Basically everything that can be improved by exercising and maintaining a healthy diet.
Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
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Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#562I find it fascinating how much a pretty large group of people just hate semaglutides and seemingly need to believe that it's some kind of Faustian bargain. I'm not talking about the people who are cautious or suspicious, that's more than reasonable, but it's clear that it's not cautious optimism in many.
>and seemingly need to believe that it's some kind of Faustian bargain.
I've seen the same thing and it's simultaneously depressing and fascinating. I think it's a variation of the just world hypothesis. People think in terms of narratives, and so if something bad happened, there must be some moral or reason that rationalizes it. And if something's just good, there must be some catch or hidden secret.
So we can't have a conversation about the positive effects of ozempic without people coming in by the droves speculating that it's part of some hidden trade-off. Because it feels like doing that even without evidence counts as informed skepticism.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Ozempic is so great, how come our bodies don't just... While I agree with your sentiment, your argument here assumes the human body always makes intelligent decisions for itself. My obstructive sleep apnea would like a word. After it's done choking me awake, of course. The body is a marvelous machine, but it is far from a perfect or intelligent design. We are lucky to have what we have, but expect operating mist…
> The body is a marvelous machine, but it is far from a perfect or intelligent design. And I think that we can only expect the process of evolution through natural selection to operate on traits that cause differential survival of individuals before reproduction. All sorts of new traits acquired through random mutation and recombination that only affect individuals after typical reproductive years will exist even whi…
Yet women have a longer lifespan despite shorter reproductive years.
If in a hunter-gatherer society most people stop reproducing after 40 (not entirely realistic, but bear with me), me being alive and fit at 45 can still improve the survival of my genepool. I can hunt meat and gather plants to make sure my children and grand-children are well-fed and able to produce plenty of offspring, carrying my genes on. I can build shelter, care for the young (improving their survival chances and freeing up the parents to do more physically demanding work).
And my siblings share half of my genes, and my cousins a quarter (assuming no inbreeding at all, otherwise the numbers go up). So helping their children survive and proliferate is a win for the proliferation of my genes. Evolution gets less effective the more indirect the effect and the lower the gene contribution, but it doesn't completely stop working. If there is one clan where everyone dies at 30 and one where people stop reproducing at 30 but stay useful members of society until 60 then then the second clan will do better and outcompete the first
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
The skepticism people have towards metabolic dysregulation models of obesity is too much. We know for a fact the inverse happens: girl starves herself for years to slim down to become a ballerina, eventually decides it's not worth it and tries to stop being so dangerously thin and... can't. She never feels hungry. Every time she eats she can only stomach a few bites before pushing it away. Just eat ice cream? Instant…
Is there a drug I can take to gain weight?
Steroids and antipsychotics usually cause massive weight gain.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
"No free lunch" is a reasonable question to ask when evaluating medication, if it would improve the evolutionary fitness of the majority of people. I think this is behind some of the skepticism. If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them? I would guess t…
> If Ozempic is so great, how come our bodies don't just... While I agree with your sentiment, your argument here assumes the human body always makes intelligent decisions for itself. My obstructive sleep apnea would like a word. After it's done choking me awake, of course. The body is a marvelous machine, but it is far from a perfect or intelligent design. We are lucky to have what we have, but expect operating mist…
I agree with this criticism in the case of sleep apnoea, since the respiratory system is complicated. By intuition, it seems like the evolution of a complicated trait should require significant genetic changes, and thus be more likely to get stuck in a local maximum. I'd expect the respiratory system to be quite resistant to change: what if you've got an SNP that reduces sleep aponea but also prevents peristalsis, speech, weakens your neck, etc.? You might need a number of SNPs to all change at once in order to fix the problem.
I don't think the argument holds so strongly for questions like "why don't we produce GLP-1 hormone at a 20% higher level?" Increasing GLP-1 production levels seem like a smoother transition with fewer side effects. If higher production is better, and you've got an SNP that increases production by 5% on its own by increasing the number of L cells in your intestines (or something), that sounds like it should make you more reproductively viable in today's world and shouldn't have as high an impact on everything else as changing the shape of a throat.
Most of this is just my intuition, and I'm absolutely not an expert.
Edit: final note that I think in today's world is the key gotcha here, per the original text: "getting fat in times of plenty was a feature and not a bug", meaning that it was evolutionary advantageous for most people to put on weight until very recently, evolutionarily speaking.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#566This, like much of the pharmaceutical approach to well-being, is treating symptoms and not the problem. Metabolic dysfunction? Fix the metabolism. Poor understanding of nutrition? Fix the understanding. Lack of emotional or self-control? Fix the discipline. Obesity is largely NOT an acute symptom and does not need an acute solution. If you don't fix the underlying problem you will have weight issues your whole life (…
Wow, I didn't realize the solution to all my problems is just to fix them. The answer was staring me right in the face the entire time. While I'm at it, I should also not take ADHD medication and instead just fix my mutated dopamine circuitry.
