Had to read the article to find how the mice were lifting!
"To access food, mice were fit with a small collar around the shoulders that required them to lift and set down the cage lid in a squat-like motion, which activates concentric and eccentric muscle contraction"
I wonder why is that research even being done anymore. Isn't obesity solved for good with GLP-1? Why do we need to return to this, aren't there more pressing health issues to resolve?
There are no silver bullets. Receptor agonists only work as long as you take them and seem to have a limit at about 15-20 % of your starting mass. Bar a lifestyle change, once you stop taking them, most regain their weight. Furthermore they have side effects like vomitting, nauseau and increase the risk of certain kinds of cancer and gallstones. If you are seriously overweight, agonists may give you the headstart you need, but they are not a long-term solution.
A lifestyle change alone may take longer (it took me about a year to lose 15 % of my weight) but is longer lasting and cheaper. That muscle build-up is more beneficial to weight reduction than cardio is not new but research is still warranted.
True, you take them for life, given multitude of other benefits, what's the problem about it? No one is claiming otherwise. Problem used to be the price, but now they are cheap.
Negative consequences of quitting gym are even more severe than those of quitting GLP-1. Especially if one worked out intensely enough to actually achieve any weight goals (i've been doing it for 6 years with a personal trainer and achieved absolutely nothing). Many people who were serious gym rats, just died after quitting (quitting because of trauma or similar external causes), usually due to heart conditions - heart was unable to readapt. You don't die after quitting GLP-1, just get fat again, which is bad in itself - analogous to yo-yo dieting - but not fatal.
GLP-1 is indeed, absolutely, a silver bullet for obesity. And pre-diabetes, and multitude of other conditions and among other things, many addictions (albeit not smoking, sadly).
Having lost weight, i quit gym because it wasn't working for me anyway, and my weight goals have been achieved. Nothing bad happened except now, a year later, i can feel that slight back pains i used to have before starting gym and that completely went away while i was doing it, are slowly coming back.
GLP-1 isn't new and was used by ~10 years by diabetics - health of which is extremely fragile almost by definition and if it was in any way dangerous, we'd have lots of deaths a long time ago.
People using it for specific things like diabetes is not the same as using it to compensate for poor lifestyle choices.
The corporations win. Everyone keeps loading up on low quality food while big pharma attempts to keep people skinny with GLP-1 drugs. This feels like the wrong path. Just because someone is skinny doesn’t mean they are healthy.
I think this is mostly religious thinking. Gluttony is a sin and an attempt to "hack" it this way is subconsciously perceived as an abomination of God. I can't explain it in any other way.
You can't fix "lifestyle choices" on the population scale. Individually sure, but there is simply no way to force billions of people to eat healthy. Someone who's arguing in that direction is nothing but counterproductive and that line of thinking only contributes to suffering and death. Especially since obesity is immutable: poor lifestyle choices cause it, but switching back to good lifestyle choices does not reverse it. One can have a BMI of 30 and be malnourished, weak to the point of being barely able to function, and unable to lose any more weight. So even if one could fix "lifestyle choices", it will take a generation to see a result (like it happened with smoking - almost no one quit it, just that few young people newly picked up the habit and eventually they crowded out smokers due to generational change). Wegovy fixes this.
Also, in many cases, it's not even lifestyle choices. I was never obese just overweight and indeed, in my case it was mostly lifestyle choices: overindulging on steaks and wine. But my wife had a thyroid condition that GLP-1 also treated and she had weight she never had a chance to lose that only kept creeping up in spite of her doing a lot of gym and eating very little. She went from BMI of 33 to 23 in half a year and it resulted in almost miraculous improvement of all her health metrics. This simply won't be possible in any other way at all - even through bariatric surgery or a comparable radical intervention - because it was simply not about eating.
People who are against GLP-1 are mostly religious bigots who keep pressing on their medieval beliefs even if it means killing people, just like those who wish to deny abortion to a woman with a dangerous pregnancy with a deformed foetus.
Religion doesn’t play any role in what I said. I feel like you made up a whole persona for me based on very little information and missed the mark.
Lifestyle choices are changed at a population level by changing the incentives for those producing food. Back in the 70s and 80s small changes were made which shifted how the population ate, and it led us here. I worked with a guy who ended up getting weight loss surgery. His wife was Japanese, and when he went to Japan he’d always lose a bunch of weight, because the food quality and culture is much different than the US… as one example. He ate better in Japan, because it was easy to eat better. In the US it take study, effort, and constant vigilance to eat well.
> Especially since obesity is immutable: poor lifestyle choices cause it, but switching back to good lifestyle choices does not reverse it.
This is simply not true. Surely you’ve seen a person lose weight before.
It is true that once you gain a certain amount of weight you end up with more fat cells, and those don’t go away (without liposuction), but the fat they hold can be lost. Lots of people do it. I’m not saying it’s easy to maintain longterm, but it is possible and millions have done it. To say obesity is immutable is not accurate.
> it will take a generation to see a result (like it happened with smoking - almost no one quit it
It didn’t take a generation to screw everything up. People grew up with one food landscape and had a different one as adults, and things got worse for them.
