Just a reminder there are no shortcuts; doing the work to actually heal yourself and fast, etc. will always beat this sort of thing in the long run.
Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
621–630 of 985 posts
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother was on it for a bit (and should go on it again) and the thing he noted was that it makes it easy to not eat but it gives you no useful habits to keep that up because it's so easy. Which makes sense. I still calorie count everything generally because I know I'll let myself creep portion sizes unchecked.
I don't think it's natural (in the sense of defining health) for adequate homeostasis to require special rituals and constant attention.
To be fair, 12 step programs would be a counter argument. The maintenance of homeostasis requires constant attention in those programs. You could say overeating is different from other addictions, and I would agree, but there are a lot of similarities too..
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
The social stigma in Europe exists, because these drugs are in limited supply. So, if a person who does not really need them is using them, the people who actually need them to stay alive might have difficulty accessing them.
that's actually not true, Mounjaro and Wegovy are pretty much meant for weight loss and there is no competition over them for people with diabetes
There is until they're packaged because they're the same drug. Only the label is different.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#624>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024. I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them…
For artificial problems, artificial solutions. I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards and eating habits (and city designs) which render the incentives really perverse
> I think the state of food in the US is really bad
Or, perhaps, the state of mental health in the US is really bad.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of the "expensive" stuff. Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. > Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit. I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios. 50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The gener…
One particular thing on items like bananas and yogurt is they are very quickly perishable. You better be around and have a plan to eat them.
Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers.
This is the thing about most crap foods. They require no commitment. Keep them around for months. Even after opening them they last for days or weeks.
Processed foods don't require the further processing you're leaving out of the equation.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#626Just a reminder there are no shortcuts; doing the work to actually heal yourself and fast, etc. will always beat this sort of thing in the long run.
There are plenty of shortcuts. I've fixed my sleeping schedule by taking lorazepam and melatonin every night. I've gotten over many illnesses faster than healing naturally by taking many a pill. Why shouldn't there be medicine for issues with weight, especially for people who haven't been able to beat it themselves in decades? I've been fat most of my life and managed to lose a significant chunk of it by myself and regained it all over the following 5 years. Honestly, at this point, it's not happening without something like Ozempic. And I think it's the same for many people. Also, I don't care for the "not natural" debate, personally. If I wanted everything to be natural, I'd live in the woods and hunt animals.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
I experienced the same, and no it isn’t. In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly. You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA. Seriously, for someone from Europe, some…
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#628>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024. I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them…
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US. hah, they're not using them to get off of processed foods... they're using them to reduce the impact of processed foods
That's not how these drugs work. Think of it in terms of there being a programmable neural network in the gut (and associated brain I/O areas). This network is designed to get the animal to eat appropriately. But food makers figured out ways (by thousands of years of machine learning) to tweak its weights such that it tells the animal to eat too much. GLP-1 works by un-tweaking those weights (not quite: more like it clamps some of the inputs to the network but the result is the same). So it does indeed work by stopping the consumer from eating as much.
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#629In other news, water is wet. More at 11.
Is anyone surprised that hunger-affecting drugs used on a large scale are causing changes in consumer habits?
One might want to consider inflation in the balance...
Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time. Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue? Or is that too scientific?
> That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time. No, it doesn't. Saying that people lack an ability is not the same as claiming that the problem is a simple matter of instilling that ability. > Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue? It also isn't the same as shaming people or making a moral issue out of it. > Or is that too scientific? The snark is…
>No, it doesn't
If you owe the bank $100,000 that's your problem.
If you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 that's the banks problem.
Obesity is a 'bank problem' issue. When everyone around the globe is massively gaining weight, in every country on this planet that's not in a war or famine, this isn't a human willpower issue. Something has changed, and to ignore that is unscientific.