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You made the story about you, when nobody asked. Check the comment I responded to. You did exactly what people always seem to jump out of their seats to do when this drug is mentioned: crowd the conversation with anecdata about how you did it better.

>There were quite a few foods I let go of when I decided to drop weight. Can't say I miss them much, certainly not to the extent to say something like "wow, i can't enjoy food anymore" or "now i'm fighting cravings all the time!!". And I legitimately have no interest in reintegrating them into my diet.

Your story has been told over and over and over. We get it. Congratulations. You win. You don't need GLP1s to sustain your weight loss. You don't experience food noise. You made all the right choices. Your brain and genetics are superior to the 30% of American adults who have been told to eat less and move more and still haven't managed to improve their health through weight loss.

Now that you've been properly congratulated for your superiority, are you interested at all in understanding the complex systems that prevent 100 million Americans from achieving the success you have? Like, any intellectual curiosity at all about a problem that causes untold suffering for almost one third of Americans? That costs literally billions in healthcare costs? About stress, anxiety, access to healthy foods, or the novel mechanisms by which a drug which was discovered through studying the venom of a Gila monster operates on the human gut and brain? Or are you only interested in re-telling the world how you don't have the problem that we're trying to solve?

> If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1? How come we aren't like chimps, with eternally shredded bodies and cheese grater abs, provided we get the protein to support them?

Evolution favored this level of GLP1, then we invented agriculture, and cooking, and bliss points. Now it’s far easier to ingest massive numbers of calories in ways that our old world systems can’t properly signal against. Evolution hasn’t caught up and maybe never will.

If changing habits were much easier, then people wouldn't be using the drug to make it easier change their habits. They would just do it.

Bread, sugar and potatoes exist on a spectrum from highly processed/refined (truly problematic) to minimally processed whole food versions (nutritionally valuable). There's no reason to give up minimally processed whole food versions of these.

The choice is no longer between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "some kind of lifelong moderation for a person that has struggled." The choice is now between "cutting out bread and sugar completely" and "removing the struggle to moderate bread and sugar."

You're clearly an advocate for your father making healthy choices. So why would you advocate against the use of a drug that makes that easier?

He could have lost all that weight and still had bread, sugar, and potatoes but instead he gave up what he clearly enjoyed. Now he gets to live out the rest of his life fighting cravings, telling himself he's not allowed to enjoy food. How utterly sad.

That you have the means to make that distinction inside the justice system illustrates the dichotomy. In places that never had the rule of law to begin with, what you described is the standard expectation of the individuals living it. To question it, or to comment on it at all, would be akin to asking a fish “how’s the water”? If it could talk, it’d respond, “what the hell is water”?

The rule of law generally refers to societies where everyone is subject to the same set of laws. China, for example, does not and has not had the rule of law. Instead they have rule BY law, where laws are simply to control certain people’s behavior.

>It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?

The difference is order of magnitude as proportion of net worth and the necessity of the purchase.

The U.S. is really far behind on this front. Going to even casual restaurants in Germany, I see a menu that has a dozen or so symbols, representing everything from gluten to alliums to lupins. In the US you're lucky to get "May contain nuts"

I wonder if, like the precision fermentation process, these engineered bacteria can be fed into existing dairy processing machines that make ice cream and other derivative products. The win there is huge, it means practically replacing a very difficult to produce / maintain biological component (cows) with relatively stable component (vats of bacteria), with little impact to the rest of the production pipeline.

Nobody pays that. It's a pre-negotiation price that exists as a factor of many other costs and payments to various stakeholders like PBMs.

>IV drug use is a massively more efficient transmission route than any type of sexual contact.

Yes, and people who take IV drugs are much less likely than men who have sex with men in general to take a pill daily.