I would guess that this is because people are replacing full-blown meals with smaller snacks. The meat snacks is probably because people are warned about losing muscle mass. Perhaps this affects yogurt consumption as well.

> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period.

This seems pretty high considering they're only following people for 6 months. I guess people are most likely to have side effects at the beginning, but I feel like I've not gotten the sense that a third of people bail within the first year, due to side effects or other reasons.

I was able to lose weight before but it always required adhering strictly to a diet, or I’d just gain all the weight back. I’m so indescribably happy to be able to go on long bike rides, work on my house without getting tired after 20 minutes, and I go to the gym regularly. All this happened after the weight loss, not before. I think a lot of things we think are causing obesity is mixed up — the obesity for me seemed to be causing the dysfunction in almost every facet of my life.

The data might really be useful for the food industry once, but only after the usage of the medicine goes beyond 16% currently. 5-8% change, even 10%, for 16% of the population is tiny.

To me the study sounds desperate to project significance, using adjectives rather than data for seeking attention.

It would have been useful if this were broken out differently, to highlight the different impact in single-person households and larger households.

The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.

So far, what being on a GLP-1 gives me is a steady state that most people probably find quite unremarkable: I don't crave a snack, and I don't thirst for alcohol. Both of those desires have had real control over me for a very long time.

Even if it's not intentional, I find that the enshittification seems to run along these lines.

The things that finally drove it home for me this year were "peppermint bark" and "ranch dip". I used to buy this stuff or use the premade. This year I worked out how to do them properly myself.

People raved about both. But I noticed that they ate far less of them (including myself!). My suspicion is that the difference was that I used actual chocolate and actual buttermilk. I suspect the extra fat made people sated and they quit eating afterward.

I'm finding this applicable to more and more foods. I'm no genius chef, but simply using standard ingredients causes people to eat very differently.

If I may ask, do you think you will be able to cope with the lack of willpower once you stop taking the drug?

I don't want to sound dismissive or argumentative, I'm asking out of pure curiosity, forgive me if I sound negative, I'm rooting for people who try to improve their health.

I mean, you _can_ get off it, but studies show the effects reverse pretty quickly. Crucially, if you decide to get off of the drug, you’ll likely end up in a worse position than you started. Why? Many Ozempic patients lose some bone density. That can be an issue as you age. So if you get off the drug, your food habits revert to baseline, you gain the weight back, AND you have less bone density than when you started. Not a great plan.

If you need it, can tolerate the side affects, and can afford it, staying on ozempic for life makes the most sense. I believe the idea is that you can reduce the dose after you’re in a good weight range, and continue taking it as “maintenance”.

We should be clear here - bone density loss is not something intrinsic to ozempic, it has to do with your rate of weight loss, exercise and dietary habits, etc.

It is entirely possible for someone to modify their diet, lift weights, etc., while on ozempic and gain bone mineral density.

But if you don't do those things and just lose a bunch of weight really fast, you're going to lose density (and lean muscle mass)

As I lost weight I discovered a love for bike riding, with a lot of E-Bike assist at first, then progressively less assistance, and took my wheelchair user daughter on several 20+ mile bike rides over the spring and summer. I’ve been going to the gym and building muscle mass. I have more muscle mass than the average man my age, and have about ten pounds of belly fat but I’m a normal healthy weight. My life is completely changed for the better. I feel as if I’ve been freed from a curse that’s been lifted due to a wonder drug.

I will say the muscle loss is real, I had to chug protein shakes and did some physical therapy to fix my hip, at only 39 I hurt my muscle and had to learn some exercises to ensure I could walk properly. Once I got down to my current weight, that problem has resolved itself with working out, and I’m in maintenance and working toward building muscle definition (although I could probably lose another ten pounds of belly fat, if I really wanted to, but important it isn’t visceral fat on my organs, so it isn’t negatively impacting my health). Amazingly my BMI isn’t an accurate indicator of health anymore because I’m more muscular than the average person, according to the body scanner at the gym (bikes in a hilly area really work the legs!)

