GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients

Agreed.

I'm a big fan of intermittent and water fasting. Have seen things in my blood work that doctors would require me on meds to reverse. Outside of that, I can't speak to the positive impacts on my mood, and general ability to focus.

The simplest solution to a lot of problems is consuming less with the assumption that, most of us (maybe not you), have a lot of spare energy sitting around.

A lie that we don't unlearn as we grow up is we "require" three meals a day. This is true for children who need obscene amounts of energy to grow, but, not for us desk-bound adults.

In the end, giving the body a break to heal by fasting or just consuming significantly less is going to leave more resources for the body energy to deal with other things.

Yeah, most GLP-1 benefits (or even adverse effects, like muscle loss) seem to be caused by the weight loss. We already knew obesity massively increases risk from a host of diseases, but GLP-1s are still treated with scepticism of the "oh but what about the side-effects we don't know about?!" variety?

I hypothesize that the appetite-suppressing effect of GLP-1 agonists contributes to the normalization of dopamine signaling in the brain. By mitigating the exaggerated dopamine fluctuations seen in food and sugar addiction, GLP-1 may promote a return to dopamine homeostasis, thereby reducing compulsive or addiction-like reward-seeking behaviors.

Is there evidence for addiction tendencies in general? Or is it something specific to alcohol?

Many Americans drive a car every day, even though ~40k people a year die in car accidents. Why? Because the benefits outweigh the risk.

(my partner is on a GLP-1, and lost ~25 lbs in 3 months)

There have been some. I've heard about eyesight related issues. A quick google found this article [0] where results showed that people using GLP-1 drugs were 68.6 times more likely to develop certain types of vision problems.

[0]: https://www.aao.org/newsroom/news-releases/detail/do-glp-1-d...

Not everything has another shoe to drop.

Getting people to eat more broccoli is almost entirely upside. Sure a handful of people will be allergic or whatever, but on a population level some interventions are just one positive after another, and there's no reason it has to be a deal made with the devil.

GLP-1s have been peescribed for like 20 years, but have been limited more to diabetics and extreme cases. So there is pretty good data. Not to say there isnt going to be side effects in some population sample, but we need to compare that with obesity and diabetes (which is a very bad disease).

Even with an increased risk of mortality, at least right now I can live. The voice in my head that is constantly telling me I'm hungry is quiet.

Without it I'd die sooner anyway.

These drugs have been around for more than 10 years. If there were significant downsides, we probably would have seen them already.

I don’t know. Having listened to a number of interviews with some of the founders in this area of drug research I came away with a much higher respect and significantly less cynicism toward big pharmaceutical. Novo Nordisk is run by a nonprofit even.

I'm sure there will be negative side effects but the main outcome of these drugs is that you eat less. Many of us have trained ourselves to eat at a frequency and volume way beyond what is really required to keep our body functioning. This leads to weight gain in most people and thus is the focus but even independent of weight there are effects of continuously eating poor quality foods which are unlikely to be good. So I'm not surprised that there are all these miraculous sounding positive side effects to drugs which prevent most people from putting their metabolic system under near constant load.

When the side effects are better understood I suspect for the average person, eating less would be a net benefit to their overall health - _even if they don't lose any weight_.

My understanding is that it slows the digestive process, so there isn't more "empty time to repair or relax".

But my thinking there may be naive.

I don’t agree. They are not saying that.

It’s observational. They are saying they see correlation.

Your suggested mechanism is plausible, and likely, of course, but that might only be part of the effect.

I think it’s still valuable findings and can help direct further studies.

There may be some herbal supplements that impact GLP-1 release to some extent, but what is being talked about here are synthetic GLP-1 receptor agonists.

GLP-1 agonists? Well they derived them from a lizard, so, uh… sort of? But no, no foods you eat are really going to have GLP-1 agonists in them, not to any meaningful degree anyway. Plus if you’re eating them they have to survive at least part of the digestive tract, which means you need even more since some of it’ll be lost.

Your body produces GLP-1, but it lives in the blood for like minutes. The innovation was finding a chemical that tickles the same receptors but survives in the body for days at a time.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...

L-tryptophan > Indole > Raises GLP-1

Private people invested a lot of money to develop this and get it through testing. Allowing them to reap the benefits from their investment for a limited time is just fine.

It's not people couldn't also: Diet, exercise, choose veggies, eat more fiber, etc

Compounded GLP-1s are still floating around in the US

In theory you could supplement with L-tryptophan which is metabolized into indole which then raises GLP-1 production within enteroendocrine cells.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...

> After adjusting for age, body mass index (BMI), disease severity and other health factors, GLP-1 users still showed significantly lower odds of death, suggesting a strong and independent protective effect.

You should try reading the article instead of being angry. That’s not at all what it indicated.

they don't know that?