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That's interesting. I knew it caused appetite suppression, but i didn't realize it dulls other areas as well.

Additionally while GLP-1 can reduce caloric intake, it doesn’t actually fix the poor dietary choices that got you there in the first place.

This shows an ignorance of how obesity actually works. The primary difference between skinny people and fat people is that fat people are just hungrier. Skinny people have functioning satiation reflexes, while fat people's have been damaged, likely from exposure to highly processed foods during childhood.

Have you learned nothing from the effect of GLP-1 inhibitors? For years, people have been demonizing fat folks as lazy and ignorant, smug in the self-satisfaction that their superior character and intellect could save them from that fate. And now we've apparently learned to bottle willpower, to condense "good dietary choices" into an injection. People take these medicines, and suddenly they find themselves drawn to eat a healthy amount of food, and to eat less sugary and refined crap.

This shows beyond any doubt that people were not making poor choices. They didn't lack willpower. They never had any fundamental character flaws. They just had a broken metabolism that forced them to crave unhealthy levels of unhealthy food. We give them a shot, and somehow this profound flaw in their moral character just vanishes into the wind.

Obesity is a medical problem. It's not an education, a willpower, or a character problem. We have tens of millions of people who have had a core part of their bodies - their satiation reflex, poisoned and damaged by the food industry. And instead of helping them, we declare their poisoning to be a moral failure.

You have learned nothing.

This is all true, but if overweight is your most urgent health issue, and if the excess fat is causing other health issues, simply reducing weight by whatever means can improve health, and there are virtuous cycles too, if you are lighter you can move more, maybe you feel better about your body and treat it better, an upward spiral. The epidemic of overweight (or more specifically over-fat) is causing so many cascade effects here that it's well worth treating aggressively.

What I'd like to know is are these beneficial side effects just due to the weight loss, or are they available to normal weight people who take the drug? Is it actually the drug, or would they get the same benefits by losing weight some other way?

All drugs have side-effects, so what?

You are focusing on the weight loss issue, which is a miracle in itself. So what if they still make unhealthy choices? They are still losing massive amounts of weight, which is us already a HUGE improvement. You can't let perfection be the enemy. So it doesn't solve 100% of the problem, solving 75% is still a worthy improvement.

Then there are all the other things it does. It reduces cravings in addicts of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, making it much easier to quit. So an unhealthy person with addictions and diabetes can take this drug, get their diabetes under control, lose a ton of weight, and quit smoking and drinking and whatever else, and we're supposed to avoid this drug because there might be some side effects? As long as the side-effects aren't dying 20 years sooner, they're better off with the drug.

It also seems to help with dementia, and other drugs.

You know, all those things like weight loss and addiction control are side-effects, right? They are an unintended consequence of taking the drug, which is what a side-effects is. Sometimes side-effects are bad, sometimes they're good.

Expecting NO side-effects is an unrealistic objective.

You contradict yourself when you claim there have been no long-term studies, then say it's been used for 20 years, and that's how they discovered the weight loss SIDE-EFFECT.

It certainly does get to the bottom of one of the worst aspects of obesity - overeating. You are assuming that all obese people are eating poor quality food, but that isn't always the case. Often they are eating high quality food, they are just eating too much of it. This address that issue, reduces cravings, and teaches them to eat less. It also seems to help in reducing cravings for poor quality food.

And you are avoiding the addiction issues. That alone makes this drug worth exploring further.

The real issue with this drug isn't the lack of research, it's the fact that it is difficult to access for the average person. Here is a drug that could go a long way in reducing some of the most pressing health issues in our society - obesity, addictions, dementia, etc., and yet insurance companies won't cover it. The cost of the drug would be far cheaper than the associated costs to a society who allows those serious health issues to exist unchecked.

Generally, most people we're talking about here don't have dietary nutritional deficiencies. You'd have to specifically eat an unbalanced diet, like chicken nuggets for every meal, for that to happen.

I would bet that anyone prescribed ozempic has also talked with their doctor about their diet before starting.