It does give me pause, but I plan on taking this medication for the rest of my life, or at least until a better medication comes along. Weight loss is a skill, and one I’ve been good at for awhile, which is likely why my results have been so good and beyond the average. The hard part has always been keeping the weight off, weird metabolic effects or blood sugar crashes from eating sugar, and sleep apnea caused by obesity or food or something getting me into a vicious cycle where my life just falls apart. I’ve noticed I crave better foods, while still sometimes enjoying a small snack on occasion. I had a single yogurt cup today with some strawberry, some unsweet iced tea (I can’t stand sugary drinks anymore! They taste far too sweet), and two servings of homemade matzo ball soup I made for my family.

I’d much rather be thin now and not having the terrible side effects of being morbidly obese than worrying about some future problem I might have because of going off the medicine. My children are young and I want to be able to spend time with them and teach them better habits than what I learned from my parents, even if the key to that self control is through medication.

It’s good to get some good news sometimes. Thanks for that :)

> Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out.

> ..In casual dining establishments, they spend 25% more than non-GLP-1 households do, the market researcher says. Data firm Numerator shares similar findings, noting that while GLP-1 users report eating out less and cooking at home more, their spending says otherwise: “Verified purchase data reveals that their fast-food buy rate is up 2%.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-02/ozempic-g... (archive: https://archive.ph/V6Erv)

No shade on people taking the drug btw. I'm on tirzepatide myself.

This was simply when the studies ended. Weight loss for most definitely tails off, but doesn't completely stop if you continue longer than the 18mo SURMOUNT-4[0] study went for with Tirzepatide.

I also do not know if this was patients going on maintenance dosing, staying the same, or ramping up doses to the full 15mg max dose. Would need to re-read it as it's been some time.

fwiw Tirzepatide is actually around 25% average loss vs. 20%. My anecdotal evidence from my peer group shows that the vast majority can go further than 25% (if needed) and then maintain it - but that does require significant lifestyle changes to maintain. The few who simply kept eating junk but less of it had far less drastic results.

I do consider it a performance enhancing drug for dieting due to that fact. Those that use it as one tool of many seem to do incredibly well. Those that use it as the only tool have much worse outcomes. No surprises there, but it was surprising to me how durable so far those who decided to make life changes have stuck with it now over the course of around 3+ years.

My random guess would be that if you use it to break habits and establish new ones, you tend to become a super responder. I like to tell people it was perhaps roughly 60% of my weight loss (36% or so, but I tapered off due to hitting my goal) was due to the drug, 40% due to other factors like eating better and creating new workout habits. The drug simply made it much easier than previous attempts at dieting, and the results turned into a feedback loop.

Another pet theory of mine is that if you use it to break a food addiction, you end up being able to stay on the wagon easier. This is based on other life experiences with other substances - the longer you stay off, the easier it becomes (for most) to abstain. Especially if you create new habits in their place. I no longer crave those late night taco bell runs like I once did even when (mostly) off the drug itself.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38078870/

Kind of tired of people taking anabolic steroids and then claiming it's a smaller part of their success or people being born rich talking about hard work whilst being on the golf course.

Just be happy that we live in a time where drugs have been painstakingly researched and move on without the ego boost. Be humble.

https://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

Multi-variate causation doesn't losslessly or deterministically reduce to a single dimension. Particularly when the causes aren't independent.

The drugs facilitate behaviour change. Changed behaviour helps the drugs work. Both done together are stronger than independently, and the strength of that interaction (and the overall effect) is mediated by other inputs.

Since you brought up steroids, plenty of people take a gram of gear and look like they don't even lift. I'm not saying that someone taking anabolic steroids should act like they've worked just as hard as someone who is natural and at the same level of musculature, but good results take effort and consistency in the gym, diet, and rest of your lifestyle. You get some benefit just from being on steroids, but and there might be some genetic freak hyper-responders that blow up without any of that, but the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to look like they're a steroid user if they're not pushing themselves very hard as well, and the sheer amount of mediocre physiques from people on gear proves it.

