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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?

#771

Post by bozleh2 »

unlikelytomato wrote: post #746
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we find it acceptable to help people who struggle with alcohol abuse, or nicotine addiction, or opioid addiction, but not to help people who struggle with food abuse? "Getting fit and staying fit" is a form of social capital, because it's extremely hard and only within reach of a small portion of the population. "Being fit" is strongly aligned with "being attractive" which confers all sorts of cross-cutting…

I would say my concerns are far more in the range of downstream effects from the medication. Specifically, I am concerned with muscle retention. Concerns aside, it's a little hard of an argument to swallow having visited many other countries where these things are simply not an issue. How can it be argued that the cause is anything other than behavior when so many others are doing just fine? There is more to this sto…

> How can it be argued that the cause is anything other than behavior when so many others are doing just fine?

Aren’t you are ignoring the way western society influences behavior? eg lack of walkability of suburbs, massive price difference between fresh and processed foods, constant advertising of junk food & alcohol.

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

#772

Post by TeeMassive »

llamaimperative wrote: post #267
TeeMassive wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad for RFK Jr. for this reason. Nobody talked about this in the mainstream conversations in the past.

If you like RFK Jr "for this reason," you oughta looove Michelle Obama! https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ Out from underneath the rock, people have been talking about this nonstop for decades.

I don't see the Obamas defending the farmers getting criminally prosecuted for selling their raw food directly to consumers. RFK Jr is.

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

#773

Post by TeeMassive »

labster wrote: post #243
TeeMassive wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad for RFK Jr. for this reason. Nobody talked about this in the mainstream conversations in the past.

People and officials have been talking about healthy eating for generations. Hard to get more mainstream than every doctor talking about diet and exercise.

Politicians have been protecting big ag for decades. Now independent farmers are getting criminally prosecuted for selling their raw foods directly to consumers.

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

#774

Post by gcanyon »

To anyone thinking that exercise will fix anything: I've owned a Concept 2 rowing machine since 2005. In that time I've done an average of 100 workouts per year, for a total of over 35 days of rowing. Some workouts were relatively easy 120bpm heart rate; some were at a relatively brutal 160bpm. Concept 2 estimates I've burned just over 600,000 calories, or about 1,000 Big Macs. Could I have eaten 1,000 Big Macs in 19 years? I think so.

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

#775

Post by croissants »

gcr wrote: post #185
IncreasePosts wrote: post #3

My biggest fear is either there will be long term negative consequences to Ozempic et al, and a huge swath of the population will be dealing with issues 30 years form now - OR - there will be some long term positive consequence to using Ozempic et al, and I'm not getting any of the benefits because I'm not overweight.

I can understand this perspective. You're looking at it with healthy eyes. But for fat people, the calculus looks different. A decision to take semaglutides is a decision between the long-term negative effects of obesity *now*, or the possibility of long-term negative effects *later.* Anecdotally, trans people have a similar calculus. Going unmedicated/unsupported brings significant mental health risk now [1], wherea…

Tangential, but

> 1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G

This paper also finds that 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students (out of ~8k surveyed for each) attempted suicide in the past year. It's kind of strange, because the age [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr024.pdf, Figure 3

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

#776

Post by zero-sharp »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #544
OptionOfT wrote: post #420

As someone who struggled with their weight his whole life, this medication is a god send. My wife and I cook every evening. We never eat food made in a factory. We buy raw products and spend a good amount of time every day cooking them. Every morning I wake up and go on a 5 mile hike. And still weight kept on coming on. Worse yet, I am on ADHD medication, which are amphetamines and actually make you lose weight. Yet.…

> Why do we find it acceptable to help people who struggle with alcohol abuse, or nicotine addiction, or opioid addiction, but not to help people who struggle with food abuse? "Getting fit and staying fit" is a form of social capital, because it's extremely hard and only within reach of a small portion of the population. "Being fit" is strongly aligned with "being attractive" which confers all sorts of cross-cutting…

>Some people feel cheated when medication allows others to "effortlessly" join this social club, and then become vile and hateful in response.

Nice one. I think it's a bad idea to be dependent on drugs for something you can achieve on your own, especially if the drugs don't have a long term safety profile. Pretty sure I read somewhere that they don't. If you're going to use them for a short period of time, that's fine. Don't say nobody warned you if that doesn't pan out though (or worse, you have a bad drug response).