You don't quite understand the meaning of "symptom" and "illness", do you?
Obesity - symptom. Usually the illness is a bad diet, lack of movement, or very rarely some serious health condition. Instead of targeting obesity, fix your habits or see a doctor to see why your body accumulates excessive amounts of fat.
Dopamine issues, lack of concentration, etc. - symptoms. The illness is ADHD. By taking medicines you are targeting illness, which is correct. Targeting symptoms would be me standing behind you with a metal pipe and hitting you every time you lose focus.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#567The article says nothing about whether they controlled for the associated weight loss. That would still be interesting, but less surprising.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
The drug companies are very good at making new drugs with high profit potential look better than they are. I'm worried semaglutides are another fen-phen, Vioxx, Quaaludes, Trovafloxacin or OxyContin. One thing to watch for is effect size: how big of an anti-aging effect does Ozempic confer relative to other good interventions? Were the subjects doing other solid anti-aging interventions like the Fasting Mimicking Die…
Quaaludes should definitely make a comeback.
These were too strong a sleeping pill to be safe for driving, if you stayed awake or didn't wait for it to wear off all the way the next day. You could feel it was kind of a goofy intoxicant, but if you took one and laid down you slept like a log.
I think there were some early incidents that would keep it from becoming a legitimate blockbuster, other sleep aids became more widespread and Quaaludes ended up more for retired people who didn't drive or didn't drive as much any more.
Naturally the condos of South Florida were packed with those type residents like nowhere else.
Mostly the old folks would take the first one and the next day feel like it was more potent than they thought. They were potent and most people wouldn't really need one the next night even if they took it for insomnia the night before.
These patients weren't taking them every night, just the opposite, only occasionally, if ever again when they felt like they really needed it.
One day, after a few years, some wild high-school kid with nothing else but pure rebelliousness and unruly behavior in mind, who will take any pill they find, finds out that grandma has a forgotten bottle in the medicine cabinet with 99 of them still in it.
Tries it and likes it. Tells his friends.
Within a few weeks hundreds of kids were finding vast repositories, selling them for $1 each and that's when they first started flying off the shelf.
They probably cost about $6 a 100 for the prescription at the pharmacy, in 1970's dollars.
Interestingly, they became a blockbuster only after it was no longer legitimate.
This is also when pharma started to jack up their prices on a per-pill basis, before that the medical world was still like it really had never crossed their mind until then.
For a number of years afterward new "patients" started preferring them too, on the black market a renewed prescription yielded over 10x the money the drug company made on the same bottle. Pharma was just cringing about it until they eventually got their skyrocketing underway. Still caught them again with opiates, especially Oxycontin.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
"No free lunch" is a reasonable question to ask when evaluating medication, if it would improve the evolutionary fitness of the majority of people. I think this is behind some of the skepticism. If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them? I would guess t…
> How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them? There are several reasons: Chimps have a higher density of testosterone receptors with a higher sensitivity than humans. Compared to humans, they are essentially roided out all the time. Humans are also hairless endurance hunters so we naturally have much larger fat reserves (15-25% of…
> to retain body heat
Heat retention would benefit an ambush hunter in a cold climate whereas heat exhaustion is one of the ways endurance hunters catch their prey in hot climes.
> Humans are also hairless endurance hunters
It's something we can do but the diversity of habitats, prey and techniques humans feed themselves with is far greater than what feels like an over-indexing on specific extant savannah tribes as if they are proto-human relics. Do you need to out run a fish or an oyster? Why would you run after a rabbit instead of waiting for it near it's burrow? etc.
Personally I bear little resemblance to an endurance runner so one might assume no shortage of forest/mountain dwellers in my genes given short thick legs. Built for sprinting, climbing and carrying but, to my despair, incurably injury prone at endurance running.
Re: Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Ozempic is just a symbol of what modern life looks like. Obesity is a problem that 100% could be solved with a cultural shift (see Japan), but instead we decide to use medicine. It's like, humanity at large grew such big brains because there was evolutionary pressure to be intelligent, but now we're using intelligence to remove that pressure. Which would make sense if we redirected that intelligence to someth…
The way Japan "solves" obesity is quite cruel on those it does not work for. Overweight natives are not treated kindly. I think creating a medicine to make this easier is a moral good, and a sign of kindness and intelligence. Hopefully the aliens also agree.
What is more cruel:
a) emotional damage
b) heart disease