Similarly, if someone turns their lifestyle around with the help of a GLP-1, if they change up their diet from crap to decent or good, if they move from being sedentary to exercising regularly, does the drug get 100% of the credit? Do we throw away all of the other work done?

You can both take a drug and also put in significant work that you can and should be proud of. Both things can be true.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the outcome would 100% not happen if it weren't for the drugs, but I think it is useful to note that part of the benefit comes from the habits the drugs help you form rather than simply 100% the appetite reduction the drug produces.

I take a tiny dose of retatrutide for IBS (works amazingly well, btw). I’m not overweight. One week I stupidly got my injections mixed up and I took what’s still a fairly low but standard dose.

I could barely eat 1/3 of my supper. Granted, I’m sure you get used to it somewhat but it’s no small help that it’s giving you and I don’t know if it would help make new habits. The whole point of what most of us non-overweight people do is not eat despite being able to eat more, or even still being hungry. How are you learning that habit when it’s hard to eat and you stay full ridiculously long?

The other wild thing is general health improvement - all of my bloodwork has gone from questionable to better than standard - closer to ideal values than I would ever expect. Liver values, cholesterol, lipids, blood pressure, everything. I expected them to improve but not to the degree that they have, my LDL has gone down by 60%. Actuarial tables say it's given me another ~10 years of probable lifespan, and even more if you think in healthspan.

1) How is your energy/stamina following the 35% loss

2) Have you done any dexascans/bodyspecs to measure your lean mass percentage before and after your loss

3) Did you take any steps to reduce the muscle loss?

4) with 35% loss, what BMI are you at?

1) amazing, I can actually do things now. I didn’t realize how much I was resting and just not doing anything around the house. I managed to do my work with stimulants but that’s about it.

2) I did a scan and am currently around 110% for with 100% being the baseline for the average male my age, for my muscle mass. I did lose more muscle mass in the 230-210 loss than most of the previous, but I think that’s because I couldn’t ride my bike everywhere as it’s winter time. I had to chug protein shakes while losing weight and do physical therapy for a few body parts, especially my hip and my shoulders as they were easy to hurt. Going to the gym regularly solved this long term.

3) I guess I answered question 2

4) I’m now 27.1 BMI, although my percent body fat is only 18.9%, so I’m not concerned about the number since I have access to a body scanner and can see I’m fine. My visceral fat levels have dropped below concerning levels, which is great.

I also sleep way better, and the heartburn I thought was just a part of life went from “literally every day” to “once or twice a year, and only if I do something I shouldn’t have”.

I was also way more aggressive about just going to the dose and hit 15mg in April of 2025, and have stayed there. I might go for another 10 pounds mostly out of vanity.

1) Amazing, like being a decade and a half younger

2) Not before, planning one in the next couple months, but I use skinfold and impedance and they say I've dropped from about 48% to ~20% as I've dropped from 272 to 186, lean mass seems maybe 5kg lower than I started with? Less lean mass loss than I expected.

3) Weight bearing exercise and medium-high protein intake (>80g/d)

4) Per above, starting BMI 37.9 -> ending BMI 25.9

In "setpoint theory" there's an additional hunger drive based on whether you are below or above a given level of adiposity - your "setpoint". This is often given as an explanation for why people can't keep weight off, and is the sort of thing you'd need to posit to explain why people on GLP-1 inhibitors can't as easily get to lower levels of adiposity.

I'm curious how these below-the-radar users skew the numbers. Maybe not at all?

But now I eat almost exclusively at restaurants and enjoy it, and overall it's cheaper than cooking at home given wastage with many ingredients and desire for variety.

I do eat very simply though, usually south & east asian food.

