At a risk of being ignorant: Isn’t obesity a function of calories intake and calories burn rate? If so, why do we even need a drug for that? What should a possible drug target here? Assuming no changes in behaviour and thus a continued steady daily caloric surplus, would it even work?
I believe you are correct, but that leaves several possibilities for the drugs to be effective. They could work by either causing you to lose interest in food/improving impulse control so that you eat less, or by increasing your calorie burn rate, or by causing your body to absorb less calories from the same amount of food.
The implication is that something has happened during the last 50-100 years that caused people's "natural weight" to change upward. (Someone's "natural weight" is normally called their "set point".) The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor…
I'd be sooner to suspect environmental contaminants (changing types of air pollution, microplastics, pesticides on food, stress hormones in factory-farmed meat, et al) as a cause. Although I suspect there's something to your hypothesis as well. I don't know about a spoonful of oil, but I have gone through phases where food seems less "rewarding" on a physiological level, and as a result I feel more satisfied with les…
Air pollution seems unlikely as it's been falling for decades, and America has much lower levels than Europe. Microplastics are a perennial boogey man, and probably a genuine ecological issue, but there has no been mountains of studies done and documented health effects are virtually non-existent. Livestock and slaughterhouse conditions are certainly not good from an animal welfare perspective, but we've had similar practices for 100+ years and obesity wasn't a major issue in 1960. Pesticides in food products have been substantially reduced since the EPA changed guidelines in the 1990s, and yet obesity has exploded since then.
It appears you can do the same thing with 3g of cinnamon https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19158209/ Conclusions: Ingestion of 3 g cinnamon reduced postprandial serum insulin and increased GLP-1 concentrations without significantly affecting blood glucose, GIP, the ghrelin concentration, satiety, or GER in healthy subjects.
Isn’t that a dangerous amount?
It's about 1/3 of a tablespoon. It's dangerous to the bottom line of drug manufactures trying to sell a $1000 injection that does the same thing.
I mean, if you have perfect bloodwork and a marvel movie body probably not necessary but otherwise yes. Heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, colon cancer rates are rising amongst everyone, even thin people. These drugs positively impact indicators of these things in everyone. Longevity makers have been betting on metformin for a long time and these drugs are like a supercharged metformin
colon cancer rates are rising amongst everyone, even thin people. Yeah, look at all these super-old people like Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, Kissinger, Munger who pretty much have terrible diets, obese, no exercise yet still going strong, productive. Shows the power of genes. "Your BMI is below 23, therefore we will skip the colonoscopy and prostate/PSA exam and blood work," said no doctor ever (unless the doctor…
You might think the very rich have bad diets, but I guarantee you it's probably way better than the vast majority of people. They can and do have personal cooks, nutritionists and shoppers give them optimized food all the time and drink a coke and have a burger in public once in a while to make you think they are 'just like you and me!'.
It's that underlying foundation that you don't see that gives them the margin to have a burger.
> It's quite undeniable that modern life has drawbacks and obesity is just a symptom. Yea, people tend to forget pre-green revolution people going hungry for longer periods of time and mass starvation were really common. We made a trade, between the sudden and terrible outcome of starving and hunger to one of long term consequences like obesity and disease.
We've gone quite far beyond never starving, we're eating far more than the required amount. Just a simple consequence of it being cheap and easy to make good tasting food by dumping sugar into literally everything. And the results are predictable.
>We've gone quite far beyond never starving
I would counter you're incorrect, we're only 2 to 3 generations (maybe 4 now that I'm getting old) past never starving. On an evolutionary timescale this is nothing when talking about an impulse hundreds of millions of years old.
Our bodies never developed any means to prevent eating more than we needed other than "Oh $deity my belly hurts" and "Hmm, I better save some of this for tomorrow because food could run out then instead".
Maintaining a healthy weight is not that difficult FOR YOU. Many, many people struggle to control their weight. One day you might too. I never had an issue with my weight until I had a thyroid infection around 30. I now have "normal" thyroid levels, but ever since then maintaining my weight take vigilance and lots of discipline. It's possible, but definitely "difficult".
I had a similar issue. I was over the weight I wanted to be, but not amazingly so. Then I had a thyroid issue, and I lost a bunch of weight; down to my target weight. Then, once the thyroid issue was treated, my weight rebounded well past it's starting point. I'm still trying to lose the extra weight.
Non-obese people who eat McDonalds and drink Coke are unequivocally healthier than obese people who adhere to the healthiest diets. There's absolutely zero academic research that disputes that obesity (and exercise) by far is the largest risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, etc.
Wow that's some impressive logical gymnastics. If these people adhere to the "healthiest diets" they will eventually no longer be obese. American food is shit. Most people have no clue what healthy food is, even if they intend to eat a healthy diet.
This is not very impressive logically. Plenty of non-obese people eat exclusively shitty food.
I'm unfamiliar with the research around GLP1 drugs, but I my past reading about the long-term effects of metformin led me to a similar conclusion. Unfortunately, metformin causes me severe gastrointestinal issues that don't resolve themselves after a few weeks. There are lots of surprising findings w/r/t pharmaceuticals if you start really digging. Lots of missed opportunity for overall improvement in the human condi…
Gets into fun tradeoff questions of "Would you live an extra 20 years but have diarrhea every day"
Depends how bad the diarrhea is. I basically kind of lived that with the very spicy food in south east asia, along with the resultant better health & fat loss from the better diet.
Petro Dobromylskyj is one of the foremost experts of fat metabolism. He has a blog called Hyperlipid where he's been blogging about fat metabolism and interpreting research for close to 10 years. He thinks the GLP-1 inhibitor drugs will be a disaster in the long term because they 1) cause weight loss but also 2) cause the body to create lots of new adipocyte (fat cells). Increasing the number of adipocytes is very un…
The only thing I see from him on google scholar is about mechanical ventilation for small animals. What's his background?
> And there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. I have a hard time believing this without some very strong evidence for this claim. There's already existing evidence for greatly varying health effects of differences in cooking method, oil-type, omega ratios in fats, amino-acid ratios in proteins, glycemic index of carbs, sodium conte…
Try to find any major research showing either diet has a significant health impact on either 1) non-overweight individuals who remain non-overweight; or 2) has a health impact after controlling for changes in weight/obesity/body fat. It's virtually non-existent. Perhaps there are small differences on the margin, but all dwarfed by the impact of obesity. Again this shouldn't shock us, because we know hunter-gatherers…
The point is that certain diets are more likely to prevent non-overweight individuals from remaining non-overweight. Example study where participants ate two different diets, one highly processed and one less processed, that were matched for macronutrient and calorie content: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248...