To wonder if there will be any fall out from skinny jabs?

[TheLemonGuide]

Everyone I know is now suddenly very slim. Okay, im exaggerating slightly, but genuinely, most of my friends who were previously overweight are all now slim thanks to skinny jabs. I am delighted for them! It seems unbelievable to think that a jab can cure this obesity crisis, but I am so pleased my friends and a couple of family members are able to live a healthier life thanks to this.

My only slight concern is, is this something that is going to be too good to be true? Do you think there will be any long term repercussions, or are we right to just celebrate this medication as a cure for something that so many have been battling for so long?

What I think will turn out to be indefensible is that the NHS do not fund this. This will lead to an increased class divide in obesity and the morbidity associated with it.

I do wonder about this. The NHS funds some very questionable treatments such as cross sex hormones for men and women who are not happy with the sex they were born into. Those drugs have significant negative side affects and are not adequately researched. So I cannot see how they will be able to defend questions around not funding this drug for obesity going forward particularly given the mounting evidence on how beneficial they are.

It's an interesting issue.

I've some sympathy with the NHS here as there are obvious cost and logistical issues. I think it may well be cheaper overall in the end, but it's not a simple thing to transfer an amount of the resources currently used for obesity related illnesses to WLI usage even if everyone agreed it needs to be done.

But meanwhile there are still GPs having to give non-qualifying obese people who seek help poor, proven to fail advice about diet and exercise. We already know this doesn't work for the majority of people who are already obese. At least some of the GPs will know that too. Could see how that would be dispiriting.

To be fair, the NHS is funding WLI, both Wegovy and Mounjaro, it's just that access at the moment is very limited. There is a 12 year roll out programme in England for Mounjaro but due to logistics and cost they have started with those who they deem as having the highest need and therefore the potential highest benefit. That's people with a high BMI (40+) and 4 out of 5 specific serious weight related health conditions. Each year, those requirements will be reduced so that gradually more people will qualify until after 12 years it will be the same criteria as the MHRA guidelines - so BMI 30 plus, or BMI27 with one weight related health condition, which could be fairly minor.

Wegovy is sometimes available once you have worked through the tiers of weight loss support and not lost a meaningful amount of weight. That process can take several years though, and whether Wegovy is offered depends on your NHS area.

I wouldn't afford that. But i will look up some things and maybe you tube videos. I have an exercise bike as well.

I guess it depends whether you really believe that everyone who isn’t overweight is running for miles, working out daily, counting calories and shunning drinks, cakes and biscuits whilst also comparing themselves to others?

Dieting has been around for centuries, so there must have been enough people to form a market, or appetite for dieting ideas. I was aware of "banting" from the Victorian era, but a quick read of wiki turned up this:

"One of the first dieticians was the English doctor George Cheyne. He himself was tremendously overweight and would constantly eat large quantities of rich food and drink. He began a meatless diet, taking only milk and vegetables, and soon regained his health. He began publicly recommending his diet for everyone who was obese. In 1724, he wrote An Essay of Health and Long Life, in which he advises exercise and fresh air and avoiding luxury foods. ...

The first popular diet was "Banting", named after the English undertaker William Banting. In 1863, he wrote a booklet called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, which contained the particular plan for the diet he had successfully followed. His own diet was four meals per day, consisting of meat, greens, fruits, and dry wine. The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, sweet foods, starch, beer, milk and butter. Banting's pamphlet was popular for years to come, and would be used as a model for modern diets. The pamphlet's popularity was such that the question "Do you bant?" referred to his method, and eventually to dieting in general. ...

The first weight-loss book to promote calorie counting, and the first weight-loss book to become a bestseller, was the 1918 Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories by American physician and columnist Lulu Hunt Peters."

Dieting - Wikipedia

One would have to really force themselves to eat 5000 calories of steak and even if they did, the body would respond very differently to that of 5000 calories from cake or refined carbs.

How many people have you ever heard say they need to cut out the steak or salmon to lose weight? It’s the processed junk that is the issue.

Steak with protein and fat does not induce the same hunger response that refined carbs do. Again, because it does not rocket insulin and mess up hormones.

It’s interesting that in Japan, which has been one of the wealthiest countries in the world for decades, has not seen the same levels of obesity as the Western world. Why? Because they mostly eat a diet closer to what our ancestors ate. Likewise, in many very poor African countries where they still eat close to an ancestral diet, we do not see obesity and western diseases at the same levels.

So your point isn’t valid about this being driven by poverty. It’s from eating the wrong food encouraged by a whole industry that is pushing it.

Where do people get their odd notions of history from? The food in the 70s and 80s was comparatively good in most other parts of the developed world.

