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by jacobgkau 529 days ago
"You will never win against your brain chemistry" is a defeatist way to dismiss taking basically any action, ever. People selling you artificial solutions will, of course, be incentivized to convince you that it's true.

Humans lived for thousands of years (without the widespread diet-related ailments we're seeing epidemics of today) without artificially "fixing" their own brain chemistry. This is not an internal medicine problem, it's an external food supply and societal lifestyle problem.

If you want to say it's too hard for you (you, only) to do what's required to not get sick and you'd rather rely on medicine, fine. But it is actually insulting to pretend like everyone needs a crutch just because you do. The main thing is that the crutch should be a last resort, and "willpower isn't a solution" should not be a common mantra to push the crutch as the first option.

1 comments

Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale and your theory is not? We tried the silly will power way, that did not work. We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it. If you want to ignore data out of a belief system, that’s a choice. You believe the intervention is inferior to will. But the evidence clearly shows the vast majority of humans are assisted by an intervention versus “will power” which does not work (gold stars to those who need to feel better about themselves they don’t need an intervention).

I don’t take GLP-1s, but I support getting them to everyone who wants them and ignoring anyone who tries to stop that, or says that is a lesser path for lesser people. I hope you learn to give grace, because lucky people are just lucky, not special.

> We tried the silly will power way, that did not work.

They still work for plenty of people, just not you. They can work for more if we enable healthy diets and lifestyles as a society.

And no, that's not a "gold star" to the people who were able to literally have their "machine" work as designed. It's rather a gold star for you to not acknowledge if you needed artificial assistance to exist.

> Is this why GLP-1s are so effective at scale... We tried GLP-1s, and they clearly work because industries are shifting because of it.

None of the articles you cited in your earlier comment address "scale" at all, nor provide evidence of "shifting industries." Two of them address changes in the spending patterns of high-income consumers who are already using the drug (unrelated to the proportion of the total population using the drug), and the third is a blog post by a doctor literally selling GLP-1s as a miracle drug ("It's getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren't good for"-- yikes).

Your most recent KFF link (which it looks like you removed) claims 12% of adults have taken GLP-1 drugs (going off of a single poll taken by a health-tracking organization-- probably biased towards people actively working on their health). If that number was true, it would be alarming that over 10% of humans needed an artificial fix for a problem created by the food industry and socially sanctioned sedentary lifestyles, not something to parade around like you've actually fixed the underlying problem.