Where I live (Sweden), there's a perhaps surprisingly large portion of overweight/obesese people, especially in the countryside. Semaglutide could really do wonders here for quality of life and health.

Meanwhile, the newspapers keep pushing exceptional scare stories. The one that stuck with me from a few weeks ago went like 'I puked up my own poop.' Perhaps tellingly, the people they tend to feature in these stories typically aren't really overweight.

It is not yet generally subsidized, unless you have a diabetes type 2 diagnose. It really should be, above some BMI (sans body builders).

The part of Mounjaro that regulates the craving side of the weight loss equation (like reducing 'food noise' and the desire for sugary and fatty foods) seems to also affect other behaviors due to Mounjaro's effect on the brain's reward circuitry. I believe there are also early preliminary studies that indicate it can help with addictions like alcoholism.

Those drugs really are quite something. Shame they're so damn expensive. Insurance here in Germany is unfortunately legally prohibited from covering GLP-1 class drugs for weight loss unless you have a diabetes diagnosis.

It'll come to be known that these drugs are far better for people in a broad way than even thought today. They seem to have at least 4 effects that individually should be considered a "miracle."

This was the disc between lumbar and sacrum. 1,000 ways to have a bad disc so results will vary a lot!

Then someone suggested I try dead hangs, stretching my hamstrings, and really cranking the McKenzie stretch. I'm not sure which one made the difference (all 3?), but pain was gone in 2 weeks.

Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. But since someone took a flyer telling me, I always share this with others in the small chance it helps them.

Does that include people who haven't lost weight on the drug? I imagine a lot of people will start to feel better when they look better and are healthier.

Actually losing some weight as well as cutting my drinking down, helped me with depression far more than SSRIs (which had previously led to even faster weight gain)

Unfortunately, the effects started to diminish somewhat after about a year on it, as if I was building up a bit of a tolerance to the drug. And then I switched to Wegovy (=Ozempic) after big UK price hikes to Mounjaro, and found it much less effective, started gaining weight again (winter/xmas didn't help). Switching back to Mounjaro at the moment, but having to slowly step back up from a lower dose. Not expecting to see the initial near-miraculous effects again, expecting to have to combine it with some actual willpower and more exercise going forwards.

The peptides themselves are being used for everything but realistically, considering the costs, you have to innovate a little. Here’s a little example with GLP-1: the core biology and mechanism were well understood. But use was like the grey market peptides you were talking about: a daily injection. Half life is super short because DPP4 chews through.

So you need some innovation first to make it last so that you can bring it to market. Perhaps they misread the market and didn’t realize that for sufficient weight loss people would inject daily. But anyway, the liraglutide, dulaglutide, semaglutide, are various attempts at this to preserve function while raising half life in the body.

If you want to accelerate this research you’re really going to have to reform the whole process of medical testing and this and that but most things are not so dangerous that you need to rush to release a drug. Not everything is COVID-19 or obesity. Getting a PDA trial so some few people can heal faster from workout injuries is probably going to be a hard sell, even on this forum.

I’m of the view that the combination of grey market and clean market supply is a great way to serve latent desire as well as safe mass access.

One funny thing that a researcher told me (on seeing my lab notebook of my retatrutide self tests) is that it complicates baseline wide population studies. The total population is also losing weight, not just known GLP-1RA users. It turns out grandpa and grandma are reconstituting vials with BAC in New Salem, Oklahoma.

But people in their 50s and older? What long term effect is going to show up before they die? At age 70 or 80 long term effects are basically completely irrelevant.

There are other known molecules that are many to many like cortisol, testosterone, and insulin.

You're commenting on a paper that specifically found OA improvement without weight loss improvement...

> By designing a precise diet-controlled setting to rule out the effect of appetite suppression and weight loss induced by SG, we demonstrate a weight loss-independent mechanism.

I had heard about the effects on addiction but this typo had me thinking there might be some effect on arithmetic ability, too.

It's the simplest explanation that we have been underestimating just how unhealthy we are?

There's a synergy here, eat healthier, reduce blood sugar spikes, lose weight. And you are healthier than each individual effect alone would cause.

Maybe we're just ruining our bodies even if we don't put on weight by eating sugary foods that spoke our blood sugar. Or big meals that constantly make us switch into sit down and digest mode.

I'm open to something more happening but this isn't just GLPs. It seems we have uniquely attacked our bodies in a way that diabetes is the ultimate result but the entire journey is exquisitely toxic to our physiology.

Maybe fasting helps. Maybe keto helps. But this is similar to people who live off McDonalds suddenly go vegan and become healthy, is veganism that great? Or was the alternative for you just so awful for you?

They explicitly controlled for all of this.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6914931/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22124...