I’m sympathetic to anyone who feels they “need” to take these, and wants to encourage others to do the same. I’m sure they work wonders for obesity, and that’s

I’m sympathetic to anyone who feels they “need” to take these, and wants to encourage others to do the same. I’m sure they work wonders for obesity, and that’s great. But we cannot get something for nothing, so I have to wonder: at what cost? A poster below me said that, at a population level, diet and exercise do not work. That’s mostly true. Most people don’t permanently change their diet and other lifestyle long term. I think that ignoring that they do work in the short term, and could work in the long term if adherence were better, overlooks something important. Moving past that, we are an obese population. Or, at least, very overweight. Supposing diet and exercise do not work, what are we to do? I’d propose we look toward rectifying the causes. There are innumerable environmental factors today that make us fat: pollution, drug side effects, food advertising, alcohol, social pressure, widespread sedentary jobs and lifestyle, etc., etc., etc. If we focused on solving the problems that are making us obese, we wouldn’t need these drugs (or at least, not nearly to the extent we do). We used to live in a world like that. We know what it looks like. We know the consequences. We know our bodies and society can tolerate that world, and that it would solve our issues. Why not aim for a return? Instead we will opt for another technical solution to our technical problem of obesity, causing all manner of unknown risks later on, and falling back to another technical solution to that technical problem. We will continue to layer on technique after technique to patch holes in the solutions we left in our last layer of solutions. The holes will grow larger and larger as we stack on more layers with more holes, and solutions will grow smaller and smaller as technology grows ever more specialized. The cycle is not sustainable.