How long til we're all on Ozempic?

Over the past several years we've found that antibiotics have a huge impact on beneficial microbes in your body which then has downstream impacts on your health [0]. Oddly enough for the topic in this article exposure to antibiotics as a child may be linked to obesity[1]. They are also extremely over prescribed for things like viral illnesses [2].

I personally wouldn't take an antibiotic unless whatever malady I was suffering from was proven to not only be bacterial in origin but likely to progress without treatment.

Regarding your larger point some of the distrust of medications can be related to the fact that people know that medication producers' goal is to be profit for the most part.

Because they are for-profit the medicine producers can't be trusted to produce quality products or to produce products which resolve a problem rather than just reducing symptoms as long as the patient continues to pay for the medicine.

As with other problems we have a low trust society because it's a society built on for-profit enterprises rather than enterprises focused on doing the best thing for society.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8756738/ 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2014180 2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37876436/

Add sugar to everything, advertise anything and everything to kids so they are hooked up early, make healthy food expensive so the poor have no choice but to eat unhealthy and so on. Profit!

Now they'll profit once again at the other end "fixing" the issues they caused in the first place. Genius. There's no limit on human ingenuity when it comes to exploiting others.

I've been running distance most my life. I stopped when my wife had our first kid to concentrate on working hard and give her as much time off from the kid as I could, then after 6 years I had enough and started running. Two years ago, I hadn't been losing any weight, and I was put on these drugs to help me.

I lost more weight.

I run, walk, and move more than you imagine. It didn't work, but these drugs worked.

Not everything is black and white or fits into your preconceived notions.

At my lightest in 2023, I weighed 60kg. Currently I weigh over 95kg. I don't know what else people who hold your view can be told to convince them this problem is not one of willpower. I have the capacity to suffer. I've given up smoking. There is no escape from food.

1. Posts from folks who diet+exercise, or who have tried diet/exercise and nothing's worked so they then turned to Zepbound ("excited to hit the gym," "my diet is finally starting to work with Zepbound" and similar)

2. Posts from folks who haven't tried diet/exercise and turned to Zepbound first. (e.g. "I'm excited to eat dessert and laze around on my couch all day!" or "Zep is so much easier than before, no more keto for me" and similar)

Which group do you think would have more posts?

Selection bias probably prevents us from being able to count "Zepbound didn't work for me, but diet and exercise did" posts, which is why i suggest this.

Here's my hypothesis: I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight. Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight "the simple way," but certainly not sufficient. I know lots of friends who've struggled and found it's not so simple.