this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
17 points (94.7% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
2398 readers
336 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can someone more knowledgeable than me please ELI5 how this drug is so revolutionary and why it only came to be recently? Based on what I see on articles, it seems like the equivalent of a cure for cancer, but for obesity amd weight loss instead. Is it the result of years and years of research and testing, and/or a breakthrough discovery of the chemical that makes it work?
It’s a happy accident. They were working on a diabetes treatment, which they did develop. The side effects included weight loss, so it started to get prescribed off-label for that. Then they did the required testing to get it approval for weight-loss.
It works because it is a fake hormone that mimics GLP-1, a hormone that is involved with appetite regulation. When it binds to the GLP-1 receptors it causes more insulin to be released in response to sugars which lowers blood sugars. The weight loss doesn’t come from that, though, it comes from the appetite suppression.
A lot of people seem to think you can eat as much as you want while you’re taking it. That’s technically true, but really because you won’t want to eat much.