8 ms·

> So has anyone managed to separate the effects of semaglutide from the effects of weight loss? In general? Yes. For this specific thing? We haven't even reall

> So has anyone managed to separate the effects of semaglutide from the effects of weight loss? In general? Yes. For this specific thing? We haven't even really shown the effects matter for humans. > If this is caused by the weight loss, it is a little disappointing that public health didn't act quicker - lots of people have been overweight for a century now, so literally 10's of millions of people could have been saved from dementia had action been taken 100 years ago. Public health has been banging the drum on obesity for decades now. But humans on the whole aren't built to be able to resist hyper palatable calorie dense cheap foods.

OptionOfT 1mo ago
We're too soft on companies, but equally too hard on people who have a food addiction.
- SubmarineClub 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ThrowawayTestr 1mo ago
    It's really not hard to not drink. It's really not hard to not do heroin. It's really not hard to...
    - procaryote 1mo ago
      Those are easier in many ways as you don't need heroin or alcohol to survive and can avoid it completely If it's hard or not is more of a philosopical question about how much free will we have as people. Statistically they're all hard and not over-eating is the hardest. Culturally and individually we do a lot of things that probably make the food one even harder If you drink too much, the common answer is that you need to stop drinking. If you eat too much, we are very reluctant to talk about how you need to eat less. We prefer to talk about how it's someone else's fault and how powerless we are to do anything about it, including comforting lies about how eating less wouldn't work anyway, or how being overweight isn't bad really.
  - NorthSouthNorth 1mo ago
    I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.
    - wtetzner 1mo ago
      It's not just habits. It changes the composition of your gut microbiome, hormones, etc. All of that can make changing your diet much harder than one might think.
  - jaggederest 1mo ago
    As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily) Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.
    - seydor 1mo ago
      40% in a specific country
      - jaggederest 1mo ago
        Don't worry, everyone else is getting there: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=line https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
      - cthalupa 21d ago
        Japan is literally the only country in the developed world that doesn't see their trends following the path of America. Even culturally similar countries like Korea are seeing a rise in overweight and obesity similar to the trends that happened in America and other countries in the west. And Korea has one of the largest shame-industrial-complexes around people being fat, with it being the norm for everyone from your friends and family to strangers pointing out the fact that you're overweight, one of the most insane beauty industries in the world, a 'show up and get GLP-1 medications same day' complex that puts America's compounding industry to shame when it comes to ease of access, etc. If other countries avoid getting as fat as America was at her fattest, it will be because of GLP-1 medications, not because they are morally superior with a better work ethic.
  - agos 1mo ago
    If it’s not too hard why are people not doing it?
    - wao0uuno 1mo ago
      Because not doing it is even easier.
      - taneq 1mo ago
        Well now we’ve just moved the goal posts with the “easy” and “hard” labels on them, and nothing of value was said.
  - honkycat 1mo ago
    i feel like close to half the adult population having an eating disorder has to be chocked up to a bug in the human brain at some point. we evolved to eat caloric foods, in case of a famine that will never happen in the modern world. I think we are too soft on people and we let dirtbags get away with way too much in the US but saying "its not that hard" is a cop out. we get it you're a macho conservative. nobody cares.
  - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
    It can be very hard to eat a healthy diet if you're poor or if you live in a food desert, or you have a dietary restriction, or some allergies...
    - spockz 1mo ago
      And it becomes even harder when you mix any of those two criteria, let alone more. Then factor in your environment. It is way easier to eat healthily in Italy than in the US. (Maybe that is what you meant with Food desert.)
      - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
