380 karma · joined January 21, 2025
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?
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.
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?
The difference is order of magnitude as proportion of net worth and the necessity of the purchase.
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/
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.
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
..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.
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.
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."
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 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.