Granted, this setup does require that you do like Indian food and don't mind having the bulk of what you eat each month generally be of that cuisine. But in our case the restaurant has enough variety that with both of us having a different dish for each meal there are enough dishes to choose from that we don't have to eat the same thing more than once all week.

With all that said, we haven't even talked about how there is no cooking or cleanup involved either, so there are massive time and convenience benefits as well.

But I can appreciate that not everyone would be satisfied with this.

I don't know if it's true but a friend from Kaohshing told me almost no one cooks at home anymore as the food outside is cheap, convenient, and abundant.

You also have to consider what you're eating. You can buy caviar for home ($$$) and have hot dogs out ($)

And, you have to take into account your time. If it takes you an hour to prepare food vs 10 minutes to get food made for you then there is some value to getting those 50 mins back. Some people enjoy cooking. I do. But if my choices was to hang out with a friend for ~2hrs or say nah I can only meet for ~1hr because I gotta make dinner, I'd value that extra time with my friend more than zero.

Most local Indian places will do you a solid 1500 calorie meal for £10 if you know what to look for.

Versus, go to supermarket... get stuck in a routine every day of "buying stuff", wanting snacks, meat, and so on adds up quickly to the point where sticking below £10 a day becomes a constant battle. It's the routine and constant food noise that really got to me, and when even a chocolate bar can be 10% of your budget for a day the decision fatigue is real.

So by breaking the routine, sticking to OMAD, I lost weight, had much less decision fatigue, and no constant food noise - that was the major change that saved me a load of money, time & effort.

For example yesterday I found a tiny cantonese place, got wonton soup and some duck, vegetables and watermelon for about £8

But the 'routine of supermarket shopping' creates 'noise' that makes you want to eat more / more often? How does that work.

I tend to go to the supermarket once a week and make this buying decision on a full stomach. I've not bought snacks or soda during this type of shopping since I was a teenager, I simply refuse to buy these things, like cigarettes or alcohol. There is no decision fatigue, the decision was made once and stuck to.

The discipline required is about 30 minutes a week. The rest of the time I'm not at the supermarket, and travelling to the supermarket to buy a snack just isn't worth the trouble. This way sticking to the decision becomes easy: I only shop once a week.

Then I have to cook the food (I only buy ingredients). I'm not a big fan of cooking, so I wouldn't go out of my way to cook more often than I need or want, and overspend in this way.

This seems like a lot less noise or fatigue than going out for food 3 times a day and being presented with ready-made menu's of tens or even more than a hundred food options per day, and making a healthy and budget-friendly decision 21 times a week, on an empty stomach -- there's no way I could ever spend less at restaurants than cooking.

I get eating out, I've been doing it solely for the last months due to travel and I love it. But I'm absolutely not spending less or eating more healthy.

Whereas now I almost exclusively eat set menus, thalis, nasi kandar etc. at small family run places and ask for extra rice, pickles and veg at little to no cost, and the staff end up getting to know me.

So most days it's "Oh... it's 8pm, I should eat now" and I'm done in half an hour without really thinking about it and somebody else handles the cooking, shopping & cleaning - sometimes I just sit down and look at my phone and food turns up.

As a weird benefit - I don't really drink alcohol any more. The craving and even desire is gone.

---

Re: food noise, it's irrational craving to fill the time, it's sugar, fats, salt. It is an addiction, a little devil on your shoulder going "IM HUNGRY!!! GO TO SHOP AND CONSUME" even when you're not. It's a choice I've had to make to regain more control, and I understand not everybody has the same relationship or brain so may not experience it the same.

Restaurant food is generally much less healthy than food one cooks at home, but perhaps if it's just one meal that's outweighed by the disciplined calorie control.

- a chef is faster

- a chef will produce better quality

- but a chef charges for their time

A restaurant often is paying half the price to ingredients and half to overhead; which means you can get it “cheaper” despite paying more for ingredients — since 150% as much on ingredients is still only 75% cost, once you don’t count personal overhead.