        Food Deserts are a concept that can exist anywhere but yes, I think they are more common in the rural USA. They are places that don't have nearby access to decent grocery stores, basically. Instead they have to buy all of their food from convenience stores. Imagine doing all of your food shopping at a gas station store because that's the only groceries around. That's a food desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
        QuercusMax 1mo ago
        Not just a rural thing. Plenty of poor areas in big cities have a dearth of affordable grocery stores.
    - refurb 1mo ago
      I disagree on the “if you’re poor”. I find eating healthy cheaper. You can prepare healthy meals from basic and cheap foodstuffs like vegetables, whole grains and legumes, eggs, low cost meat cuts etc. You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each. Buying prepared unhealthy foods is what is expensive.
      - degamad 1mo ago
        > I find eating healthy cheaper. Being poor is very expensive. > You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each. If you have the time and resources to do so.
  - honkycat 1mo ago
    [flagged]
  - N_Lens 1mo ago
    Ignorant comment.
- simianparrot 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cthalupa 1mo ago
    Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about. Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
    - 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
      Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.
    - simianparrot 1mo ago
      South Korea's obesity threshold is much lower than western Europe and the US. There you're considered obese at 25 kg/m2 or above. In Europe and the US it's 30 kg/m2. There's also factors like this: https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU7EAHAMZLWJO654/ https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU... I didn't mean to say the cases I listed are exclusively the only ones, but I still maintain they are a major part of it. Japan teaches accountability and taking personal responsibility -- it's a country where its capital city can get away with barely any places to dispose of your trash and not be littered. DEI is barely a thing, if at all. And it definitely does not celebrate mediocrity.
      - cthalupa 21d ago
        I'm going based off of set standards, not local. Plenty of international organizations track this and even before you replied to me here there were other links in the thread. But the absolute numbers aren't important either way, it's the trends. I don't care if it's the 25kg mark they're passing or the 30kg, and the numbers I'm basing this off of predate GLP-1 medications. What I care about is the trends for weight - and in Korea, just like everywhere else in the developed world, those trends were rising, and accelerating at the rate at which they rose. As for Japan, uh, I love Japan, but you have a.... very interesting... view of it. No litter? Walk off the main streets, go down some back alleys. Tokyo is a big city. Japanese people aren't so inhuman compared to the rest of the world as to be perfect. Hell, go have some great craft beer at the Mikkeller bar in Shibuya or literally anything down one of those alleys. You'll find trash, you'll find garbage sitting out, you'll see rats. New Yorkers will stop feeling so claustrophobically clean and start feeling at home. You're right about DEI, but it's also one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world, the poor treatment of women in the workforce for so long directly lead to a backlash that has precipitated and massively contributed their birth rate issues, and racism against people of Korean descent is still massive. And the entire salaryman system is literally a "the vast majority of you will get promoted in near lockstep for time served" celebration of mediocrity. Japan is a wonderful country. There's plenty of things they do better than anyone else. There's plenty of things they are awful at or about, too. Go look at their legal system - they have an absurd conviction rate of nearly 100%. And it's not because they're doing that much better of a job investigating, or having better prosecution, or only charge people they've got definitive proof. And there's a million things they are just as bad at. Korea is just a perfect counterexample because they also are huge on accountability and personal responsibility, the cleanliness level is similar to Japan, they don't have DEI, and they celebrate mediocrity far less than Japan does.... and yet, still getting fat. I can't explain Japan. But the explanations people give always have plenty of counterexamples.
Jesus_piece 1mo ago
Capitalist systems and dysfunctional healthcare in the US thrive on people with chronic unhealthy issues and habits
londons_explore 1mo ago
Perhaps they need a bigger drum. Maybe they make a set of health guidelines, and for those who choose to follow them you get a $1000 tax rebate. If the benefits are as big as some estimate, the added longevity and productivity will lead to more than that much economic benefit to the nation.

