We already know the side-effects of the alternative because Western society as a whole has been living them.
It's bad. The obesity epidemic causes pretty much everything bad. This drug doesn't just solve one thing, it solves hundreds or thousands of things all at once.
This is the question and for people that are older the scales steadily tip towards just taking the damn drug because in 20 years they're likely to be dead anyways.
Seems like you need to increase the usage of it as your body starts adapting to it and the weight loss plateaus. IMO, I think the hype around this drug is a bit much and I expect a significant number of users won't be able to meet or maintain their weight loss goals with it.
I do think the dosing schedule should receive more personalization per-person. The schedule for tirzepatide is 2.5mg a week for the first month, then 5mg, then 7.5, etc.
For me, a month in on 2.5, I was still struggling to force myself to eat enough. Zero need to move up. Some people don't feel anything at all until they're on 7.5mg, though.
There's also a lot of people seeing better success with smaller doses more frequently, too. Instead of moving up to 5mg, I'm doing 2mg every 3-4 days. Loss is still steady and I'm not seeing any indication I'll need to bump up any time soon.
I’ll make my usual response: we know that being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself, and the longer you are, the worse it is. The side effects are going to be pretty awful just to negate that, much less all the other things they seem to be good for.
>> being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself
Lol. I can think of dozens of worse things. Drinking. Cocaine addiction. Meth. Winding up in prison for some reason. Riding a motorcycle without a proper helmet. Getting into a plane flown by Harrison Ford. Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems. Ever looked up the average life expectancy of professional athletes, especially the NFL? It isn't great.
Being obese is probably worse for you. NAFLD has long eclipsed alcohol related liver issues.
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Even treated HIV is probably less of a risk to your long term health than obesity, but I'm not a doctor.
> Cocaine addiction. Meth
OK, yes, there are illegal drugs that are going to be worse for you than being fat.
I'll rephrase:
Being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself that affects a huge portion of the population of the western world.
Very very few people are riding motorcycles without a helmet, even fewer are getting into planes flown by harrison ford, only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the population even has the option of being a professional athlete.
I like how the implicit sorting at the end here suggests Harrison Ford is ferrying around more people than there are professional athletes. Busy fella!
Okay, GLP-1 don't solve these but these aren't medical issues. This is just danger
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Mmm... not really. People overblow this. Pretty much all STIs are completely harmless to your health if treated. One shot of penicillin and you're good to go. Your average flu is probably much worse than syphilis or chlamydia. HIV is the "biggest" risk, but HIV doesn't even impact your lifespan anymore.
Actually I recently listened to a fascinating hour long interview with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (ACQ2 podcast) from which I learned that the original research started in the early 90s. I'm not an authority but I'm pretty well aware of the history. However, I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop if you don't mind.
And I don't care about votes up or down. But I appreciate your theory on how they're playing out!
Is there a law of nature that says a chemical compound has to have a side effects of medical concern for a significant portion of people that ingest it?
One of the most commonly consumed drugs on the planet seems to indicate there is no such thing - caffeine in reasonable quantities is tolerated by the overwhelming majority of human beings and research indicates that even outside of the stimulant effects that humans use it for, it is beneficial. We have significant evidence that caffeine in the 100-400mg per day range decreases risk of heart disease and stroke, and smaller but still compelling evidence that it is protective against diabetes.
Irregular use does seem to cause a small increase in heart rate and blood pressure, but this fades in the overwhelming majority of users as they make the usage more regular.
Too much can cause adverse outcomes, such as anxiety, and in some people timing might be important for maintaining sleep quality, but the vast majority of us would see positive impact from consuming a cup or two of coffee in the morning with little to no concern around side effects.
Absolutely, I'm sure there's all kinds of drugs that are totally safe. And I have no reason to think that this one isn't. But it does seem to follow a classic pattern - people get unhealthy because modern life and technology have removed them, in a period of decades, from the environment, incentives, and activities that have shaped their bodies for millennia. And rather than looking at the simpler solutions - in this case just being more active and eating better - some new technological solution is created to fix the problem that the earlier technologies accidentally created. Then the cycle continues and other non-intended consequences ensue. So that's all I'm saying - it's interesting to watch humanity progress. Hope it works out for everyone and it's a smashing success!
> And rather than looking at the simpler solutions - in this case just being more active and eating better
I think this is the part where the argument falls apart, though. My relationship with food is vastly different now than it was when I was a teenager or in the front half of my 20s. It was easy for me to eat a healthy amount of food and exercise. I never struggled with it. It didn't take any particular amount of willpower to avoid overeating. I even was able to fairly easily bulk and cut because I was focused fairly heavily on lifting weights - the bulking was harder for me than the cutting!
But as I got busier with other aspects of my life, it became easier and easier to just grab some fast food, or swap over to eating almost entirely uber eats during the pandemic. Before I realized it, it was suddenly very hard to eat less. It was still possible - I would lose weight, manage my eating, exercise, etc. - but something would always happen that caused me to lose track and backslide. A huge project at work, a bad breakup, tearing my meniscus while lifting. But all of these attempts took significant effort and willpower from me, something that I had never struggled with before. It wasn't my metabolism slowing down - I was always hungry in a way that I had never faced when I was a slimmer person, and fighting it caused significant impact to my mood, ability to focus, stress levels, etc. Tirzepatide has put my relationship with food and hunger back to being much closer to how it was when I was younger.
There are tons of feedback loops that are well documented that makes it more and more difficult to lose weight once you've put it on and kept it on for a while. It's certainly true that there's no magical situation where people can eat fewer calories than they use and not lose weight, but for a huge amount of people, these GLP-1 medications are a far simpler solution.
> Hope it works out for everyone and it's a smashing success!
You're getting downvoted here but I think there is precedent behind your statement. History is littered with weight loss drugs that had to be pulled because the shoe eventually dropped. Usually that was addiction or death which, admittedly, neither have been shown in the GLP-1's but, given the history of weight loss drugs, it's not unreasonable in my opinion to be cautious.
I'm not a chemist, biologist, or pharmacologist, but wouldn't it be more reasonable to be cautious based on how analogous the method of action is to other drugs, rather than the effect? GLP-1s don't work in the same manner that phen/fen did, for example.
DNP is an extremely effective drug for weight loss, but no one who knows anything about how it works would think that it would be reasonable to compare it to the GLP-1s, and anyone who knows how it works would also plainly see the dangers around its use.
GLP-1 type drugs have been on the market for decades now as well, and while they are not perfectly safe, we've got a good amount of data around the short to medium term side effects.
