 60 years. Sure, it works in a vacuum, but that’s not where real people live.

                • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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                  3 months ago

                  And what do you suppose we do about that? It has become a global epidemic. Just “get good” and start eating healthy? Clearly that does actually work, and yet obesity is more of a problem now than it has ever been.

                • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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                  3 months ago

                  Right, you are correct. Now how do we get people to actually follow diets and eat less? How do we save the billions of people who are overweight? Because clearly telling them “stop being so lazy and eat less or exercise more” hasn’t been working for decades.

            • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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              2 months ago

              Dieting is effective if you can stick to it. I watch my calorie intake and have no problems staying at a healthy weight. Even considering that I go out drinking practically every weekend. I also have the advantage that I don’t really think about food until I’m starving and even then it’s not an issue for me to put off for a few more hours.

              That is not the case for many people. There are so many things working against us when it comes to eating healthy. Fast food is all designed to be as addictive as possible. Meal planning and preparation takes a lot more time and healthy food is expensive (although at this point all food is expensive so maybe that one is a wash). People’s lives are stressful as fuck and they have so much to deal that uses up their mental energy. That additional stress from trying to maintain a diet is just too much. Food brings them joy so they overeat. These drugs help to curb their appetite without the additional stress. I see no problem there even if they shouldn’t technically need the help in a perfect world. The world’s far from perfect and we don’t know what people are dealing with.

            • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Your oversimplification of complex biological processes is mindbogglingly ignorant. Please find a study that shows a diet that produces results that are over a 10% reduction in body mass and with results that last for over two years. If you can’t do even that miniscule baseline, if you can’t find one diet that has actual scientific macking, please stfu about subjects you know next to nothing about and have no evidence for. I know it’s really difficult for you to understand concepts that can’t be boiled down to a single sentence, but let’s try this one time, okay?

              • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Complex biology is emergent from and constrained by the laws of physics.

                There is no process, no matter how complex, that does not abide by thermodynamics.

                If you burn more calories of energy than you consume, your body mass will decrease.

                  • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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                    3 months ago

                    So you think a single phrase can encompass something useful in such a complex system?

                    Yes. Absolutely. So do all dieticians and nutritionists, as this is the principle that all diets are based on, because it is correct. It is both “technically” true and useful. Your body cannot store calories that you do not consume or that it burns, because your body cannot do magic or make something from nothing.

              • lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Energy in = energy out is Newton’s law, not mine. You’re arguing about something else it seems

              • Alk@sh.itjust.works
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                3 months ago

                Dieting is effective in a vacuum. Much of the time dieting isn’t effective because people are too busy, uninformed, too stressed, working 2 jobs, have mental disorders, don’t live near accessible sources of healthy food, have incredibly low willpower, are being lied to by food companies, lied to by their governments health systems, coerced into an unhealthy but profitable lifestyle, or all of the above.

                Sure you could say “well just fix all of that and you’d be healthy” and you’d be right. But we all know that’s not going to happen, especially en masse.

                Semaglutide helps people in those situations avoid the consequences of obesity. Sure it may have its own downsides. But it’s the easiest of many solutions, often the only one that will feasibly work for someone.

                Not everyone can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and get healthy without help. If they could, the world wouldn’t be so obese on average. You have to acknowledge this is a mostly global issue and traditional solutions would have fixed it by now if they always worked.

              • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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                3 months ago

                Go find me a study that backs up your truth. Easy parameters, find one that shows a 10% reduction in body mass that is sustainable for two years by a quarter of the participants. Otherwise you’re just spouting unscientific crap out of ignorance and should really just not speak on topics you don’t know anything about.

                • DireTech@sh.itjust.works
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                  3 months ago

                  You guys are talking about two different things. He says changing your diet is effective and it is.

                  You’re saying hardly anyone sticks with the diet changes after losing weight so they end up regaining the weight and that’s also true.

                  Though I’m going to add that a lot of the reason people fail to keep the weight off without drugs is we’re ok with companies outright lying about how healthy their product is. You should not be able to pretend that highly processed crap full of sugar is good for you. It’s really obvious that hardly anyone reads nutritional info and does the math on sugar content by weight.

                  • greenskye@lemmy.zip
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                    3 months ago

                    There’s also a ton of psychological aspects that make keeping weight off harder. Your brain will literally self sabotage you repeatedly because humans are designed to gain and keep weight, not lose it.

                    Adding more exercise? Well that must mean we need to eat more! Eating less? Well obviously we’re starving, so now your brain will tell your body to move less. Lost weight for awhile? Clearly we need to slowly increase portion sizes over time.

                    Long term weight loss is a literally a struggle against yourself and your body does not want you to win.

                    You guys are talking about two different things. He says changing your diet is effective and it is.

                    The point was that the drugs help fight the effects of obesity by keeping weight off permanently. If dieting cannot do the same, then it isn’t effective at fighting that threat. Losing weight for 2 years and then relapsing isn’t all that helpful in fighting the long term health effects of obesity.

                  • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
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                    3 months ago

                    We are talking about different things. I’m talking about evidence and they’re not.

                    and it is.

                    You say in your very next line people stop doing it and that’s why it doesn’t work. Yes. These interventions are not sustainable. If that’s your gotcha, that people can’t stay on them but crash dieting, starvation, disordered eating, etc is a reasonable idea, then that’s a lazy strawman. If you don’t have a scientific study to back up that dieting works for actual people, please shut up. I’m really sick of people proping up bullshit without ever trying to figure out if it’s true. If you can’t find evidence of a diet that actual people can do that results in a 10% loss over 2 years for even a third of the participants, then it’s time to update what you think. Short of surgery, nothing works long term for weight loss. Even Ozempic has to be taken for as long as you want the weight off, it stops working for some people after 6 months to a year, and about 75% of people stop taking it within two years.