Weight Loss Pharmacotherapy has been getting such a tremendous amount of airplay recently that the fad diet yo-yo queen herself, Oprah wanted in on the action. She was the leading cast member in a 21st Century Medicine Show the other day; presented by ABC/Disney. She brought a few doctors and some emotional stories from the folks out in TV Land, to help sell an amazing, miracle Elixir (“Snake Oil”), that cures disease, smoothes wrinkles, removes stains, prolongs life, and cures several common ailments, like obesity and metabolic dysfunction, for instance. “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution” was the name of the made-for-TV special. Just another program in a long list, designed to peddle pharmaceuticals. Imagine that – it seems like there’s a magic pill for everything now.
“Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please!
Come in close where everyone can see!
I got a tale to tell, it isn’t gonna cost a dime!
(And if you believe that,
we’re gonna get along just fine.)”
― Stephen King
We don’t watch much TV and an Oprah special was not worth making an exception for, so we didn’t see it. The truth is that we made up our minds about Weight Loss Pharmacotherapy a long time ago. There are no magic pills folks. The topic of the hour-long special was about using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists, (GLP-1) to lose weight. They’ve been in development since the 1980s and were first approved by the FDA in 2005 for the treatment of Type 2 Diabetes. There are a half dozen of them in development by various pharmaceutical companies and a few have already been approved for weight loss. Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy are the big names that are making waves presently.
“It is a very personal topic for me and for the hundreds of millions of people impacted around the globe who have for years struggled with weight and obesity,” said Oprah in a statement. “This special will bring together medical experts, leaders in the space, and people in the day-to-day struggle to talk about health equity and obesity to ultimately release the shame, judgment, and stigma surrounding weight.”
Isn’t that nice? Sadly, it’s just “Snake Oil” Sales talk. GLP-1s drive a physiological response by tricking a receptor or upscaling a hormone and there’s usually hell to pay when you go fooling around with God’s perfect creation. Human physiology makes a fine Swiss watch look like a tinker toy. In a properly working gut biome, GLP-1 is released from cells in the intestine when they sense food coming into the gut; a feedback mechanism that optimizes digestion, regulates glucose production, and adjusts insulin. The effect that interested the big pharmaceutical companies to market these agonists for weight loss, however, is their ability to shut down hunger signals in the brain.
Calorie restriction in one form or another is the key to almost all weight loss therapies. Now you can just take a pill and hunger and appetite disappear – what could possibly go wrong? Plenty. To start with, these agonists suppress digestion, causing nausea, lower abdominal pain, constipation, bloating, gas, and vomiting. The use of this new class of drugs has also been associated with several adverse effects on pancreatic and thyroid tissue. Animal studies and analyses of drug databases indicate an association of GLP-1 receptor agonists with pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, and thyroid cancer. There are also multiple case reports that have linked the use of these drugs, with the occurrence of acute kidney injury, primarily through hemodynamic derangement due to nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
The most common symptoms associated with the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists are gastrointestinal symptoms. Other common adverse effects include injection site reactions, headache, and nasopharyngitis. There are much better ways to restrict calories that do not involve puking up dinner or wearing out your sphincter muscle sitting on the toilet with diarrhea. Isn’t it interesting that a person who uses laxatives or vomiting to purge gets classified with an eating disorder like “bulimia nervosa” but when you take an expensive pharmaceutical to do the same thing, it gets classified as a wonder drug and health equity or something? Pharmacologically induced mental disorders, the new normal.
These drugs are fairly new so there’s not a lot of data to look at yet but the studies that are out there show a median weight loss of around 10 pounds in a half year of taking a GLP-1. Wouldn’t it be more efficient just to skip lunch? Studies also show that most people quit taking the drugs in that same period, probably because they couldn’t deal with the ugly effects. No one wants to be sick to their stomach all the time and sadly almost all of them gained the weight back after they quit taking the therapy. The serious damage that manifests from the yoyo tendency of calorie restriction therapies is that when you lose weight a significant portion of it is lean body mass, (muscle) but the weight gained back is mostly fat.
Even if you’re only skipping lunch, calorie restriction can cause havoc with hormones, like cortisol. Restricting calories also causes bone mass loss which is a significant concern for senior citizens. The one weight loss modality that consistently provides results is eating a proper diet and exercising. Lean body mass is critical to keep your metabolism working to design specifications. So you need to consume enough protein and you need to do resistance training. Metabolic dysfunction is responsible for almost all non-communicable diseases.
So it’s not just about weight loss folks, your health and happiness are directly connected to your metabolism. Stop eating and drinking toxic packaged, and processed human chow laced with seed oils and corn syrup. Start eating a balanced diet rich in high-quality whole foods, exercise, and your metabolism will respond. No need to worry about pancreatic or thyroid cancer. No nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea, and no expensive weekly injections. If Oprah truly cared about the hundreds of millions of people around the globe who have for years struggled with weight and obesity more than she cares about money she would be partnered with a gym, not a pharmaceutical company.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ~ Albert Einstein