HN user
You made the story about you, when nobody asked. Check the comment I responded to. You did exactly what people always seem to jump out of their seats to do when this drug is mentioned: crowd the conversation with anecdata about how you did it better.
There were quite a few foods I let go of when I decided to drop weight. Can't say I miss them much, certainly not to the extent to say something like "wow, i can't enjoy food anymore" or "now i'm fighting cravings all the time!!". And I legitimately have no interest in reintegrating them into my diet.
Your story has been told over and over and over. We get it. Congratulations. You win. You don't need GLP1s to sustain your weight loss. You don't experience food noise. You made all the right choices. Your brain and genetics are superior to the 30% of American adults who have been told to eat less and move more and still haven't managed to improve their health through weight loss.
Now that you've been properly congratulated for your superiority, are you interested at all in understanding the complex systems that prevent 100 million Americans from achieving the success you have? Like, any intellectual curiosity at all about a problem that causes untold suffering for almost one third of Americans? That costs literally billions in healthcare costs? About stress, anxiety, access to healthy foods, or the novel mechanisms by which a drug which was discovered through studying the venom of a Gila monster operates on the human gut and brain? Or are you only interested in re-telling the world how you don't have the problem that we're trying to solve?
If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them?
Evolution favored this level of GLP1, then we invented agriculture, and cooking, and bliss points. Now it’s far easier to ingest massive numbers of calories in ways that our old world systems can’t properly signal against. Evolution hasn’t caught up and maybe never will.
If changing habits were much easier, then people wouldn't be using the drug to make it easier change their habits. They would just do it.
Bread, sugar and potatoes exist on a spectrum from highly processed/refined (truly problematic) to minimally processed whole food versions (nutritionally valuable). There's no reason to give up minimally processed whole food versions of these.
The choice is no longer between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "some kind of lifelong moderation for a person that has struggled." The choice is now between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "removing the struggle to moderate bread and sugar."
You're clearly an advocate for your father making healthy choices. So why would you advocate against the use of a drug that makes that easier?
He could have lost all that weight and still had bread, sugar, and potatoes but instead he gave up what he clearly enjoyed. Now he gets to live out the rest of his life fighting cravings, telling himself he's not allowed to enjoy food. How utterly sad.
That you have the means to make that distinction inside the justice system illustrates the dichotomy. In places that never had the rule of law to begin with, what you described is the standard expectation of the individuals living it. To question it, or to comment on it at all, would be akin to asking a fish “how’s the water”? If it could talk, it’d respond, “what the hell is water”?
The rule of law generally refers to societies where everyone is subject to the same set of laws. China, for example, does not and has not had the rule of law. Instead they have rule BY law, where laws are simply to control certain people’s behavior.
It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?
The difference is order of magnitude as proportion of net worth and the necessity of the purchase.
The U.S. is really far behind on this front. Going to even casual restaurants in Germany, I see a menu that has a dozen or so symbols, representing everything from gluten to alliums to lupins. In the US you're lucky to get "May contain nuts"
I wonder if, like the precision fermentation process, these engineered bacteria can be fed into existing dairy processing machines that make ice cream and other derivative products. The win there is huge, it means practically replacing a very difficult to produce / maintain biological component (cows) with relatively stable component (vats of bacteria), with little impact to the rest of the production pipeline.
What is the target audience for these bi-annual shots?
In the US, there are certain patients who are at high risk for HIV infection. They are men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users, and people who have sex for money or housing.
In Southern Africa, young women experience some of the highest incidence rates of HIV infection in the world [0], so that would be the high risk population there.
In terms of side effects, there are practically none for the once-every-two-months drug Apretude, which is prescribed in the US for the high risk population I mentioned. They are mostly around the physical injection itself/
Nobody pays that. It's a pre-negotiation price that exists as a factor of many other costs and payments to various stakeholders like PBMs.
IV drug use is a massively more efficient transmission route than any type of sexual contact.
Yes, and people who take IV drugs are much less likely than men who have sex with men in general to take a pill daily.
They bill the insurance companies a lot, plus they take public and private (i.e., government and Gates Foundation) investment.
Lehrer taught me, at a young age, that the “division” between music and mathematics was completely arbitrary, that you can be interested in both, and indeed there is significant overlap.
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
That’s a rather idiosyncratic definition of stability. Evolutionary adaptation is literally change over time.
I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky.
..we’re shaping nature to fit human values,
You’re right to question it, because the philosophy itself is based on the emotionally satisfying but ultimately unscientific “Gaia” theory of “balance” and “self-sustaining” / “self-correcting” systems.
So that's why it seemed to say the same thing over and over again.
That's just part and parcel of being human.
Also part and parcel of being a human being is logic and empathy. Anyone who possesses one of these traits, never mind both of them, should find it easy to choose the product that isn't literally the product of human suffering an exploitation.
The largest generation in US history is retiring and buying property in the state with no income tax.
Tomorrow I'm going to release 100 snakes into your home. Most of them aren't venomous, but I can't check all of them. After I release them, let me know if you don't want any snakes in your home, and I'll look into in 4-6 weeks to decide if your claim is valid.
This is why walkable cities are important!
that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."
"For decades we've been telling Americans that you're lazy, it's your fault, you're not moving enough, you're eating too much," Mozaffarian says. "And I think what this study shows is that there's really complicated biology happening and that our food is driving this."
The industry that invented the bliss point [0] has every reason to blame the individual and not the system they created.
One quibble: the article blames ultraprocessed foods, but that's not a category of foods with a stable definition. What we do know is that food has been engineered to be more delicious and less filling, so staying away from those foods is a better way to think about it.
The company adds that "if you would like us to blur your entire house, car, or body, submit a request using the "Report a problem" tool
The cold logic of surveillance capitalism is easily seen here: Big companies will spy and it’s your fault for not reporting your desire to not be spied on.
Why do you care what it looks like? Riding while looking at your bike is dangerous. Watch the road!
The last time we got employers to care about employees it was because the unions dragged the bosses into the streets and beat the daylights out of them.
The English will be glad to hear their empire remains!