What I am saying is that, in the larger context, 300 million people, using drugs to control weight is the wrong approach. This does not lead to a healthier population at all.
The effects of our poisonous food system go way beyond the mere storage of energy as fat. The horrific nutritional profile seen out there today en masse, has consequences that do not evaporate simply by losing weight with a drug.
Speaking in terms of just the US --because I cannot be critical of food elsewhere-- what we want is a healthy population that consumes less drugs, has much lower incidences of all of the diseases caused by poisonous food, has less need for life-long interventionist medical care, etc.
Our population is sick. The problem is shit food (first), too much of it (second) and lack of exercise (third). Taking a pill for life will never change that. Not even close.
It isn't a solution. What's next, 300 million people taking a pill for life?
This is the kind of thing that bugs me about big government. The FDA is worthless. They are not protecting people where protection is needed. Watch the videos I posted. I'd be interested in what you might have to say.
Fair enough on the "nutrition in the US is terrible" front, and fair enough that we need interventions beyond just drugs, but why is "taking a pill for life" a bad thing in itself? Lots of people take drugs for life and are better off for it—a daily med like Trikafta is an incredible success story.
> why is "taking a pill for life" a bad thing in itself?
I would strongly suggest watching the two videos I posted. This should answer your question to a sufficient depth.
The simple answer: Because taking a pill does not fix root causes and the consequences of eating poison. In other words, the net result is not a healthier society at all. In fact, I think I could make a solid argument that this would create and perpetuate multi-generational sickness the likes of which we simply do not understand.
Perhaps the single most important element in this is that poisonous foods destroy gut bacteria. The microbiome is supremely important for health at levels most people don't understand. Taking a pill does not fix this at all. Even worse, taking a pill while continuing to eat garbage is likely even worse.
I am not a purist at all. I struggled with food most of my life, eventually being rewarded with type 2 diabetes. Years later, after a years-long effort to rectify bad eating habits, I reversed by diabetes and got off the meds --which are a formula for ever-worsening health.
This started with saying "Enough!" and finally understanding why both fasting and attending to your gut bacteria are extremely important tools for both getting healthier and staying healthy.
Lots of haters down-voting, insulting me and posting hateful comments. Yet nobody seems to want to stop for a moment and consider the idea that a human being did not evolve to eat the shit our food system produces and that it is this food that is making us both fat and sick.
To the haters I say: You are part of the problem. Grow up and learn something before you attack people who are essentially saying: You can be healthy without drugs. Because, you know, that's a hateful and selfish message, isn't it.
The example I gave, Trikafta, is a treatment for cystic fibrosis. Without drugs like this you would not be remotely healthy and are all but guaranteed to die young.
You're entitled to your beliefs about "poisonous foods," but I think people may not be receptive to what you're saying because it seems a bit like you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Yes, eating well should be our ultimate goal. Yes, using drugs to mitigate the effects of a poor diet is a band-aid solution. (Although band-aid solutions are still a net good—that's why we have, you know, band-aids. Sometimes it's not possible or easy to fix root causes and the best you can do is stop the bleeding.)
But framing long-term medication use as a bad thing in itself is generally not convincing to anyone but the crunchiest of hippies or anti-establishment types. Prescription drugs restore a lot of people to normal functioning that they otherwise wouldn't achieve.
I agree that it would be better if we could prevent people from developing autoimmune diseases, or cancer, or unhealthy eating habits in the first place, but in the meantime we have... drugs. Which is better than not having drugs at all.
> The example I gave, Trikafta, is a treatment for cystic fibrosis. Without drugs like this you would not be remotely healthy and are all but guaranteed to die young.
Oh, c'mon, why don't you add colon, pancreatic and lung cancer to your list.
What a fucking ridiculous non-argument. Of course there are afflictions that have a requirement for drugs and serious medical intervention. Do you think I told my mother to eat better food while she was dyeing from pancreatic cancer last year? Don't fucking insult me. Grow the fuck up and learn to have an adult discussion!
I don’t disagree with most of what you said, and I wont say big government and more regulation is the answer, but I’m super skeptical that small government would yield better results as it relates to public health. Is your point that government, big or small, won’t solve the problems we’re facing, so why waste the money? If so, that seems like a defeatist attitude, which also doesn’t jive with me.
Many of the regulations in place today absolutely have a net positive impact on public health. Even many regs enforced by the FDA. Anyway, I’m just wondering what your solution is if big govt is the problem. Thanks.
> I’m super skeptical that small government would yield better results
Note that I did not make this argument. I am merely pointing out that these big government agencies have allowed people to be poisoned for decades.
Like I said in another comment: If people can't comprehend food labels, why hasn't the FDA come up with very basic labelling to ensure everyone gets it? Better yet, why don't we have serious restrictions on what companies can do to food?
I mean, I am very much for freedom in the classical liberal/libertarian range. However, there is a need for responsible regulatory oversight in certain domains. The FDA and the Department of Education are responsible for not working hard to ensure that both our food system is safe and kids are educated adequately. Instead we have a sick population, massive healthcare costs and all the collateral damage that causes.
