All About the New Weight Loss Drugs
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Photo by Andres Ayrton
By: Mark Sisson
The United States and much of the industrialized world has an obesity problem. The environment is obesogenic. The food is delicious and engineered by PhDs to target and titillate our brain reward systems. The portions are enormous. Half of our waking hours are devoted to sitting slumped over in a chair staring into an electronic device—for work and for pleasure. We eat carbs we don’t need, use seed oils in quantities our bodies haven’t adapted to handling, and largely avoid the most important food our ancestors evolved consuming: animal protein. The cheapest food is the worst and the healthiest is the most expensive.
It’s a big mess, and many people resist the dietary and lifestyle changes required to fix the issue. It’s no wonder many people have been hoping for a pill or medication that fixes the obesity problem.
Over the last few years, scientists appear to have found a class of medications that can help: GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (sold as Ozempic® and Wegovy®) and liraglutide (aka Victoza® and Saxenda®). Hollywood celebrities and fashion models are taking these drugs in vast quantities. Silicon Valley tech circles are taking them—Elon Musk, most famously, is on semaglutide. In short, almost everyone with the money and access and weight to lose is using semaglutide and related drugs to stay thin. I know several docs who prescribe it for overweight patients.
Originally designed as diabetes drugs, these agents mimic the effects of glucagon-like peptide-1, an incretin hormone the body releases when you eat food. GLP-1 has two primary effects:
It stimulates the release of insulin and inhibits the release of glucagon. It slows down gastric motility and the passage of food through the gut, keeping you full for longer.
GLP-1 is a hormone that “signals” fullness. There are all sorts of positive downstream effects as well:
Lower glucose productionMore glucose uptake by musclesIncreased insulin sensitivity Lower blood pressureImproved endothelial function
The new weight loss drugs bind to the receptors that normally interact with GLP-1 and elicit the same effect as the hormone itself.
Do the obesity drugs work for losing weight?
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