Isn't "jab" just another word for "an injection" not only "a vaccine"?

Jabs is basically the British equivalent of the American term shots.

Sometimes it is not malicious language. There's a trend in modern journalism towards colloquial, imprecise language that in itself is a reaction to decreasing reading abilities and vocabulary in the general population, as we are now in the descending slope of the Flynn's effect curve.

Also, a journalist nowadays is evaluated as a professional basically by the amount of pageviews he can harvest. There's a strong incentive towards clickbait language.

If it had been BBC Scotland you might have seen "jags" instead.

If this was a US-based journalist I’d agree, but the term doesn’t carry the same connotations for the BBC’s home audience

English pedant and RP speaker here. Jabs is a colloquialism in British English, but the BBC website is riddled with grammatical and vocabulary errors daily and rarely rises above a secondary (high school) reading level.

While "jab" is used almost universally across UK print and broadcast media to describe an injection, it's interesting to note the choice of accompanying adjective.

The Sun, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times love to use "fat jab".

The BBC, The Guardian and The Mirror seem to prefer "slimming jab" or "weight-loss jab".

There's a lot to digest in those choices.

What if increasing global instability renders them sporadically unavailable for certain markets?

> At the same time, people who come off insulin get blood sugar problems fairly quickly too.

Yep, within hours for a type 1 diabetic, followed quickly by death within a few days to weeks

God I hate my disease, haha

> They are not a magic bean that will cure over eating but they are being marketed and discussed as that.

Well in a way they kind of are (at least more so than any previous pharmaceutical approach), but only as long as you take them.

> They are not a magic bean that will cure over eating

All evidence points to them being very effective in reducing food intake. That’s how they work.

The fact that users return to their previous eating habits when discontinued is not surprising at all.

> They are not a magic bean that will cure over eating but they are being marketed and discussed as that.

Where and by whom? I keep seeing this claim but every ad I see mentions diet and exercise. The subreddits for these drugs are all full of people talking about diet and exercise.

They aren’t marketed as bankrupting fast food. They’re marketed as weight loss drugs, which is honest and accurate.

The stories about bankrupting the fast food industry were from journalists looking for sensational stories to write, not from the marketers.

> Seems like another instance of create a problem ("food" industry) and sell a recurring "solution" (big pharma).

There is no conspiracy between the food industry and pharmaceutical companies. They’re all just selling products that people demand.

I mean it isn't a conspiracy. People love food that makes them fat cuz it's fucking tasty. But being fat is cosmetically unappealing, is socially stigmatized, makes it hard to do things, and is bad for your overall health. All of this, the drugs, the fat burning "cures," diet culture, surgery, all of it going back to time immemorial is trying to resolve this inherent conflict:

* Shitty food is fucking delicious.

* For whatever reasons an individual cites, being fat is undesirable.

And... you can't. At least not with today's technology. But people hate that answer and so there's huge money in figuring out how to make it so people can eat like fatasses without being fatasses.

And... same. I'd fucking love that, I just don't expect it coming anytime soon.

That would be really bad marketing. When's the last time you bought something because it'd bankrupt fast food?

Yea, there is quite a lot of survivorship bias in this comparison. "People who succeeded at controlling hunger and improving diet" vs "People who stopped taking their medicine". It is very unsurprising.

The meta-analysis that is being referenced in the paper included only randomized controlled trials for body-weight management programs. I don't see why you think the weight loss/regain being compared is excluding those who weren't successful rather than averaged over all participants.

I read the study to the best of my abilities, and I see nothing that would support your claim.

I'll second this, the medical opinion that I've seen is "You should take the drug as prescribed, if you tolerate it well it's safe to take indefinitely".

Now this does get a bit more complex when you consider the nontrivial financial cost to someone without insurance or who's insurance does not cover their intended use.

And the problem with that is what, exactly? These drugs not only optimize weight, but make it easier to avoid all sorts of useless dopamine spam activities. People report drinking a lot less on them too

Exactly. Chronic conditions require chronic management.