You need a lot of efficiency on the professional side to offset that cook time and kitchen space are “free” on the home side of the equation.

Fortunately we have much healthier alternatives (like Ozempic) now.

This isn't always the patient's choice—my insurance/PBM (CVS Caremark) dropped coverage for the GLP-1 that I was taking (Zepbound) and had several rounds of prior-authorization shenanigans over a few months before they approved the previous-generation GLP-1, Wegovy. Now I've had to start the ramp-up of a different medication again, which hurt and stalled progress. Evil.

Just how many Americans are on Ozempic?

It's interesting that overall spending doesn't decrease that much in the end, although shifting from snacks to fruit is the kind of change health advocates have always wanted?

That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time. Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue? Or is that too scientific?

No, it doesn't. Saying that people lack an ability is not the same as claiming that the problem is a simple matter of instilling that ability.

> Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue?

It also isn't the same as shaming people or making a moral issue out of it.

> Or is that too scientific?

The snark is uncalled for. "Science" doesn't require ignoring obviously true proximate causes in search of ultimate causes.

If you owe the bank $100,000 that's your problem.

If you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 that's the banks problem.

Obesity is a 'bank problem' issue. When everyone around the globe is massively gaining weight, in every country on this planet that's not in a war or famine, this isn't a human willpower issue. Something has changed, and to ignore that is unscientific.

The change was far too rapid for anything else to be remotely the primary cause.

If you put a past heroin addict locked in a room with unlimited heroin readily available, chances are likely 9 times out of 10 that person is going to partake eventually. Same goes for our food environment and way of life.

Besides, the logical consequence of the portion of my comment you highlighted is that the majority of GLP-1 patients will need to be on these drugs forever to maintain these benefits long-term. We have precisely one trial of 5+ years of patients taking liraglutide, and ~2 years for semaglutide. Some side effects and long-term consequences could be entirely unknown.

Anyway, it's fairly obvious that discipline is not a solution to weight loss, because weight gains a) happened in lab and pet animals on the same timescales they happened to humans and b) are reversed by moving to higher altitudes.

So to be productive, you should be telling people to move to Colorado.

All fun and games until it costs every individual a massive amount.

Is it for everyone? Perhaps not. But to outright unequivocally say it's not is simply outright incorrect.

It was absolutely motivation and discipline for me. One day I just decided enough was enough and I threw the proverbial kitchen sink at it.

I am perhaps an outlier in that I'm not ashamed to say I was obese in the past because I simply lacked the motivation and desire to do the work to change it. It was easier and more comfortable being fat than in shape.

I definitely agree telling an obese person to eat less and move more is about as useful as telling a depressed person to just stop being depressed. But lets not make outlandish claims either.

correcting satiety signaling on a chemical level more directly addresses the problem in those folks.

yes, the food environment is the main problem, in a way, but only because it punishes having a certain set of chemical and lifestyle parameters and rewards others.

GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of the "expensive" stuff. Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.

More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed.

Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy.

A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins.

Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error.

Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way.

And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes.

Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.

This is one of those reasons that the term 'processed' food is stupid. White rice is a very processed food - what is the removal of the bran and germ but processing? And many other 'processed' foods undergo processing with the same sort of ramifications for health.

Legumes are also not complete proteins in the majority of cases - soy is a significant exception here. Soy has a PDCAAS of 1, the same as whey, but lentils range from .5 to .7, many beans are around .6, etc., and this can end up meaning your 200g of protein ends up being quite different in impact to many of your body's uses for protein than someone else's 200g of protein.

> Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.

I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios.

50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The generic-brand sandwich cookies that are my personal vice, are cheaper yet. There's so much variation within these vaguely-defined food categories that I can't take the comparison across categories seriously.)

$1.50 gets probably a half dozen bananas here, at around a hundred calories per. Never mind the yogurt. (If you're buying fresh cut fruit you're simply doing it wrong.)

