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Comment by y-curious | Hacker News Reader

I am one of those people to some extent. For me, it's the naturalistic fallacy I can't get over. I drink caffeine daily, but the idea of hijacking my hunger with an injectable induces dread. I would like to believe that there are no long-term side effects, but:

1. We have to trust the data of for-profit pharmaceutical companies and their trials. They are incentivized to produce optimistic results.

2. It's relatively new (insofar that a lot of people are taking it). Opiates were touted in a similar way until the other shoe dropped. There exists an undefined line in time where I would feel more comfortable.

3. It is/was made of a poison from an animal.

4. The extreme benefits are overwhelmingly in obese candidates. Keto is the same way; I tried it and it was not for me because I am not obese.

I'm actually open to any sort of evidence that will change my mind. No name calling please.

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>It is/was made of a poison from an animal.

Caffeine is an insecticide.

Right, and it's also not something naturally in the human body. But sugar is also an insecticide when you cook it into a jam. It doesn't really make me comfortable with giant lizard poison

These hormones occur naturally in the body. We found an analog in nature that behaves a bit differently in that it is longer lasting. Now we have synthetic versions based on that understanding.

And the gila monsters have their own circulating serum levels of exenedin-4. It's produced in their salivary glands - it's a component in their venom, yes, but they also ingest it themselves, particularly when eating.

But these are fundamentally analogs to our own hormones that have been tweaked to increase desirable properties. It's not like we isolated some random compound that our body has never had to deal with before. (Not that I think that that would necessarily be an indicator we shouldn't use it, either. I don't see why any of this is a strong argument to you, even if your understanding was correct.)

This is a fair point. I am ignorant of how the hormone in our bodies works, and what it's downstream effects are. I'll take a peek at the literature

I'd trust for-profit pharmaceutical companies before I would trust "all chemicals are evil and bad" Facebook moms.

Clearly you missed the part about name-calling. Anyways, that's a false dichotomy since you can be a third option: someone that's skeptical of messing with an important energy consumption pathway in the human body.

The baseline of "energy consumption pathways in the human body" now is to be severely messed up.

Humans did not evolve for an environment where food is overly abundant and physical activity is optional. For almost the entire evolutionary history of humans, this just wasn't the case. But it is what humans are having to deal with today.

Now, take a look at the "metabolic syndrome" and its prevalence. Clearly, there's a lot of room for improvement.

By all accounts, this generation of GLP-1 agonists has found a meaningful way to improve on that baseline. The benefits are broad and the side effects are manageable. This isn't "surprising" as much as it is "long overdue".

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