alt Hacker NewsI think Ozempic is a treatment of a symptom but not the underlying condition, but unlike many of the posters here, I do not think the underlying condition is "obesity". The below is mostly speculation.
Research especially into people with healthy body weight seems to indicate that there is something going on that is causing widespread obesity. That is, there's some sort of environmental "GLP-1 Turbocharger".
Maybe it relates to processed food, maybe it relates to microplastic contamination, maybe it's in the cheese, maybe it's an innocuous viral agent, maybe it's gut biome, maybe it's ADHD drugs, maybe it's SSRIs.
I suspect that Ozempic is helping us get back to a baseline level of exposure by counteracting this. And in the future if we're lucky we'll figure out what it is and try to correct it at the source.
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I could suppose it's some of all of this. But my money is on UPF. The author of Ultra Processed People has an identical twin in NJ while he lives in the UK and their weights are vastly different.
You think ozempic is counteracting this mystery force and it is mere unrelated coincidence that it results in eating substantially less?
We all know the problem: processed food and lack of exercise.
We all know the solution: Organic vegetables, lean protein, and lots of exercise.
My bet is pollutants in the water. The further up the waterstream (and higher elevation) the thinner on average people get.
You are doing an awful lot of mental gymnastics in search of a boogeyman that does not exist.
How mammals ingest, process, store and burn energy has been well understood for a very long time.
You know why some domestic dogs and cats are overweight? Is it ADHD or microplastics? Of course not, it’s because they’ve been eating more energy thaN they have been burning for a while.
Ozempic only stops you wanting to eat more, which perfectly proves the point. The boogeyman you are searching for is eating more energy than you burn.
I couldn't agree more.
Out of curiosity, last year, I purchased some test strips to test my drinking water. The strips showed typical contaminates: arsenic, lead, copper etc. they all registered in the "acceptable range". In the test, there was a test strip for QUATs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_ammonium_cation), which caught my attention. It wasn't something that I would have thought to test for, but my water tested positive. I was curious, so I started testing other local water sources including bottled water from various brands; to my surprise they all tested positive for QUATs. The only local water I could find that didn't contain QUATs was distilled.
I thought maybe it was just in my area, so I started taking the test strips with me when I traveled. In the last year, I've tested the drinking water in multiple states and countries, and only one source has tested negative for QUATs. It was the water from a drinking fountain in the San Francisco Airport, interesting enough.
My suspicion is that QUATs are often flushed down the drain, and the molecules must be too small to be filtered out in the water treatment process.
I haven't found much research on the impact of QUATs on the human body, but I can help but think our mitochondria would be susceptible to damage.