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Does this seriously need to be a first-page discussion topic on Hacker News every single day from now until eternity? Can this just become a pinned thread or pa
by nonameiguess 2y ago
Does this seriously need to be a first-page discussion topic on Hacker News every single day from now until eternity? Can this just become a pinned thread or part of an FAQ or Wiki or something?
I say this facetiously knowing Hacker News doesn't have those features, but what do these posts hope to achieve that hasn't already been achieved?
We'll see some variety of:
- Isn't it all just because of weight loss? Well, read the damn article because the author sure claims at least some effects don't seem to be because of weight loss.
- Isn't it all just because of eating less in general being good for you? If you're overweight, sure. If you're weight stable, seemingly you can't just eat less or you'll eventually starve to death.
- I'm worried about the long-term side effects we don't know about. Well, GLP-1 agonists have been approved for human use as a diabetes treatment for 20 years, so at what point are you expecting these to show up?
- Isn't this an amphetamine? No, it isn't.
- Isn't this addictive? No, it isn't.
- What about all the horrible side effects? The side effect profile for these drugs are among the most mild of all regular use drugs you can take. The few severe effects are incredibly rare and the most common issues with nausea are heavily dose-dependent and tend to go away after a while.
- Don't you need to increase the dose forever? No, you don't. The Ozempic is pretty low and stays low. The Wegovy dose is much higher but still capped, and if you see increasing dosages, it's because of titration to find the needed amount without overwhelming you all at once and taking more than you need.
- Why didn't the body just evolve this itself? The human body, all mammal bodies, and possibly other animals do in fact produce GLP-1. It isn't very long-lasting in serum, though, so medical researchers figured out how to make an analog that won't break down in minutes. That's all these drugs are, something your body already makes but a longer lasting version. GLP-1 is, in fact, secreted in response to eating, and is one of the signals the body produces telling you to stop eating when you've had enough. This mechanism seems to be broken for one reason or another in many people, and those people end up obese. Increasing the level exogeneously seems to help, as you might expect.
Is there anything else that is going to come up? Because it sure feels like the exact same back and forth, every single day.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nahnahno 2y agoThis is explained in the article: “ That does happen, of course, but research shows that it is not the full story. A study of more than 17,600 overweight and obese patients from 41 countries who took semaglutide found that participants lost about 10% of their body weight and had a 20% reduction in serious adverse coronary events, strokes, heart attacks and all-cause mortality. Crucially, these cardiovascular improvements long preceded any meaningful weight loss. ”
- MPSimmons 2y agoI believe the parent to your comment was ranting that those are the kinds of questions we see again and again in the repeated threads, and they're right about that.
- llm_trw 2y ago>- Isn't this addictive? No, it isn't. I've heard this one before. There's a little thing called the opioid epidemic that started because Oxycodone was meant to be free from the potential to be addictive. 30 years later - oops. I trust medications which haven't become generic less than leaches on any claim they make.
- MPSimmons 2y agoIt may not be psychologically addictive, but there are definite ramifications when my wife misses a dose of Ozempic because the pharmacies are all out of it.
- jf22 2y agoI'd spent a bit more time looking up why the opiod epidemic happened. There were a whole bunch of other factors involved outside of a 30 year old marketing slogan.
- MrBuddyCasino 2y agoThis is a problem with the nature of sites such as HN, or forums. They live in the present, and there is no mechanism to build up a body of knowledge, every reader has to re-process the whole log himself.
- dylan604 2y ago> every reader has to re-process the whole log himself. You say this like the current readers of HN have been here since the beginning and no new readers have come along since then. New readers come along at some rate I have no idea about, but I'm assuming it to be >0% per day/month/year. These new readers will find something existing readers have already seen and post it because it is interesting to them. This is no different than seeing the same "experiments" every year in 5th grade science fairs.
- rmellow 2y agoThese are submarines* * https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html