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

#777

Post by jodrellblank »

inglor_cz wrote: post #343
jodrellblank wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article " Estimates suggest GLP-1s can reduce body weight by at least 15% when taken regularly ". That's a 5'10" man starting at 250lbs (obese, BMI > 35) and finishing at 220lbs (obese, BMI >30). Or a 5'10" man starting at 220lbs (obese) and finishing at 187lbs (overweight, BMI > 26). It ain't nothing, but that's not a magic pill which will fix the obesity epidemic. And these people have skipped changing the…

This is work in progress, though. 3rd generation medications are already way more efficient than 1st gen. Saxenda ever was. A further increase in efficiency is likely. "And these people have skipped changing their lifestyle, exercise, diet, and attitudes around food." That sounds very judgmental of you, like if they were skipping school. Bad truants! What about "found the necessary changes too hard/complicated to sus…

There are 110,000,000 overweight people in the USA and another 110,000,000 obese people. Is it really closer to reality that everyone is a two-jobs no time for exercise, or is it more that Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino has 500 Calories and Starbucks has 15,800 stores in the USA and $36Bn annual revenue? And McDonalds, KFC, and all the rest. Is it closer to reality that people are snacking on some snack food on the couch out of habit and not paying attention to how many calories that is in a week, because it's just habit and gone in seconds? Is it closer to reality that Uber Eats and Door Dash and Domino's advertise to manipulate you into believing that you don't have time to cook at home and they are a good option? Is it closer to reality that there are food deserts with only junk easily available?

> "That sounds very judgmental of you, like if they were skipping school. Bad truants!"

It is judgemental of me, like if you want to pass your exams but skip studying, that would be bad. If you aren't exercising and are eating terribly and are obese, this lets you silence the alarm bells while saying "I don't have time to exercise". That doesn't seem as good as eating better and changing your life to include movement.

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

#778

Post by hirvi74 »

dahart wrote: post #745
larodi wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the first person on HN who actively and without shame pays attention to the fact that Adderall is a very nice amphet cocktail. Surprising though you don't loose wait with it, sad also given the circumstances. But I envy you a little cause such ADHD boost is only illegal in EU. Sometimes I wonder if it was a some neat trick by US gov to diagnose and put 1/5 of the population on amphetamines (2024 data +60mil p…

> 1/5 of the population suddenly increases output I’ve heard studies show Adderall doesn’t help people without ADHD… googling now seems to confirm. Apparently lots of people, especially college kids, take it thinking it will help, but it actually can slow them down.

My understanding is the amph. works the same in everyone - minus the edge cases.

The main difference is that the magnitude is greater in people with ADHD than those without. A reduction in hyperactivity, for example, is not really apparent in people that are not overtly hyperactive to begin with.

Beside, ADHD is kind of a nebulous label for a lot of symptoms. Having ADHD vs. not having ADHD is not exactly binary.

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

#779

Post by makeitdouble »

itsoktocry wrote: post #760
mlsu wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view about obesity has shifted dramatically since Ozempic came out. Before this, I didn't think about it too much (I am not obese myself). I notice now that there is a LOT of judgement, bias(?), around obesity, that people, obese or not, carry with them [1]. I certainly carried that bias, and the reason I noticed it was because Ozempic is literally an external substance that you take that simply makes obesity go a…

For me, personally, it's that we don't really know the long term effects of these drugs ie are you actually "healthier". But we do know that diet and exercise work.

> we do know that diet and exercise work.

Stricly speaking we don't.

This is "common sense" and the official recommendation, but fundamentally we don't have solid long term reproductible experiments[0], and due to the nature of the problem (humans living their life in a complex society) we'll probably never have a good answer.

I've read many many studies spanning a few months and calling it a day (did the subjects rebound ? who knows), other taking a very small and homogenic pathological group, making it follow a strict regimen and end the experiment right after the subjects are let free again. But nothing with an actually rigorous protocol that gives a clear undisputable result.

In a way I feel a lot of researchers are bound to their common sense and think they either don't need to prove the obvious, or it brings them nothing to let the room for controversial results ? (nobody's paying for research that says current policy is dumb)

[0] If you have any double blind study with more than a hundred subjects taken randomly from the general population (including "healthy" subjects), with a control group, spanning more than 3 years of observations I'd be dying to read it..

If you think that's a high bar, obesity is touted to be the worst health crisis the US has to deal with with tremendous impacts, putting at least that much effort into research doesn't seem outlandish.

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

#780

Post by carapace »

crooked-v wrote: post #302
gcr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have good food, but you won't find it on "The Easy Path." The Easy Path is that gentle encouragement to hit up Chipotle for lunch, because it's "right there." The Easy Path says dinner's hard and you've had a long day, so get something simple, like take-out or microwave. The Easy Path is entropy. The Easy Path is self-care over struggle. The Easy Path is simple carbs shown on prominent display in store shelves. Th…

> I personally doubt that, because putting GLP-1 on The Easy Path would require big food companies to rethink their entire portfolio. I think the drug industry is more powerful than the food industry, these days.

I mean...

> RJR Nabisco was formed in 1985 by the merger of Nabisco Brands and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco

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