I think the killer side effect is that if you stop taking it, you put the weight back on plus more.
The Zoe podcast last year interviewed Dr Robert Kushner who has done research trials on semaglutide (ozempic etc). He believes you have to take the injections for life as his studies show people regain the weight loss over 1-5 years when they stop taking the injection. He is not against this but does warn it’s a lifelong medication as obesity is a chronic disease and if you stop taking the medication, there's a high likelihood the obesity will come back. Hypertension, asthma, or diabetes are chronic medical problems that you take medication for long term, obesity he views in the same category.
You regain the weight because when you come off the injection your body will be fighting to get back to its set point at a higher weight through increasing hunger hormones and suppressing satiating hormones. So if you have to remain on it for life if you don’t want to re gain the weight, it’s a considerable financial commitment if a person has to fund privately for life.
From the podcast transcript:
Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: “With regards to what you were just talking about, you just published a paper on this specific topic, which is weight regain after discontinuing the drug.
You published it in October of 2022, and I found it to be very interesting. There was one particular graph in the paper where you could see the weight coming back, and it appears to me that eventually, everyone gets back to almost the same baseline. So it's almost like the baseline that was established before you started the drug is where your body thinks you're supposed to be. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:39:23] Dr. Robert Kushner: Yeah, what you're referring to is the step one extension trial. And, just to bring all listeners up to, speed, we took about 300 individuals who were in that step trial that we described before the 68-week trial and follow them for a year, with no intervention.
Just follow them as if they stop taking it. And what we found will at the end of one year, is that individuals on average regained two-thirds of the weight that they lost over that first year. And if we follow them long enough, they would probably get back to baseline, which is what you're saying. So that speaks to this whole idea that there's a biological set point.
That's a new term we're introducing today in the podcast. A set point that the brain has of where you ought to be. That gets back to that whole famine and starvation concept I talked about before. So the body doesn't forget. It's under the category of unfair. But the body, the brain doesn't quite forget where you started, and it works its way very slowly over one to probably five years to get you back to where you were. Now you can introduce change in your, diet. Again, reduce calories, and increase physical activity. Drive the body weight down again. But again, over time it's likely to go up. Will, we see this in animal studies all the time. We change the rat chow. We change how many times, they're on the treadmill and the rats go back to the weight that they started at.
And we are biological beings, and our bodies behave in very similar ways. There are only two interventions that I am aware of. That changed this set point of where the brain thinks you ought to be. One is medications. We're talking about that today. The other is bariatric surgery.
It’s worth reading the transcript for full details. https://zoe.com/learn/podcast-can-ozempic-semaglutide-solve-weight-loss