So if you're purely comparing calorie counts and finding yourself on less-calorie-dense options then yeah there's a ratio but it's still not as bad as people think. But this is still fundamentally committing a fallacy equating "less calorie-dense" with "healthy".

The same 360 calories from white rice cost me perhaps 15 or 20 cents (plus the time and energy to cook). I'm not big on brown rice but I'm sure I don't have to pay several times as much for it unless it's some fancy boutique thing. 360 calories from dried split legumes (packed with protein and fibre), similarly, are in the ballpark of 30 cents. Perhaps you don't "snack" on those things, but you get the point.

Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers.

This is the thing about most crap foods. They require no commitment. Keep them around for months. Even after opening them they last for days or weeks.

Processed foods don't require the further processing you're leaving out of the equation.

You can freeze cooked rice for months with very little loss of quality, and reheating frozen rice is quick and easy. Just put the frozen rice in a bowl, add a little bit of water, cover, and microwave for 3 minutes.

I make 12 servings in my rice cooker, then fill 12 one serving containers and freeze them.

If you live off bananas and rice, you are not going to be healthy. You can get just as fat off plantains as you can doritos.

Peanut butter (which is at least partially processed) can be a healthy part of your diet. It can also absolutely wreck it.

Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h.

Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight.

You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all.

If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.

Only after discontinuation. GLP-1s should be considered chronic medication for most people.

The media spun it as GLP-1’s being evil and pointless, quelle surprise, but really it hints towards obesity being more than just “fixing your relationship with food” and acknowledging that there is more we don’t understand about why some people are fatter than others despite similar lifestyles.

Going to be an interesting decade as more data is gathered on these, that’s for sure.

No, it doesn't. It points towards that task being too difficult to hand-wave at.

> acknowledging that there is more we don’t understand about why some people are fatter than others despite similar lifestyles.

Such effects are greatly overstated, unless you're counting diet as a product of lifestyle rather than a component.

"This review found that cessation of WMM [weight management medication] is followed by rapid weight regain and reversal of beneficial effects on cardiometabolic markers. Regain after WMM was faster than after BWMP [behavioral weight management programs]. These findings suggest caution in short term use of these drugs without a more comprehensive approach to weight management."

Which makes sense. I still calorie count everything generally because I know I'll let myself creep portion sizes unchecked.

Wouldn't it be funny if we discovered that naturally trim people just produce more hormones like glp...

I work a desk job in a knowledge work based society with consistent, reliable caloric abundance.

The body doesn't know it's not on the African plains and needing to bank the current bounty because who knows when it'll eat next.

Natural is a fair part of your population starving every winter.

It does make me think we're applying bandaids over some other issue with the available foods - it's hard to imagine that everyone 50 years ago was just much better about dieting and counting calories?

Do we just have a lot more food available now? Not just bad food, but calories of all kinds? Combined with steadily automating nearly all of the hard work, I'm not surprised people get fatter these days than 50 years ago. I bet the average person today is actually much more aware of what healthy eating looks like, it's just that there aren't that many really physical jobs anymore and food is extremely cheap and plentiful for most.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10097271/#:~:text=S...

Basically incredibly tasty food became plentiful and cheap and convenient right when physical labor went away.

This is a commonly repeated claim but it's usually not true. Fruit is, in fact, pretty cheap:

In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

A kilo is usually ~6 bananas. So a banana costs maybe 28c on average. Find a cost-competitive ultra-processed snack for the calories and satiety that a banana provides. Healthy eating might not is cheap but junk food, specifically, is not usually a cost optimisation.

Having enough fruit for a family for a week, indeed as a sibling posted, accounting for spoilage or just bad items in the delivery, takes a substantial amount. In volume and in cost.

On the other hand, crappy snacks are typically <€1 or <€2 per kg.

