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How long til we're all on Ozempic?

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Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#361

Post by hackable_sand »

Teever wrote: post #288
SapporoChris wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is impossible to live a healthy lifestyle and have healthy weight, if you ignore the 3/5ths of Americans that are not obese and the 7/8th of the global population.

Are the 3/5ths of Americans who are not obese actually living a healthy lifestyle? Or are they just living a different unhealthy lifestyle? Is a skinny homeless methhead with a great BMI healthy? Or the blue collar dude who has terrible blood pressure from chain smoking and pounding energy drinks on his way to the job site? How many Americans who are not obese are on their way to becoming obese? There are lots of pat…

True. I do not think I have not yet met a person who is completely healthy.

Maybe in passing.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#362

Post by justinator »

squidlogic wrote: post #337
llamaimperative wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP isn't talking about self-control, they're talking about the fact we've created a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health. People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.

In my experience fitness is less about self control or will power and more about creating routines that lead to fitness. For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required. Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really…

Habits are great, but I'm in great shape because what I do is fun. When it's not fun I called it "training" and that's usually for some huge goal that'll at least be fun to look back at 10, 20 years down the line to marvel that I did a thing.

I guess what I want to express is habits are one step closer to a lifestyle change and that's what keeps one ultimately healthy (mentally, too). We can't have nightmare commutes to soul-sucking jobs to continually have people addicted to looking at screens and think that there's no fallout. Adding, "but now there are drugs!" isn't an advancement.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#363

Post by llamaimperative »

jrflowers wrote: post #358
llamaimperative wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP isn't talking about self-control, they're talking about the fact we've created a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health. People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.

> People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. People in the 50s (in the US) had, among other things, fistfuls of benzedrine. Edit: here is a link for the skeptical folks https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...

Whatever, set the clock to the 1820s. Or the 1400s. Or the 1200s. Or the 1990's or 200 BCE, I don't care.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#364

Post by zarathustreal »

Spivak wrote: post #98
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the negative consequence on the value of willpower is pretty obvious. "In what measure" is the real question.

You have the completely wrong take on this. Dieting destroys your relationship with food. Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad. Being able to lose weight while continuing to eat is a wonderful thing. There is no virtue in spending your willpower making your body do something it desperately doesn't want to do. That's s…

There is absolutely virtue in spending willpower to make your body do something it doesn’t want to do - maintaining and developing self control and autonomy. Imagine if there was no way to develop self-discipline, you’d be at the whims of your environment and the world would be nothing but chaos.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#365

Post by soulbadguy »

As every conversation with weigth management/obesity treatment, there are still people thinking that just more willing power / better habits is what's needed.

To those people I suggest you run an experiment : what ever your current body weigth is right now. Try loosing and keeping off 20%.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#366

Post by crooked-v »

llamaimperative wrote: post #264
paulcole wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying, "All things being equal, I'd prefer Santa Claus bring presents on Christmas Eve than have to go shopping for my kids." It's like well duh of course you'd prefer the impossibly unrealistic miracle.

Impossibly unrealistic to change zoning to disincentivize car-dependent urban design? Impossibly unrealistic to get rid of enormous sugar production subsidies that make it insanely cheap? Impossibly unrealistic to simply tax added sugar?

> Impossibly unrealistic to change zoning to disincentivize car-dependent urban design?

Those zoning issues are the same reason for any number of other problems, including housing prices that are supposedly the #1 concern for a huge number of voters, and yet voters in many cities have only doubled down over time on making it harder and harder to build in efficient and high-density ways. "Impossible" seems like a fair way to put it.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#367

Post by vessenes »

apsec112 wrote: post #8

This compares Ozempic with past drugs, but sales of past drugs are almost always limited by demand. I'm not sure there's much to learn here for a drug that is limited by supply. Also, this part is silly: "The announced investments across both companies total $32 billion. GLP-1s were 71% of Novo’s revenue in 2023, 16% of Lilly’s in 2023, and 26% of Lilly’s in 2024Q1. If these sales are proportional to the manufacturin…

Agreed. Don't forget they're spending on next-gen versions of these too -- Novo is testing a pill form that's apparently twice as effective as semaglutide(!) right now. It's easy to imagine that becomes part of many people's January routine -- stop drinking, take your pills, go to the gym for a month, slowly put the weight back on during the year, no problem.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#368

Post by vundercind »

NotPractical wrote: post #348
vundercind wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been studied pretty well. Possible effective solutions to the US obesity epidemic are pretty much limited to: 1) Radically alter aspects of food culture, work culture, social policy, and business regulation. 2) Magic pill (/injection) There appears to be no imminent progress on the many parts of #1 that need serious work, so if we want a big turn-around in the next half-century, #2 has suddenly and surprisingly…

But is it time to give up just because there hasn't been much progress yet? It seems now that we have #2 there's little incentive for #1, whereas there was plenty incentive for #1 before even if little action.

I think fourish decades was enough time to see if we’d get our shit together on the pile of problems that need to be fixed to solve this the #1 way. We haven’t, even a little.

So no, I’m thrilled to see #2 show up to maybe get our healthcare system to limp along for at least a couple decades longer than it was looking like it would.

Re: How long til we're all on Ozempic?

#369

Post by andrewla »

supportengineer wrote: post #270
andrewla wrote: post #239

I think Ozempic is a treatment of a symptom but not the underlying condition, but unlike many of the posters here, I do not think the underlying condition is "obesity". The below is mostly speculation. Research especially into people with healthy body weight seems to indicate that there is something going on that is causing widespread obesity. That is, there's some sort of environmental "GLP-1 Turbocharger". Maybe it…

We all know the problem: processed food and lack of exercise. We all know the solution: Organic vegetables, lean protein, and lots of exercise.

Maybe? I don't think we all know this. And some research, especially into people with unusual metabolism (but not necessarily known metabolic disorders) indicates that even with these restrictions, they need to operate at a significant calorie deficit simply to maintain a healthy weight. [1]

It might be that they are already exposed to enough processed food and pesticides that simply getting those things out of their diet is not sufficient, but I think it's clear that there's more going on here than a simple answer.

And, I think, most damningly, there are many people who maintain a healthy weight with no active efforts to maintain that weight, including a lack of exercise and consumption of processed food. It might be that a significant fraction of people are resistant to this effect or might just not enjoy the taste of processed food so naturally gain the benefits of avoidance.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/

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