This is definitely a historic moment in US public health. Today we look at photos and marvel at how prevalent smoking was 50 years ago (in restaurants, in hospitals, in airplanes, etc.). 40 years from now people will look at photos from the last decade and be in disbelief at how widespread obesity was.
> Research now shows that the body may respond to a calorie-deficit diet by increasing hunger and reducing feelings of fullness<p>Dieting makes you hungry, truly revolutionary research.
Lilly's also working on retatrutide, that has 3 targets in addition to the two that this drug targets.<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/lilly-experimental-triple-g-obesity-drug-leads-242-weight-loss-trial-nejm-2023-06-26/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...</a>
With these drugs, is there any mechanism at work beyond "patients have a lower appetite and eat less food"?<p>I've only read a few papers and articles but what I've seen is that all of the hormone triggering leads to 1) decreased appetite 2) slowed gastric emptying which also decreases appetite.<p>Patients lose weight due to eating less but usually regain the weight when stopping the drug since they then go back to their normal level of eating.<p>---<p>Are these drugs fixing/replacing a system failure where people don't feel satiated normally?<p>Can the same effect be replicated by eating a higher fiber and higher fat diet with more whole foods to feel full longer and slow gastric emptying?
This appears to be a GIP and GLP-1 agonist. Recently I read there might be some severe side effects with this class of med in diabetic and non-diabetic patients:<p><a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10-links-popular-weight-loss-drugs-stomach.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10-links-popular-weight-...</a><p>But its still pretty exciting.
Has anybody here taken this category of drug, lost significant weight, and kept it off after dropping the drug?<p>I've seen great success stories, but I'm kind of nervous of the long-term effects of taking a drug like this for your whole lifetime (i.e. what's implied by the "chronic" in "chronic weight management").<p>It seems like it might be a great off-ramp from obesity to a body weight where the risk of injury in exercise is greatly diminished and the degree of enjoyment in exercise goes way up. If you could go off the drug and then use exercise to maintain the caloric deficit (instead of under-eating, as the drug induces you to do), that sounds like it would be kind of miraculous.
While personally I'd like to see a reduction in obesity rates by focusing on causes (e.g., "sugar taxes" and the like), it's hard to deny the positive impact of these drugs. Obesity is such a destructive epidemic in my country (US) that I see an argument for providing these drugs either for free or at substantially reduced costs via government subsidy. Despite vaccine skepticism, free COVID vaccinations might be a model worth following.<p>If the public sector doesn't help, I imagine that insurance companies are doing what they can to put downward price pressure on these drugs. If I can pay x now to avoid 10x in payout costs to medical providers for obesity complications (while keeping rates the same), I'm going to take that trade (subject to actuarial data and discount rates).