We make the choice to buy fruit. But also we are well off enough to be able to do so consistently. There are also other costs of having to spend more time getting the fruit, preparing it for the kids to take to school. Not everyone has the time or sees the opportunity to do so. I’m very reluctant to just blame those people and say it is their choice to eat crappy food.

I think a lot of people that say quickly perishable items are cheap shop every few days and buy in small quantities.

It is not a generalizable answer to this problem.

That's definitely not something I expected to be cheaper in Canada than the US.

Deserts are visible - obviously a pack of Little Debbies has no nutritional value and is purely excess calories - but what fraction of your total calories are coming from deserts? The real issue is excess calories in your regular food consumption, such as large portions. Indeed, if your meals were filling you, you probably wouldn't even be snacking to begin with. When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper. In absolute calorie terms they have lower sticker prices, but they also genuinely appear to be better value: you can get significantly more volume of food, and it will last substantially longer meaning you can buy in bulk, reduce the amount of time you spend grocery shopping, and spread purchases out to better align with when money is available. More often than not they also require less time and effort to prepare good tasting meals.

I can't even fathom what you have in mind as "the ultra processed version of butter". Margarine is a completely different product from a different source.

Bread is a relative luxury regardless. The sponge-foam "wonder" stuff isn't even the cheapest for sale here generally. But even then, typical bread is (adding up the macros) only about 60% actual grain by weight (the rest mostly water), going by the nutrition label; so a kilogram of whole grain whatever equates to nearly two and a half loaves. Even whole rolled oats are much less expensive, on this basis, than the cheapest bread I can find and it's not complicated to cook them.

At any rate, bread and butter are two of the worst possible examples to make a claim about energy density in "healthy" versus "processed" options. Grain is grain (overwhelmingly carbohydrate and almost no water beside what is added in cooking or baking) and fat is fat.

Whatever it is you are trying to argue in your comment, it has nothing to do with the cost comparison I am making.

A kilogram of rolled oats can be easily found for about $3; white rice around $1.50 if you shop around; pasta from $1.33 to $2.22 depending (usually on the higher end of that); white flour $1 (in large bags).

A person can have a sandwich made of bread ate before your rolled oats are cooked. I think a huge portion of some people's confusion on why people eat what they eat need to look at time from picking the item from the panty to mouth to see that people spend a lot less time in the kitchen then they do.

I enjoy rolled oats uncooked in a bowl with milk and various berries sprinkled on top. Try it, for me they are more delicious uncooked!

Most Little Debbie varieties, for a standard package containing 6 or 12 items depending on the size of the items, are listed at $3.19.

Apples are commonly sold in 3 pound bags, which the internet suggests would contain 6-12 apples depending on the variety of apple and individual sizing. The 3 pound bag seems like a reasonable comparison to the standard Little Debbie packages, as it's 6-12 "snacks" in either case.

The cheapest option is Red Delicious at $3.99. You can spend up to $6.99 for 3 pounds of a more premium variety.

Little Debbies cost $0.26 to $0.53 per snack. Cheap apples are $0.33 to $0.66 per.

The advantage is also present with larger quantities. A large package of Little Debbie snacks costs $5.49, and a 5lb bag of Red Delicious apples costs $5.99. You're getting 2x the Little Debbie snacks in the larger package, but you're only getting 66% more apples in a 5lb bag.

At the larger quantity, LD's per snack price range is $0.23 to $0.45. Red Delicious apples are $0.30 to $0.60.

Either way people should be eating apples, bananas, pears (as well as cheese, nuts...), instead of snack cakes.

- It's extremely unlikely that any of the snack cakes in a particular box on the shelf have gone bad or have rotten areas. They must carefully inspect a bag of apples for brown spots or risk getting less usable product than they paid for.

- The snack cakes can sit at home for a really long time and still be usable. The apples have a much shorter shelf life. This makes bulk pricing more attractive for the snack cakes as there's a better chance all of the product can be used before it goes bad.

