[scoofy]

I mean… I’d very much push back here.

GLP-1 drugs have basically thrown out the idiotic idea that people were fat because they were sloths or gluttons. Our genetic and epigenetic predispositions very obviously played a huge role in whether on not people became obese. Body positivity was a reasonable coping mechanism for folks who drew the short straw at birth or in youth, and would never be able to have the beauty our society holds above almost everything.

Not we have a drug that fixes these predispositions. Yay! It’s basically the equivalent of “teeth positivity” going away after the advent of braces. The point was about helping people cope in an uncaring world… and then there not needing a coping mechanism after the problem people were coping with gets solved.

[suttontom]

I realize this is a nuanced discussion, but could you clarify the predispositions you're referring to? I'm asking because there are people who blame obesity on a predisposition to hunger (obese people have a stronger hunger drive than thin people) but also people who blame it on a predisposition to weight gain, meaning that obese people can eat the same amount of food as thin people and still be obese. Are you saying GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea of the latter?

[scoofy]

I'm actually saying quite the opposite. That GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea that people do not have built in biological mechanism that make them obese, whether or not that's on the hunger side (say, ghrelin) or on the amount of stored energy per calorie (say, metabolism, gut microbiome, etc).

[ecshafer]

My hypothesis is that GLP-1 drugs are basically counteracting the effects of various chemicals interfering with the natural processes of our endocrine system. I think something (microplastics, chemicals in the water, hormones, ultraprocessed food, etc) is interfering with how GLP-1 is interacting with our body in the first place. So the GLP-1 Drugs is helping bring this back to normal. I think different people due to genetic differences are affected by these environmental factors differently, that's why two people can both eat the same food and one is still starving and one is full.