I think that studies of GLP-1RAs for alcohol and opioid addiction are the biggest public health opportunities in the world right now, in terms of leverage and scale.
It is a proxy for consuming less Poly-Unsaturated FAts (PUFAs). Likely because your skin ceases to be able to withstand sun exposure, making it more uncomfortable to generate vitamin D.
This also explains why supplementing vitamin D doesn’t work: it’s the PUFAs poisoning your metabolism that cause the problems, not the lack of vitamin D.
Very interesting and seems to be in line with that older news article conveying the information that hunger/satiation is a psychological feeling, that's your body's estimate of how much food what you've eaten will provide based on your past experience, and that's what need to be acted upon instead on hypefocusing on the food/calory counting.
Quote from comment by author, responding to a similar claim in the article comments:
> That's not what this article says, and it's not true. Obesity isn't a risk factor for addiction, and is only a very weak risk factor for things like Parkinson's. Most of the people in these studies are probably diabetics taking it for diabetes and may not have even been obese to begin with.
It patches a misconfigured reward system pathway in the brain using hormones.
> There are two plausible places GLP-1 drugs could lower weight: the body or the brain. In the body, it could change stomach contraction rate, hormone production, etc. In the brain, it could control the mental sensation of hunger. To separate these two effects, scientists bred rats that only had GLP-1 receptors in the body vs. in the brain. The results were unequivocal: Ozempic and its relatives work in the brain. Although they have some effects in the body, these are short-lived and not really relevant to their mechanism of action for weight loss.
This should've been obvious the moment there was evidence GLP-1 agonists were preventing addictive behaviors, versus solely digestive system effects. Interestingly, this works by crossing the blood brain barrier, so the next question is: can you speed up the effects by temporarily opening that barrier using ultrasound such is done for Alzheimer's treatment [1]? Also, what does an fMRI look like when someone is being treated with a GLP-1 [2]?
My theory is the excess weight is more of a symptom than the root trigger. Eating too much makes the body work too hard. Frequent and excessive insulin swings, also unhealthy. Lack of movement, also undermines the systems' design. Etc. Etc.
Prevent the body (and mind) from functioning naturally (in an historic / evolutionary sense) and bad tbings happen. Obesity is the cherry on top of the cake of unhealthy diet and lifestyle.
The question is: what happens to Ozempic users over the long term? If you start on it at 18 y/o (or whatever the approved age is) what happens in 5 yrs, 10 yrs, etc. Statins eventually hit the wall so to speak, will these other system-altering drugs do the same?
For the most part, the connected additional effects tend to involve our over eating too often.
If you're on a Carnivore diet, you also have more autophagy, which helps clean the brain of proteins that cause a variety of brain diseases.
GLP-1's main effect is that you eat less. No matter what it is you are eating. Autophagy occurs by prolonged periods of not eating.
We eat too much as a society, many of us can't control ourselves because our food has been designed to be as cravable as possible, to compete against other foods.
GLP-1's compel humans to feel fed, and not desire food which prevents the cravable nature of our food system.
Our food system isn't natural, it's created. More GLP-1, that is longer lasting helps manage the situation for those that cannot overcome naturally the unnatural food we eat.
The ideal situation would be to redesign the food system (can't under capitalism) to optimize for something other than competition, and cravability.
But given that's very unlikely, we need GLP-1s to do the job for us, and help us live in this ridiculous world.
At least until food scientists break the code on how to make even GLP-1s no match for the cravability of food.
It would of course be very profitable to be the one fast food place that's food is so desired, even GLP-1s can do nothing to stop it.
Weird world. Regardless, outside of the addiction research, I have yet to see anything that isn't just an improvement in life from longer periods of not eating.
Which is good. We all know long periods of not eating (if you have excess fat) are positive in a ton of dramatic ways.
It's just that not eating wasn't profitable, so there wasn't much research in that direction. People tried, but you couldn't get funding.
Now we're getting tons of funding because it's profitable now to not eat for long periods, provided you are on GLP-1s
"We all know long periods of not eating (if you have excess fat) are positive in a ton of dramatic ways"
Sure, and also negative in several significant ways (I am not going to say ton). Some people are able to simply ignore food and get on with their life as thin people. Others can eat whatever they want and remain skinny. Some self medicate with things like nicotine which can induce thinness through appetite suppression and cancer. Many or most in my experience find that they are unable to deal long-term with the noisy, distracting, miserable nature of food cravings and ultimately fall back into their old patterns just to get some relief even if they hate themselves for it.
My favorite metaphor is "how long can you hold your breath?". Sure, you can probably hold your breath for 30 seconds without too much discomfort. Now do it twice. Now hold your breath for 15 seconds every minute. Now 30 seconds for every minute. Uncomfortable? Keep it up. What's the matter, no willpower?
So yes, food and society have been engineered to be profitable at the expense of us consumers but it is exploiting a weakness that not all of us have. Let's just think of these chemicals as eyeglasses for your metabolism and take back some control.
> think of these chemicals as eyeglasses for your metabolism
That's a great metaphor, thank you!
I'm fortunate enough to have a pretty non-addictive personality, but I'm fully aware (and have often experienced firsthand) it has approximately nothing to do with willpower.
A lot of people apprently aren't, or even need to believe this story about themselves ("I'm normal-weighted due to my excellent willpower!") to preserve their sense of self-worth, and I think it's gonna take us quite a while to address that objection as a society.
https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...
I think that studies of GLP-1RAs for alcohol and opioid addiction are the biggest public health opportunities in the world right now, in terms of leverage and scale.