I’m absolutely fascinated by all the new findings and potential in these GLP-1 medications. These final paragraphs really made me think “we are at the precipice of the beginning”
“As new findings emerge, GLP-1 medications are changing how researchers and clinicians think about body weight. Health issues that manifest as diabetes or obesity have been primarily considered peripheral disorders—problems of the pancreas, liver or body tissue—Hwang says, but this is only part of the picture. Jastreboff, who has been working on obesity treatments for 15 years, says the drugs are probes to better understand the physiology of obesity. “They’ve enabled us to have a conversation about obesity as a complex neurometabolic disease,” she says.
For so long people who couldn’t lose weight and keep it off have been told that their willpower simply wasn’t strong enough, says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto, who researched GLP-1 alongside Mojsov in the 1990s. “We—including health-care professionals—would blame people challenged by their inability to lose weight,” he says. “It’s hard to think of diseases where we blame the individual. You would never say, ‘Your cancer came back; you didn’t really try hard enough.’”
The study of GLP-1 could help erode the stigma associated with obesity and addiction by replacing assumptions with clear pathology.
“We all have the same reward systems that are absolutely essential to normal functioning,” Pontzer says, “and it’s only when we get toward the real far end of the spectrum on those reward responses that we get into trouble.” This hormonal system is evolutionarily ancient. “And we are now, in 2024, finding the advantages of the system through these drugs—we have hijacked it, if you will,” Hayes says. “We are at the precipice of the beginning.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ozempic-quiets-food-noise-in-the-brain-but-how/