Imagine if the headline was

"people who come off statins have higher cholesterol levels than people who lowered cholesterol with diet and exercise."

That's obviously stupid, so why are we treating GLP-1s differently?

I also hear people say things like "GLP-1s shouldn't exist because you'll gain weight when you go off them" which is as nonsensical (to me) as saying "you shouldn't exercise because the benefits of exercise will stop if you don't continue exercising."

It's only GLP-1s that have this "moralizing" associated with them.

But the article isn't saying it's surprising that you gain weight when you stop the treatment, the surprise is how fast you regain it compared to other treatments.

The conclusion isn't at all obvious so there's no "duh" moment. Why would you gain back the weight that much faster if you lost it with this pill vs. that pill?

My wife has been similar. She came off, gained a small amount of weight, but her diet has stabilized to a much healthier norm than before. I would argue that she's healthier now than just before she stopped, because she is eating enough to have energy for exercise/activity.

Yeah, rather than eating pizza and being unable to finish the incredibly delicious high calorie food you probably want to just eat quinoa and salmon bowl or equivalent healthy food.

I agree, I fast regularly and I’m fit for most of the year but comes the holidays and I don’t restrict myself which causes issues comes January, I have to train myself to regulate my appetite Ava hunger. It takes a bit and it goes back to normal by February and March but it takes some work.

> Dr Adam Collins, an expert in nutrition at the University of Surrey, says the way the jabs work in the brain and body might explain why weight regain is amplified once you stop taking them. They mimic a natural hormone called GLP-1, which regulates hunger. "Artificially providing GLP-1 levels several times higher than normal over a long period may cause you to produce less of your own natural GLP-1, and may also make you less sensitive to its effects. "That's not a problem when taking the drugs, but as soon as you withdraw this GLP-1 'fix', appetite is no longer kept in check and overeating is far more likely."

If that is true, and it makes mechanistic sense if I think about opiod withdrawals for example, then it is a problem regardless. If you have a stronger hunger impulse then before AND a lower body weight and thus TDEE, I can imagine that it would be pretty tough mentally to maintain your weight, even if you count your calories.

It's amazing that this isn't common sense to most people.

I foresee the overwhelming majority of people on these drugs regaining everything (and maybe even going beyond their original weight), because, just like traditional dieting, they don't actually change their lifestyle. They're just giving their system a shock, which when it goes back into fat storing mode will overcompensate due to the shock of the loss.

The nihilist in me doesn't believe that many people are truly capable of massive lifestyle change. Once you've lived a certain way for 20 or 30 years, any change beyond that is just a fleeting thing. Yo-yo weight loss and gain just proves that. It only becomes a real lifestyle change after many years.

You can gain weight on a healthy diet too though!

I was concerned about this too. Gemini informed me that the researchers "found that even when comparing people who had lost the same amount of weight, the rate of regain was significantly faster in the drug group (GLP-1s) than in the diet group (approximately 0.3 kg/month faster)."

Also, both groups contained those who didn't lose weight. They did not omit dieters who failed to lose weight or those who weren't "super responders."

If you look back at the pre-Ozempic era, you had articles like this:

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/10/11649210/biggest-loser-weight-...

> The results at year eight are heartening. Eight years later and 50.3 percent of the intensive lifestyle intervention group and 35.7 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥5 percent, while 26.9 percent of the intensive group and 17.2 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥10 percent.

The idea of "heartening" by an obesity doctor was that half of people lost a largely imperceptible amount of weight.

This was considered success at the time.

For comparison, to be on the edge of normal weight from the edge of obese is a 16% reduction.

You are the third person to mention that the cohort is "dieters who regain weight".

Reading the article and its referenced study, I thought the cohort was "all who were included in the non-placebo group of the RCT" and that the average was taken over all such subjects.

I've tried, can't find any evidence to the contrary. I am wrong and missing some key claim in the study? I would appreciate if you could support your claim.

It's because taking a drug requires zero willpower