OptionOfT 1mo ago

We're too soft on companies, but equally too hard on people who have a food addiction.

SubmarineClub 1mo ago
[flagged]
- ThrowawayTestr 1mo ago
  It's really not hard to not drink. It's really not hard to not do heroin. It's really not hard to...
  - procaryote 1mo ago
    Those are easier in many ways as you don't need heroin or alcohol to survive and can avoid it completely If it's hard or not is more of a philosopical question about how much free will we have as people. Statistically they're all hard and not over-eating is the hardest. Culturally and individually we do a lot of things that probably make the food one even harder If you drink too much, the common answer is that you need to stop drinking. If you eat too much, we are very reluctant to talk about how you need to eat less. We prefer to talk about how it's someone else's fault and how powerless we are to do anything about it, including comforting lies about how eating less wouldn't work anyway, or how being overweight isn't bad really.
- NorthSouthNorth 1mo ago
  I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.
  - wtetzner 1mo ago
    It's not just habits. It changes the composition of your gut microbiome, hormones, etc. All of that can make changing your diet much harder than one might think.
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily) Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.
  - seydor 1mo ago
    40% in a specific country
    - jaggederest 1mo ago
      Don't worry, everyone else is getting there: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=line https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
    - cthalupa 21d ago
      Japan is literally the only country in the developed world that doesn't see their trends following the path of America. Even culturally similar countries like Korea are seeing a rise in overweight and obesity similar to the trends that happened in America and other countries in the west. And Korea has one of the largest shame-industrial-complexes around people being fat, with it being the norm for everyone from your friends and family to strangers pointing out the fact that you're overweight, one of the most insane beauty industries in the world, a 'show up and get GLP-1 medications same day' complex that puts America's compounding industry to shame when it comes to ease of access, etc. If other countries avoid getting as fat as America was at her fattest, it will be because of GLP-1 medications, not because they are morally superior with a better work ethic.
- agos 1mo ago
  If it’s not too hard why are people not doing it?
  - wao0uuno 1mo ago
    Because not doing it is even easier.
    - taneq 1mo ago
      Well now we’ve just moved the goal posts with the “easy” and “hard” labels on them, and nothing of value was said.
- honkycat 1mo ago
  i feel like close to half the adult population having an eating disorder has to be chocked up to a bug in the human brain at some point. we evolved to eat caloric foods, in case of a famine that will never happen in the modern world. I think we are too soft on people and we let dirtbags get away with way too much in the US but saying "its not that hard" is a cop out. we get it you're a macho conservative. nobody cares.
- bluefirebrand 1mo ago
  It can be very hard to eat a healthy diet if you're poor or if you live in a food desert, or you have a dietary restriction, or some allergies...
  - spockz 1mo ago
    And it becomes even harder when you mix any of those two criteria, let alone more. Then factor in your environment. It is way easier to eat healthily in Italy than in the US. (Maybe that is what you meant with Food desert.)
    - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
      Food Deserts are a concept that can exist anywhere but yes, I think they are more common in the rural USA. They are places that don't have nearby access to decent grocery stores, basically. Instead they have to buy all of their food from convenience stores. Imagine doing all of your food shopping at a gas station store because that's the only groceries around. That's a food desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
      - QuercusMax 1mo ago
        Not just a rural thing. Plenty of poor areas in big cities have a dearth of affordable grocery stores.
  - refurb 1mo ago
    I disagree on the “if you’re poor”. I find eating healthy cheaper. You can prepare healthy meals from basic and cheap foodstuffs like vegetables, whole grains and legumes, eggs, low cost meat cuts etc. You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each. Buying prepared unhealthy foods is what is expensive.
    - degamad 1mo ago
      > I find eating healthy cheaper. Being poor is very expensive. > You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each. If you have the time and resources to do so.
- honkycat 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- N_Lens 1mo ago
  Ignorant comment.
simianparrot 1mo ago
[flagged]
- cthalupa 1mo ago
  Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about. Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
  - 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
    Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.
  - simianparrot 1mo ago
    South Korea's obesity threshold is much lower than western Europe and the US. There you're considered obese at 25 kg/m2 or above. In Europe and the US it's 30 kg/m2. There's also factors like this: https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU7EAHAMZLWJO654/ https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU... I didn't mean to say the cases I listed are exclusively the only ones, but I still maintain they are a major part of it. Japan teaches accountability and taking personal responsibility -- it's a country where its capital city can get away with barely any places to dispose of your trash and not be littered. DEI is barely a thing, if at all. And it definitely does not celebrate mediocrity.
    - cthalupa 21d ago
      I'm going based off of set standards, not local. Plenty of international organizations track this and even before you replied to me here there were other links in the thread. But the absolute numbers aren't important either way, it's the trends. I don't care if it's the 25kg mark they're passing or the 30kg, and the numbers I'm basing this off of predate GLP-1 medications. What I care about is the trends for weight - and in Korea, just like everywhere else in the developed world, those trends were rising, and accelerating at the rate at which they rose. As for Japan, uh, I love Japan, but you have a.... very interesting... view of it. No litter? Walk off the main streets, go down some back alleys. Tokyo is a big city. Japanese people aren't so inhuman compared to the rest of the world as to be perfect. Hell, go have some great craft beer at the Mikkeller bar in Shibuya or literally anything down one of those alleys. You'll find trash, you'll find garbage sitting out, you'll see rats. New Yorkers will stop feeling so claustrophobically clean and start feeling at home. You're right about DEI, but it's also one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world, the poor treatment of women in the workforce for so long directly lead to a backlash that has precipitated and massively contributed their birth rate issues, and racism against people of Korean descent is still massive. And the entire salaryman system is literally a "the vast majority of you will get promoted in near lockstep for time served" celebration of mediocrity. Japan is a wonderful country. There's plenty of things they do better than anyone else. There's plenty of things they are awful at or about, too. Go look at their legal system - they have an absurd conviction rate of nearly 100%. And it's not because they're doing that much better of a job investigating, or having better prosecution, or only charge people they've got definitive proof. And there's a million things they are just as bad at. Korea is just a perfect counterexample because they also are huge on accountability and personal responsibility, the cleanliness level is similar to Japan, they don't have DEI, and they celebrate mediocrity far less than Japan does.... and yet, still getting fat. I can't explain Japan. But the explanations people give always have plenty of counterexamples.

Jesus_piece 1mo ago

Capitalist systems and dysfunctional healthcare in the US thrive on people with chronic unhealthy issues and habits

londons_explore 1mo ago

Perhaps they need a bigger drum. Maybe they make a set of health guidelines, and for those who choose to follow them you get a $1000 tax rebate. If the benefits are as big as some estimate, the added longevity and productivity will lead to more than that much economic benefit to the nation.