Title: Marijuana users less likely to be overweight or have obesity
Opening line: New research finds that, despite the common phenomenon of having “the munchies” after using marijuana, cannabis users tend to weigh less and are less likely to be obese.
This involved 33k participants in the US, so at least one order of magnitude smaller and in a different context.
https://www.veriheal.com/blog/study-women-who-consume-a-lot-...
there needs to be a paper that reconciles conflicting findings.
I have funky blood sugar issues, and I can certainly see the overlap in how the cravings feel but never made the connection until now. Very interesting.
Anecdotally it always seemed to me that it didn't make you that hungry straight out, but it did depress the feeling of satiation after eating so it is much easier to binge on food once you start eating something.
This study did not differentiate between edibles, which are loaded with sugar, and inhaled cannabis usage. And, since they are not a food product, edibles do not carry the same onus as food for labeling, nor similar regulatory oversight.
This seems a significant flaw in the data gathering and could change the ultimate conclusion of the study.
Level Protabs are pretty amazing, so clean and zero sugar. It's literally just THC and a little bit of corn starch pressed into a pill. I break them in half and it gives me a focused creativity boost.
I wonder if it was truly a flaw or if it was a calculated omission.
We know there's a path from obesity to diabetes. I think it would be interesting to see if there's a path from cannabis to obesity.
I believe the technical term is "the munchies"
Mouse study: https://medschool.uci.edu/news/new-research-may-explain-why-...
Human study: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/can.2024.0069
Many people might have removed alcohol intake with cannabis use, to reduce overall caloric intake.
Source: was a burnout in college for 4 years
This may be genetic, I had friends that didn't get them nearly as badly as I did.
(I have since quit weed and lost the weight.)
That's 4x.
That seems quite large to me.
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After controlling HDL and LDL cholesterol, uncontrolled high blood pressure, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, cocaine use, alcohol use and several other lifestyle risk factors, the researchers found that new cases of diabetes were significantly higher in the cannabis group (1,937; 2.2%) compared to the healthy group (518; 0.6%), with statistical analysis showing cannabis users at nearly four times the risk of developing diabetes compared to non-users.
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Note "nearly four times the risk of developing diabetes" -- this feels like a dangerous exaggeration of "four times the correlation of having developed diabetes." No controls for diet, exercise, etc. In comparison to a gold standard clinical trial this is about as far as you can go on the other end.
That's not to say that I think that a prospective link doesn't merit deeper research -- far from it. In fact, Novo Nordisk has an anti-obesity drug in phase 2a trials, monlunabant [1], that serves as a CB1 (cannabinoid receptor 1) inverse agonist which has a mechanism of action inverse to THC. The clinical trials are showing that it creates modest weight loss, so it seems that there's likely something to how that receptor is activated that could cause weight gain. What's not clear to me is whether all the other receptors that THC activates create a compound effect at a population health level that leads to net weight gain and the development of diabetes, the inverse, or non-correlated outcomes, and whether those occur across the board or differentially based on genetic makeup.
As I read, the endocannabinoid system in the brain is pretty homeostasic.
Does something similar happen with cannabis munchies subsiding to people who ingest THC or whole leaf products?
mitchbob•1h ago