> "No free lunch" is a reasonable question to ask when evaluating medication, if it would improve the evolutionary fitness of the majority of people. I think this is behind some of the skepticism. If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1?
We can do science and technology on timescales vastly faster than evolution. "Why didn't evolution do it?" is just a very irrelevant question.
> The second point I haven't seen discussed is that weight loss drugs prior to GLP-1 agonists include cigarettes, which (worst case) give you cancer; stimulants, which cause your heart to fail; parasitic intestinal worms, which can kill you but more importantly are just plain gross; and mitochondrial uncouplers, which set you on fire at a cellular level. That's a long history of miracle weight loss drugs which turn out to have horrible side effects.
Cigarettes, parasitic worms, and 2,4-DNP were never medications.
Tobacco, and cigarettes in particular, has been used as a medicine for hundreds of years. And it's not just in the distant past - a friend of mine was actually prescribed cigarettes for anxiety about 30 years ago here in the US when he was 14.
There are various health benefits to smoking, believe it or not. They're just outweighed by the downsides.
We can do science and technology on timescales vastly faster than evolution. "Why didn't evolution do it?" is just a very irrelevant question.
> The second point I haven't seen discussed is that weight loss drugs prior to GLP-1 agonists include cigarettes, which (worst case) give you cancer; stimulants, which cause your heart to fail; parasitic intestinal worms, which can kill you but more importantly are just plain gross; and mitochondrial uncouplers, which set you on fire at a cellular level. That's a long history of miracle weight loss drugs which turn out to have horrible side effects.
Cigarettes, parasitic worms, and 2,4-DNP were never medications.