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Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

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Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#721

Post by cthalupa »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #678
SkyPuncher wrote: post #449

Earlier 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.

No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food. More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy. A kilo of (dry) legumes…

> More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. [...] rice

This is one of those reasons that the term 'processed' food is stupid. White rice is a very processed food - what is the removal of the bran and germ but processing? And many other 'processed' foods undergo processing with the same sort of ramifications for health.

Legumes are also not complete proteins in the majority of cases - soy is a significant exception here. Soy has a PDCAAS of 1, the same as whey, but lentils range from .5 to .7, many beans are around .6, etc., and this can end up meaning your 200g of protein ends up being quite different in impact to many of your body's uses for protein than someone else's 200g of protein.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#722

Post by padjo »

knowitnone3 wrote: post #490

There is lots of talk about food in these comments but the other part of the equation is exercise. You can eat as much as you want but then you have to burn those calories with exercise and most people don't.

Trying to lose weight through exercise is a fool’s errand. It’s fine for maintaining but if you want to lose weight au natural then you’re better off spending your mental energy on learning how to deal with being hungry all the time.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#723

Post by cbozeman »

padjo wrote: post #707
bsder wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more. Even if it's not intentional, I find that the enshittification seems to run along these lines. The things that finally drove it home for me this year were "peppermint bark" and "ranch dip". I used to buy this stuff or use the premade. This year I worked out how to do them properly myself. People raved about both. But I noticed th…

Or they weren’t actually that nice and people were being polite.

For a site chock full of logic-worshippers, we do seem to forget Occam's Razor too frequently.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#724

Post by spockz »

calpaterson wrote: post #82
spockz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around here fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks. In fact, replacing the snacks with healthy food in our case increased spending. So it is awesome that these households managed to cut spendings.

> fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks This is a commonly repeated claim but it's usually not true. Fruit is, in fact, pretty cheap: In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings... A kilo is usually ~6 bananas. So a banana costs maybe 28c on average. Find a cost-competitive ultra-processed snack for the calories and satiety that a banana provides. He…

I’m not in the US but in the Netherlands. Bananas are indeed pretty cheap kilo wise, currently about €2,50. Apples and pears are next at about €3,50. Strawberries in season are about €10/kg. Green kiwi is €5/kg, gold kiwi is €10/kg. Mangos are extremely cheap now at €1,39/piece.

Having enough fruit for a family for a week, indeed as a sibling posted, accounting for spoilage or just bad items in the delivery, takes a substantial amount. In volume and in cost.

On the other hand, crappy snacks are typically We make the choice to buy fruit. But also we are well off enough to be able to do so consistently. There are also other costs of having to spend more time getting the fruit, preparing it for the kids to take to school. Not everyone has the time or sees the opportunity to do so. I’m very reluctant to just blame those people and say it is their choice to eat crappy food.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#725

Post by cthalupa »

wongarsu wrote: post #63
blitzar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friend circle in Germany probably doesn't have many members who were a proud big boned 5"7' 300lbs (~140kg).

For good reason. That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany. 1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078951/

But prior to GLP-1s, obesity rates were growing rapidly in Germany. Doubled over 3 decades - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15706...

Most of the industrialized west is following very similar growth curves here to the US. America just got their first. Even Asia isn't immune - Korea has been following similar trends, as have parts of southeast asia, etc.

I suspect the prevalence of GLP-1 class drugs will halt this trend before the rest of the world catches up, but without them or similar drugs, I would have bet that 50 years form now much of the rest of the world would look just like America

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#726

Post by cthalupa »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #119
blitzar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friend circle in Germany probably doesn't have many members who were a proud big boned 5"7' 300lbs (~140kg).

In my (obviously anecdotal) experience, that’s not who the primary GLP1 user is. It’s the suburban mom (or dad sometimes) who wants help losing a little weight. Instead of being 300lbs like your example, she’s 160lbs and wants to be 140lbs.

The morbidly obese people I know fall into two camps:

Those that still want to reduce their weight: All of them are on GLP-1s now (and losing weight!)

Those that had totally given up: They had long since stopped attempting anything to reduce their weight

I suspect that the larger you are, the more likely you are to fall into that second category - getting to 300+ lb involves a certain level of accepting defeat to begin with.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#727

Post by cthalupa »

elictronic wrote: post #445
bigfishrunning wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also true in the US -- these are prescription drugs.

This is not exactly correct. The fda approved named items require a prescription. However from the shortage years ago compounding pharmacies were allowed to sell alternative versions. Basically they add a B vitamin to the normal drug and boom non prescription GLP1. With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.

> non prescription GLP1.

Compounding a drug doesn't suddenly make it non-prescription. You still need one for them.

It just lets you buy stuff where the raw API is made in China by some random pharma lab instead of from Novo or Lilly.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#728

Post by cthalupa »

BeetleB wrote: post #389
carlmr wrote: post #6

>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…

I live in the US and I don't know of anyone taking this drug. But if they were, why would I know?

I'm quite open about my usage in real life because I want to be honest about how I achieved my weight loss - I'll also show some pride in all of the lifestyle changes I made, but I don't hesitate to mention the GLP-1 use and impact it has had. I'm not ashamed of it and if me being open helps normalize it, all the better.

But most people on the internet that I speak to that are on them have had specifically negative encounters from people learning - lots of moralizing, lots of denigration. A whole lot of them now specifically don't bring it up unless explicitly asked.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#729

Post by jaggederest »

vladgur wrote: post #719
jaggederest wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original guy, but down 32%, for a point of comparison: 1) Amazing, like being a decade and a half younger 2) Not before, planning one in the next couple months, but I use skinfold and impedance and they say I've dropped from about 48% to ~20% as I've dropped from 272 to 186, lean mass seems maybe 5kg lower than I started with? Less lean mass loss than I expected. 3) Weight bearing exercise and medium-high pro…

these are amazing numbers -- how long did this loss take?

Just over 2 years from end to end, the majority towards the end when I finally got onto the right GLP-1 medication.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#730

Post by cthalupa »

jdhdjdjd333 wrote: post #325
siliconc0w wrote: post #318

This is why if we can get them down to ~$50 I think they are clearly +ROI just on the individual level. I snack, drink less, and feel like eating out significantly less. Or when I do those things, I eat the take-out meal over multiple-meals. 1-2 less takeaway meals and a svelter grocery bill due to the less booze or snacks probably is at least $50 if not more.

Something feels extremely dystopian about this statement that I cannot quite put my finger on. I hate to say it, but I do not think taking meds to curb snacking sounds healthy. Just learn some self control.

If "just learn[ing] some self control" was a viable solution we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic in the first place.

It's not like obese people don't know they should be eating less and healthier foods.

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