Mon, Jul-18-22, 07:36
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Senior Member
Posts: 3,199
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Plan: High protein, lower fat
Stats: 000/000/145
BF:276, 255 hi wts
Progress: 0%
Location: Michigan U.P., USA
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A new ‘miracle’ weight-loss drug really works — raising huge questions
Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy uses a hormone to regulate hunger. It’s wildly effective, but is it misguided?- Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/96a61dc0...a2-2b6a382b7a3b
This is a more thoughtful article than many others I've noticed about the new semaglutide drugs.
Quote:
When a patient stops taking Wegovy, their appetite returns within weeks and they pack on weight. In the study run by Robillard’s doctor, Domenica Rubino, the patients who came off the drug regained 7 per cent of their body weight. “We used to think that behaviour causes the weight state, but now we think the weight state actually causes the behaviour,” Rubino says. There may be even worse side effects of coming off the drug. Less than a week after Robillard stopped taking it at the end of the trial in November 2019, she started having panic attacks. “Every circuit started thinking about the cravings,” she says. She regained 20 pounds.
Novo Nordisk’s long-term ambition is to cure obesity by discovering how to stop the body bouncing back. Until then, Kurtzhals believes people should think of treating obesity as they do other chronic diseases. “For some reason, many people have an easier time understanding that your blood pressure medication is for life than understanding that your treatment of obesity is also for life,” he says. Part of that reason may be the price tag. Unlike generic blood pressure drugs that now cost $10 a month, Wegovy’s monthly list price in the US is about $1,350....
Even if Novo Nordisk and its competitors succeed in getting their drug accepted by the people who hold the purse strings, they will still face opponents who reject the whole premise that obesity should be treated with medicine. Advocates of “body positivity” and some weight management experts believe health metrics such as blood pressure or blood sugar are far more useful than body mass index. The company is hoping to sway doubters with a trial, which reports later this year, that will show whether Wegovy reduces the risk of cardiac problems.
Marquisele Mercedes, a doctoral student in public health at Brown University, is fed up hearing that Wegovy is a “miracle”....
Varady worries that it will be easier to medicate a world that she describes as “obesogenic” — tending to cause obesity. Wegovy could become a societal sticking plaster, allowing food companies to continue selling junk and pharma companies to profit from slimming people down. She believes it would be more “humane” if governments found ways “to teach people or tax them”, such as the UK levy on sugary drinks.
Mercedes believes Novo Nordisk’s efforts to counter stigma — the Queen Latifah campaign — could actually end up embedding existing bias. “They’re selling you a solution to the discrimination and stigma you face by giving you a way to be smaller,” she says. It is “literally just advertising. We’re transitioning from the personal failure, lacking willpower, lacking self-control narrative, to this narrative that says ‘Obesity is a disease, you need a prescribed cure’ . . . so we can sell weight-loss medication,” she says. “They are going to make a killing.”
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What's clear is that this drug does something real.
Quote:
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When we eat, cells in the small intestine secrete GLP-1....The hormone’s effect on the brain, they discovered, is to reduce appetite and create a feeling of fullness.
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One patient described feeling as if her mind was "freed from its obsession with eating".
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