Children, for the very most part, did not smoke in the 70s or 80s, or the 50s or 60s either, and still were as a group far more slender and active than modern children. I often think the average ten year old I see out and about these days would have been the lone "fat kid" in the school back in the 60s or 70s.

People back last century for the most part cooked at home, had a meal out for a celebration, and got takeaway as a rare treat. They didn't eat constantly, to the point they felt the need to eat as they walked down the street as people do nowadays. They mostly ate three meals a day, and those meals consisted of actual food, not foodstuffs. Fast food was just emerging, but it wasn't an everyday food at all. And although processed foods were available, they were not full of the level of weird emulsifiers etc etc, and again most families did not subsist on them.

I never said they were.

We are talking about percentages of populations.

There is an interesting recent experiment where people were encouraged to overeat protein significantly above maintenance… but they did not gain weight. Steak also contains fat - so not pure protein but imagine white fish or egg whites…

As previously pointed out to you, most people don't burn off 5000 calories a day so the relevant figure is much lower. Presumably you understand that some people only need in the low 1000s. It is absolutely possible to eat that in steak.

I didn't make a point about obesity being driven by poverty, not sure where you got that from.

Japan is an interesting example because their obesity rate is rising, as always happens to rich societies eventually. It is doing so as their smoking rates fall, though they're still higher than ours. But either way, they don't explain why you claimed that it must be bad to alter hunger cues. That was a wild generalisation and you've got nowhere near backing it up.

Really? I grew up in the 80s and we were on a tight budget. Processed Bernard Matthew’s Turkey ‘drumsticks’ and fake Turkey breast roast. Rice pudding in a tin, tinned fruit with evaporated milk, white bread with butter and sugar, sliced processed ham or corned beef with tinned potatoes, crappy frozen pizza breads, heavily sugared cereal. It was the hey day of processed food and colourings.

School lunches were white bread jam sandwiches, packet of crisps, a penguin and a flask of sugary squash.

Really? I grew up in the 80s and we were on a tight budget. Processed Bernard Matthew’s Turkey ‘drumsticks’ and fake Turkey breast roast. Rice pudding in a tin, tinned fruit with evaporated milk, white bread with butter and sugar, sliced processed ham or corned beef with tinned potatoes, crappy frozen pizza breads, heavily sugared cereal. It was the hey day of processed food and colourings.

School lunches were white bread jam sandwiches, packet of crisps, a penguin and a flask of sugary squash.

Really? I grew up in the 80s and we were on a tight budget. Processed Bernard Matthew’s Turkey ‘drumsticks’ and fake Turkey breast roast. Rice pudding in a tin, tinned fruit with evaporated milk, white bread with butter and sugar, sliced processed ham or corned beef with tinned potatoes, crappy frozen pizza breads, heavily sugared cereal. It was the hey day of processed food and colourings.

School lunches were white bread jam sandwiches, packet of crisps, a penguin and a flask of sugary squash.

Sorry for posting three times! My iPad glitched!

A lot if the population couldn't afford to overeat though. The wealthy could and many were obese by middle age looking at photos. Who knows what the percentages were as noone was measuring but you can't say obesity didn't exist.

Yes that's how I remember it.

My mum thought Sunny Delight was a healthy drink and bought it instead of orange juice.

Yes, food in the 80s was pretty awful. I always tell my children that is why most people were thin. Plus high rates of smoking.

This was not my experience, nor that of my extended family, or that of any of my schoolfriends etc etc.

Please explain why children of those times were not as fleshy as today - as they were obviously not all smoking then.

Lol. Were you actually alive in the 70s and 80s in the UK. I was and food was far from healthy. Where do you get the idea that children didn't smoke? Many people smoked by the age of 13.

It's a very intelligent concern.

Look at all the drugs in the past which proved to have negative long-term consequences.

I was happy to have the Covid vaccine (NOT an anti-vaxxer!!!) but I knew that, with something rushed out in less than a year when most vaccines are developed and tested over a decade, carried a level of risk and we won't know if there will actually be bad outcomes for some time. But it was a case of balancing relative risk.

I have no idea why anyone would think the OP's question is invalid!! Perhaps they know nothing about history....

Yes, I was. So most children, 8, 9, 10 years old, etc were smokers, were they.
Come on.

It really upsets a large group of people on WLI to have anyone discuss anything about these drugs in anything but a rapturous manner.

I didn't say 8 9 and 10 year olds were smokers. They often were by 13 though.

It’s not upsetting, and people are simply discussing as is allowed on a discussion platform. No one is demanding rapturous praise for this particular prescription medication. People will and should comment if they think that the criticisms or concerns are inaccurate, ill-informed or just deliberately judgemental with no foundation in fact.