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Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

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Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#801
post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex. And that’s how it dug its claws in, because almost all of those go…

Definitely. Alcohol just makes me confused and sick, with no upsides to it. I'be been told that I must be drinking incorrectly, and given advice how to drink correctly, but no, no positive experience with it for me. The funny thing is, I actually like the taste of it (it tastes kind of minty to me, while most people claim it tastes bitter) but the effects are pure poison.

Same here.

Except that even the smell of alcohol makes me want to puke.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American shopping experience is weird as well. There's a spectrum of supermarkets. Versus the UK, any US supermarket I've ever visited (I lived there for a couple of years) seemed to have far less fresh food, especially vegetables and fruit, but stuff in boxes was piled high. Then again, the UK vs. Spain or France is weird, by the same metric, they have even more fresh food than us in supermarkets, and much less…

What grocery store chain in the U.S. are you referring to? Every major chain grocery store generally stacks fresh food around the entire perimeter of the grocery store, reserving the aisles for boxed, canned, and frozen food. You can find dozens of varieties of fruits and vegetables, tons of fresh beef, pork, chicken and fish, milk, cheeses, even bread, in every major chain grocery store in the U.S.

This. Sometimes I hear people saying random stuff about the US and I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm aware of food deserts, but that aside, I could find fresh food in most grocery stores in the many places I've lived in the US. When I say "most", I'm excluding places like Dollar General that explicitly aren't about fresh food.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it that people can't seem to grasp I imagine the perceived gap here is that “those” people understand thermodynamics and the failure to grasp is entirely in your hands.

Literally no one is saying overweight people are magically defying the laws of physics. Managing weight involves the brain, and the brain is a biological organ that is affected by genetics and the chemical and hormonal signals from other organs in the body. this moralizing about using a drug to lose weight being wrong or lazy or cheating or whatever is no different than people saying depressed people need to just sto…

These ideas make a lot more sense once you realize some people just enjoy being cruel.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people quit, because it doesn't work: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/aug/14/ozempic-wei... I hoped it will finally shut up those stuck on the dogma, but it seems the denial is far too strong, and nothing will change. And yes, it is a dogma, because no kind of evidence no matter how strong makes people like you reconsider.

From your link: > “The meds are highly effective for a majority of patients but there is still a percentage who don’t lose a clinically significant percentage of body weight. Everyone’s physiology is a little different,” – Veronica Johnson MD, an obesity medicine specialist in Chicago > He explained that for someone who is overweight, shedding even a small amount of weight can improve heart and kidney function And, t…

It also cites a study which says that the average loss is 5%. That isn't what most people imagine as "highly effective".

Weight also doesn't tell the whole story. The people don't get any better, they get (more) starved in addition to staying obese.

It's a disease with another cause, hunger is only a symptom.

Too much money has been wasted on proving and "educating" people that it's just overeating, while there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.

The one that convinced me is horses. Horses get fat, and they need to wear a muzzle that makes eating difficult for them. Otherwise, they eat so much so fast that it literally kills them.

There seem to be AREAS that are affected and areas that are less affected. Either there are fat people in the area, or there are no fat peoplle in the area. People who move seem to quickly change weight to fit the local norm. There doesn't seem to be any clear correlation with dietary habits, or anything else that is commonly observed. The entire Japan appears to be spared.

It gets commonly missed that it isn't possible to get obese on purpose either. It's hard to eat more, and the body just seems to burn off the excess.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#805
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 box of snack cakes still has better shelf life than 1 bag of apples.

A pound of dry rice or beans keeps just as well, provides more food, and is cheaper unless you're buying basmati.

And require preparation vs shoving the snack cake in their / their kid's mouth.

It's good to keep time deficits in mind alongside financial deficits.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#806
post #710
post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that has changed is the environment and lifestyle humans live in, and it's quite obvious discipline and willpower cannot overpower that environment on average. The change was far too rapid for anything else to be remotely the primary cause. If you put a past heroin addict locked in a room with unlimited heroin readily available, chances are likely 9 times out of 10 that person is going to partake eventually. Same…

We could stop companies spending billions shoving the heroin down people’s throats with advertising. But I guess selling them more drugs is a better solution.

>We could stop companies spending billions

You see, companies have a way of stopping that and it only costs millions. They pay off the politicians and the politicians say that companies have more freedoms than individuals.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#807

> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.…

The American shopping experience is weird as well. There's a spectrum of supermarkets. Versus the UK, any US supermarket I've ever visited (I lived there for a couple of years) seemed to have far less fresh food, especially vegetables and fruit, but stuff in boxes was piled high. Then again, the UK vs. Spain or France is weird, by the same metric, they have even more fresh food than us in supermarkets, and much less…

The difference can be explained in large part by urban design: many US shoppers need a car to drive to the supermarket and only go there once a week or less. In Europe you live much closer to a supermarket, so you go more often and get more fresh food and less frozen or canned.

Some Americans are surprised to learn that many supermarkets inside cities do not even provide parking, everyone walks or bikes there. People go to the supermarket every day.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#808
post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key for me really was eating once a day, I got stuck in a bad routine with the shops and alcohol too. Whereas now I almost exclusively eat set menus, thalis, nasi kandar etc. at small family run places and ask for extra rice, pickles and veg at little to no cost, and the staff end up getting to know me. So most days it's "Oh... it's 8pm, I should eat now" and I'm done in half an hour without really thinking about…

> sometimes I just sit down and look at my phone and food turns up. i mean it's your experience so it must work, maybe it also differs between countries - absolutely no chance that i could order take-out food and get it delivered to me for less money than buying the groceries myself and cooking it at home :O (at the start of the pandemic it was almost doable because deliveries were way cheaper and everyone started do…

Try walking into an small diaspora place during slow hours, paying cash and not being fussy about what you eat, do that 3 days in a row and say "yesterday I was still hungry" (or something to that effect).

I think we're talking apples vs oranges here.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More subtle as in still not a healthy diet with exercise?

Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake. Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle. Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a s…

10 calories a day is like the BMR difference between 20 and 30.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#810
post #105
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in europe there is a social stigma around GLP-1 drugs, a lot of people considered it cheating and lazy, so a lot of people don't dare talk about their usage

I read this online, I don't know where it was, so I can't give a source, it probably was on twitter: "People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others, when they're not that important in the grand scheme of things. Now you'll just have to find another easy visual marker for ranking people by moral superiority."

I would imagine we'll see a greater emphasis on muscularity. Already 'skinny fat' has long been a pejorative for slim people that hadn't 'earned' it (whatever 'it' is). Like just about everything, supply and demand will determine desirability. In a world where no-one is overweight being slim is no longer a desirable differentiator.
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