> Is your point that government, big or small, won’t solve the problems we’re facing, so why waste the money?
No. The point is that we ought to demand that the people we pay to look after food, healthcare and education actually do their jobs. As I said before, some of this (a lot of this?) is a direct consequence of the failure of the very agencies that are supposed to do this work for us.
How to fix it? I'll quote a line from Fifth Element: Fire one million.
Seriously (and not), the "ruling class", so to speak, needs to be shocked into understanding who they work for. I cannot speak for other nations, I just know that what is happening here in the US is terrible at so many levels I don't even know where to start. Actually, I can speak for other nations: Argentina. I am very familiar with life and politics there. What is interesting is that everything that is happening in the US happened in Argentina in various forms over the last four decades or so. And the results are very visible. Javier Milei is working hard to fix that. We'll see if the entrenched government machinery allows him to succeed.
BTW, thanks for asking questions. I am so sick and tired of the typical HN ad-hominem approach that I rarely post any more. It's the fallacy of people who think they are smart, only to reveal the exact opposite when they speak. They also reveal just how hateful they are.
> This does not lead to a healthier population at all.
Based on what data? It sure looks like it results in a healthier population.
Your alternative seems to be essentially what we've been trying for decades: hoping, berating people and waiting for human behavior to stop being human.
For one thing because food manufacturers aren’t going to just sit around and watch their revenues get cut by 20-30%. Unless someone can explain why we’re already at the absolute lowest possible “units of satiation per unit of food,” I.e. our food cannot be made worse, then we should notice that we’ve just produced a massive/existential incentive to indeed make our food worse.
This is not how R&D works in practice. They don’t need to show 80% growth YoY. They need to show, say 8-12%. Easy enough, until an exogenous force defaults that to -20%. Suddenly your incentive to develop new methods and technologies has gone up dramatically.
No company is operating at full-tilt life or death 100% of the time simply because that’s not how economics works. E.g. when an oil reservoir “runs dry,” it’s not that it is literally dry, but that the remaining oil isn’t economically worthwhile to extract. They don’t call that “losses” or “dry,” they call that “deferrals” because they’ll come back to it when it’s economically sensical to do so.
R&D doesn’t happen by just theorizing what the maximum the market could sustain and then conjuring up those innovations out of thin air. It happens via sustained investment decisions over years. Those decisions are made in light of their costs and incentives, which change over time.
Either food can be “improved” under certain economic conditions (which are probably amplified by GLP-1s), or we’re at the theoretical maximum.
So you can give an argument why GLP-1s don’t produce strong incentive for R&D or you can argue that a stronger incentive won’t matter because we’re capped out, but historically the “if it could be better it would be better already” argument is disproved by capitalism on a daily basis.
>> using drugs to control weight is the wrong approach. This does not lead to a healthier population at all.
> Based on what data? It sure looks like it results in a healthier population.
You are kidding, right?
Please. Pretty please. With sugar on top. Go watch the two videos I posted and then come back and see just how ridiculous your answer is.
If you think taking a pill and losing weight is equivalent to getting healthy, well, all I can suggest is: Please stop and go learn something, because you truly do not understand what you are talking about.
Obesity is awful for you. This reduces obesity, substantially. It has serious risks and side effects, but certainly appears to be nowhere _near_ as bad as its benefits.
> appears to be nowhere _near_ as bad as its benefits
There is no long term data to be able to make that kind of an assertion. The data so far point to the risks as well as the need to effectively be on it for life:
From [0]:
<start quote>
The Potential Impact of Ozempic on the Body
There are some negative implications of Ozempic, particularly its correlation with various health factors, including, thyroid cancer, pancreatitis, and pancreatic cancer, hypoglycemia risks, acute kidney injury occurrences, gallbladder events, gastrointestinal disturbances, and cardiovascular effects.
<end quote>
What is clear is that embarking on a treatment that has such consequences, including the need to take this drug for life because:
<start quote>
"What hasn't been even described or reported in the peer-reviewed medical literature is what does maintenance on these medications look like,"..."if you get to your goal weight, and you completely stop these medications, the vast majority, not all, but the vast majority of people will regain the weight that's lost."
<end quote>
Which is precisely what I have been saying: The root causes are not addressed by a drug at all. It's a quick imaginary solution that is likely to come back in ten to twenty years and overload the medical system with unimaginable problems.
This is NOT how you build a healthy society, at all.
The effects of our poisonous food system go way beyond the mere storage of energy as fat. The horrific nutritional profile seen out there today en masse, has consequences that do not evaporate simply by losing weight with a drug.
Speaking in terms of just the US --because I cannot be critical of food elsewhere-- what we want is a healthy population that consumes less drugs, has much lower incidences of all of the diseases caused by poisonous food, has less need for life-long interventionist medical care, etc.
Our population is sick. The problem is shit food (first), too much of it (second) and lack of exercise (third). Taking a pill for life will never change that. Not even close.
It isn't a solution. What's next, 300 million people taking a pill for life?
This is the kind of thing that bugs me about big government. The FDA is worthless. They are not protecting people where protection is needed. Watch the videos I posted. I'd be interested in what you might have to say.