I know countless people who quit smoking. The idea that they’ve all just died off is not reflected in the world I’ve experienced. I know more former smokers than smokers at this point.
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t have any medications for people who need it, it’s that we shouldn’t just give up and say we need to medicate an entire population, because it’s the only option. We should be making those small tweaks to move the population back toward a lifestyle that doesn’t require all this medication just to live. I don’t understand how this is a controversial opinion.
Also, exercise is helpful, not for weight, but for general health. Discouraging exercise and replacing it with a drug does not help with the things that exercise helps with. When you’re old, it is the exercise that will help keep you from falling, and when you do fall your bones will be stronger (with resistance training), so they don’t break as easily. This also saves lives and prolongs them. It also prolongs a person’s health span—the number of good years they have to actually live a life worth living.
I don’t think the fix is for every individual to spend years educating themselves on nurturing and going out into the minefields everyday. Food producers should make food that doesn’t make us sick. Stores and restaurants should have good convenient options that don’t make us sick. That should be the standard… rather than a whole menu full of junk with one questionable salad as a “healthy” option.
If you’re on GLP-1 drugs, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. My dad was put on one after his bypass surgery. What I am saying is we, as a population, shouldn’t give up and deem it normal to live on junk food and soda, because the GLP-1s will balance it out. It’s treating the symptom, not the actual problem. I like to fix the root cause where we can, and then we have the drugs for the edges cases.
Never a single one who did it sustainably and never regained weight in 5-10 years. Just because yes, metabolism stays crippled, endocrinal consequences of obesity never go away, and fat cells stay ready to be re-filled with fat at the first opportunity. Keeping weight down after losing it requires a lot more effort than staying in the same weight for someone who was never obese, and the more you lost, the bigger the difference. It's cruel and above all, unrealistic to expect a significant proportion of people who are already obese, to do it - and trying it will cause highly undesirable consequences on population level (these people will just be persistently angry for being acutely hungry for the rest of their lives - imagine what the election results will turn to be).
>Also, exercise is helpful, not for weight, but for general health.
True. At least before the "gym pill" wins marketing authorisation.
>My point isn’t that we shouldn’t have any medications for people who need it, it’s that we shouldn’t just give up and say we need to medicate an entire population, because it’s the only option.
On a population level, it absolutely is. Sure, we should encourage people to eat healthy and educate them, and try to do so ourselves, but we shouldn't expect it to work, simply because we know it won't. Masses will always go for the easiest, least-effort option, if it wasn't the case, we'd have communism - the good, "classless and stateless" one - by 1980 already as originally promised. It only didn't happen because people are not perfect. It's foolish to expect them to be and act surprised when it doesn't happen.
Simply put, diets and gym, on a population level = wishful thinking, discrimination and waste of time; GLP-1 on a population level = actual solution. And yes, in the next generation food habits improve naturally just because with much fewer people stuffing themselves with shit around (because they will be on GLP-1), it will look weird to do so, obesity will just become de-normalised and much fewer people will overeat just as much fewer people start to smoke now even if they are not at all concerned with their health or aware of consequences: when no one around smokes, you don't smoke, too.
> Never a single one who did it sustainably and never regained weight in 5-10 years.
I can name at least a half dozen people I know personally who have done this, and my social circle isn’t all that big. But this isn’t the route I’m arguing for.
> Masses will always go for the easiest, least-effort option
I agree. This is why I made the point about changing the incentives of the people who produce the food, not the people who consume it. We should setup the system so the low-effort option is still a good option.
Before all this food science entered our food supply, people were thin and didn’t really know anything about nutrition. They just ate what was in front of them when they were hungry. We shouldn’t have to try hard. The current system requires hyper vigilance to be successful. That’s not what I’m pushing for.
If we want the next generation to not need drugs to live, we have to do something about the food supply. The drugs aren’t going to fix the root cause of the problem that makes people need it in the first place. Let’s say you’re right about the current generation, we should still change things so the future generations have a chance.
I'm sure they will have a chance and drug-based solution does that too. People on Ozempic are not attracted by junk food. Given how many obese people are out there, when Ozempic becomes cheap AND becomes mandatory for overweight people (or they lose health insurance coverage - which makes total sense, or they will look like someone who deliberately wastes insurance companies' money by harming their health on purpose), market for this trash will shrink, and obesity will be denormalised forcing people to keep their food habits in check as fat-shaming will reach epic scale. When there is a sure fix but someone isn't taking it, they will come across as irresponsible, short-term thinking beyond belief, and will surely be rejected by everyone from sex partners to employers, and justifiably so. If someone can fix their health radically and cheaply but won't do it because they just don't care, will they care about me? Will they care about my company? Sure not. It will create enough pressure both of junk food eaters, and on junk food companies (because their market opportunity will be massively squeezed), to solve the problem.
"To access food, mice were fit with a small collar around the shoulders that required them to lift and set down the cage lid in a squat-like motion, which activates concentric and eccentric muscle contraction"
There is a diagram as well :)