Welcome to the healthier, happier world of 2030. Heart attacks and strokes are down 20%. A drop in food consumption has left more money in people’s wallets. Lighter passengers are saving airlines 100 million litres of fuel each year. And billions of people are enjoying a better quality of life, with improvements to their mental and physical health.
These are just some of the ways in which analysts forecast that the new wave of incredibly effective weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, might transform societies and save countries trillions of dollars in the long run. The best known is semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic for diabetes, and as Wegovy for weight loss.
It might have already started. In the United States, where 12% of adults say that they have at some stage taken GLP-1 agonists for diabetes or weight loss (see ‘Uptake of GLP-1 drugs in the United States’), media reports suggest that obesity rates are falling, although scientists caution that the data are not statistically significant (see ‘US obesity rates’). Slowing or reversing obesity trends more widely — more than half of the world’s population is expected to be overweight or have obesity by 2035 — would have myriad ripple effects.
But although scientists agree that the drugs could have huge impacts, there is a lot of uncertainty. Efforts to model the weight-loss drugs’ future impact are highly speculative for various reasons, ranging from their high costs to their long-term biological effects, and the big unknown of how people’s behaviour will change. All that has medical researchers and companies scrambling to gather more data and develop better tools to assess how weight-loss drugs might transform societies.
Read more at Nature
288 sats \ 3 replies \ @aljaz 4h
GLP-1 is the perfect pharma solution since you need to keep taking it forver otherwise you'll gain the weight back. Plus the side effects seem to be far from trivial, specially in fucking around with your gut
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Thanks for the input. I didn't know that the drug needs to be taken forever? Are you in pharmacy? If you're please tell us more about the side effects of it.
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44 sats \ 1 reply \ @aljaz 3h
i'm not in pharma but i've done some research when it started gaining traction to see what it is
ozempic and other glp-1s tend to be a life long treatment, people who go off it regain weight, have blood sugar surges etc.
there are also negative side effects of burning off that much fat in your body that quickly and ppl are getting the ozempic face since the weight loss is so rapid. body stores toxins in fat so by burning a lot of it you will release lots of toxins in your system which means that you should be also working on getting rid of that (and you might feel like crap).
in any case its a very one sided approach that highly reminds me of the fatkins from cory doctorws Makers novel where people do gene therapy to get their bodies to burn 10000kcal/days in order to lose weight (and later on figure out there are some long term effects of this)
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Thank you so much for these. If I find some sources to the your claims, which I believe, I'll add and pin to this post.
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🤡🌎
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mrsu 23m
Drugs aren't the solution. Eating proper food and not being sedentary is all it takes.
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