[nosianu]

> Nearly two-thirds of adults in England are overweight or obese.

That means the issue is systemic and one needs to look at things outside of individual control. Yes, often systemic issue can be overcome by individuals - by the top quartile kind of individuals with more luck, better genes, better education (including what they picked up at home while growing up), more money, more suitable lives than the majority, or with outliers in levels of personal discipline. But systems should work for the people that actually live, if you need to blame two thirds of the population(!) it's most likely your system that is wrong.

Yes you can look at most of the individuals that are part of those two thirds and find what seems to be personal choices - but you miss the environment and the pressures from it that lead people into making those choices.

For example, that a lot fewer people know how to cook today than several decades ago (example link: https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...), do yo want to blame each individual? To me this very much looks like a bigger societal issue. It's not like people make such choices after careful consideration, it "just happens" and they "slip" into those behaviors without much deliberation, based on their living situations.

[Auracle]

You can both blame people and society. Modern living makes it easy to be fat, but plenty of us don’t succumb to the temptation of easy meals and overeating.

I’m not sure how you’d even change modern life to get around this, save maybe for incredibly large sin taxes on everything from soda to every restaurant. I’m sure we’ll just end up with a pill sometime soon. Semaglutide comes close.

[dogmatism]

Can I introduce you to semaglutides newer, better cousin, tirzepatide? https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2206038?query=TO...

50% of participants on 10 and 15mg doses lost 20% of initial body weight!

[Auracle]

Believe you me, my stock portfolio knows about it.

[Scoundreller]

> Semaglutide comes close

Until we can mass manufacture that, can we all start taking metformin?

[cameronh90]

We are mass manufacturing it and you can get it in the UK. It does cause GI side effects though which puts some of people off.

However it's fairly new and fairly unknown yet. I suspect it will become a lot more popular over the next few years.

Interestingly, like Metformin, it's also a diabetes drug.

[Scoundreller]

My guess is that it's now approved for obesity, a lot of drug plans in USA approve of it and that's led to a supply issue: https://www.novonordisk-us.com/products/product-supply-updat...

I wonder if metformin does the same thing, but the patent fell off too soon, so there just wasn't much marketing for its benefits to decision-makers.

metformin for 26 weeks lead to a net 6.6kg weight loss in non-diabetic obese patients (I would've preferred BMI reduction as the outcome measure, and a placebo-control arm, but can't have it all):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23147210/

Semaglutide yielded net 12kg weight loss in 68 weeks

https://www.cfp.ca/content/67/11/842

Obviously it's diminishing returns over time, but shows how much a drug that's been on the market for decades has still been under-utilized.