Wouldn’t using something like this trigger anti-doping concerns if an athlete took it?
In sports, manipulating appetite or insulin pathways sets off red flags immediately.
It’s interesting to see the food industry treat the same biological mechanism mainly as a market trend rather than a medical one.
When I was at the peak of my training, it was legitimately hard to get enough calories. I had days where my caloric intake was approaching 5000kcal (long zone 2 rides). When you're doing that kind of metabolic load, being unable to consume the calories you need means being unable to recover properly.
Outside weight-class or aesthetics-driven sports, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a GLP-1 analog creates a net advantage.
In endurance disciplines the binding constraint is almost always fuel throughput: if an athlete can’t take in and process enough calories, recovery and performance fall apart. Anything that suppresses appetite or slows gastric motility is basically disqualifying.
You can already see how narrow that margin is in the sheer amount of gels, bars, and mixes riders consume during long sessions. From that angle, GLP-1 simply doesn’t occupy the same decision space as substances that expand performance capacity or recovery bandwidth.
With GLP-1 and others there is other effects than those. And thus probably they should not be treated as same. The reality is that discussion lacks this sort of nuance and hormone automatically means bigger muscles...
> Repeated, excessive intake of sugar created a state in which an opioid antagonist caused behavioral and neurochemical signs of opioid withdrawal. The indices of anxiety and DA/ACh imbalance were qualitatively similar to withdrawal from morphine or nicotine, suggesting that the rats had become sugar-dependent.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12055324/
This one is even better but should be read in full: > The reviewed evidence supports the theory that, in some circumstances, intermittent access to sugar can lead to behavior and neurochemical changes that resemble the effects of a substance of abuse. According to the evidence in rats, intermittent access to sugar and chow is capable of producing a “dependency”. This was operationally defined by tests for bingeing, withdrawal, craving and cross-sensitization to amphetamine and alcohol
The key word being "qualitatively." Yes, something like a dependency can develop, but unless it's of roughly equal severity to hard drug dependencies, then the comparison is inappropriate. Hard drugs substantially affect one's agency, to a degree which sugar just doesn't.
Sugar is addictive, so talking about "individual decision-making" of millions of people like you did, like they lack willpower, is not going to improve the situation regarding the obesity epidemic.
You should do a bit of research of what can be found in supermarkets in developed countries of the EU, and what sort of food norms they have.
Of course you can put any problem on the fault of free will if you really want.
I think, generally, it is due to a lack of will, yes. Of course, eliminating the bad options altogether -- I mean, restricting what products can appear in stores -- would be more effective than relying on the willpower of individuals. Although, that would require some serious market intervention...
In any case, here in the US, companies that made money by peddling high sugar/grain diets lobbied to have a practically inverted food pyramid so Americans for generations to come would grow up believing the wrong things about a healthy and balanced diet. That was the culmination of decades of effort by junk food companies to fund fake studies to malign fats to point fingers at basically any food except the problem one: sugar.
Those unethical leaders are monkeys like the rest of us. Pointless status hoarding at the expense of populations is part of it.
It’s monkeys all the way down.
Couple other notes: I agree that excessive sugar is bad, but there's nothing wrong with whole grains. Also, we talk of corporate lobbies altering the public narrative on nutrition, but honestly, how much does it really matter? How much heed do most people pay to their image of a healthy diet? Is anyone really fooled into thinking soda, or fast food, is good? I don't think so.
> Judge Jeffrey White’s Aug. 13 order said the plaintiffs “cannot plausibly claim to be misled” about the sugar content of their cereal purchases. The company’s front-of-package and side panel labeling lists “all truthful and required objective facts about its products,” he wrote.
> The judge also noted there is no consensus about how much sugar is healthy, Food Navigator reported. “Defendant is under no obligation to warn its consumers that certain levels of sugar may be associated with poor health results,” he wrote.
Back to what you said
> Also, we talk of corporate lobbies altering the public narrative on nutrition, but honestly, how much does it really matter? How much heed do most people pay to their image of a healthy diet? Is anyone really fooled into thinking soda, or fast food, is good? I don't think so.
I personally think that if people understood how habit forming, addictive, unhealthy, and fattening all the junk food is they would make sure their children ate a lot less of it, and eventually that would move the needle. Due to my struggles with childhood obesity that I've managed to get under control as an adult, I'm definitely going to limit my kids' intake of junk food if I ever have any.
> but one who gives in to their monkey brain rage and commits murder will still rightfully end up imprisoned.
In theory prison is part of a solution, but the goals should be to protect the general public and to reform the incarcerated so they can rejoin society and participate more harmoniously than before. Prison as it stands is... Well it's like it was designed by a committee of angry monkeys.
1. https://www.fooddive.com/news/can-cereal-be-sugary-and-healt...
Can anyone ELI5 why they're having this effect? Do they reduce impulsivity or make the existing foods no longer palatable?
Not aspartame or similar, just biscuits will half or one third of the sugar.
Similar or even the same product, much more sugar added in the UK. To the point it's not edible (like supermarket cakes).
Most products would taste better if they had half or third of it.
But it's not about taste, it's about dependency.
chews•1mo ago