- The apples require more preparation, dependent on preferences. Yes, you can grab an apple out of the bag and chow down. A lot of folks will want to wash it first. Some will want to cut it into pieces, or peel it, or do some other prep to it before eating. Snack cakes are pretty much always eaten as they are.

Add it all up and it starts to become clearer why a lot of economically disadvantaged folks end up making "bad" choices around food. All of these points could be mitigated in various ways, but generally they would increase the financial and/or time costs.

As for the taste, chacun a son gout, but I quite like them.

> I can buy a bag of apples for less than what a pack of Little Debbie snacks cost.

Satiety was not part of the post I replied to.

> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

Interesting. Wonder what it is about yogurt and ozempic users. Probiotics?

You'd get some of that effect, even if the drug was actually a placebo. But if it's working, then people have an even better motivation to make changes.

Yogurt is widely seen as healthy, so people who want to change to a healthier lifestyle might pick it.

(Yogurt might actually be healthy, I don't know. That's almost besides the point for the effect here.)

If that's true for you, or someone you know, your dosage is too high, and/or you should consider dosing a lower amount more frequently.

Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

A household doesn't take Ozempic, a person does. Are they implying that if everybody in the household takes Ozempic, as a group they see a 5% reduction? Or, any one person in the household causes a 5% reduction for the group? The average household in the US is 2.5 people...

So when one (or more) people in a household begins taking the drug, the household spending goes down by that much.

I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US.

In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.

It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.

Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.

GLP-1 drugs are popular in Germany, too. Not quite to the level of some other countries but a quick search shows about 1 in 12 individuals in Germany.

Note that the US number quoted above was for households not individuals, so the numbers of households in Germany with at least one member on a GLP-1 is higher. This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, despite attempts to turn this into another America-bad comment thread.

> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.

GLP-1 drugs don’t make people stop eating processed food. They reduce food intake and cravings. It’s still up to the user to make healthy choices about what to eat.

Also it’s been about a decade since I visited family friends in Germany but there was plenty of processed food to be had when I was there, too.

I had the same question and did some back of the envelope math. The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%.

But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining), safe to say those 16% of Americans are eating 20-30% less... 20-30% times 16% = 3-5% decrease in spend.

So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet.

You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost. Unfortunately the big problem with ultra processed food is that calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods. Cutting out the cheapest items is going to reduce spending less.

I hear this a lot but I really don't see good evidence for it. And people keep peddling stereotypes about "fast food" consumption after QSRs saw much larger price increases than grocery stores. For that matter, the UPFs are where I see people most commonly reach for overpriced name brands over the generics.

It's perfectly fine for people to do rough estimates to understand a situation, especially in informal discussions. It not a dissertation for a Ph.D. or formal position paper.

Not falsely. Back of the envelope. If you want to improve the model go right ahead, but I was upfront with its limitations.

How much is a bag of Doritos? Compare it with a bag of white rice, dry lentils, raw potatoes - processed is often more expensive.

The overall weight loss seems to be because the spending decreases most heavily in calorie dense foods like savory snacks; yogurt and fresh fruit spending goes up a bit.

This can't possibly be true. A caloric surplus of 500cal/day adds a pound of weight per week. That'd mean in a decade of life the _average_ American would add an additional 260 pounds. In 4 decades Americans would add half a ton to their waistline, on average.

That'd mean at then end of their life the average American would die weighing over 2 tons

Once you're 140kg, a sedentary lifestyle requires you to take something like 800 more calories as the same person with the same lifestyle at 70kg, to each maintain your weight.

So excess eating of 500 calories over what a normal bodyweight (say 70kg) needs to maintain, leads to fat people (say 110kg) who at some point stop gaining weight and stay at that fat level (of say 110kg).

Additionally the fatter you are the more calories you use at rest. So there's a point where if you consistently eat too much you'll stop gaining weight.

The biggest source of error here will be the calories in the garbage bin though. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is stored in the waste disposal, not the waist disposal.

I would not assume this. Most people remain on GLP-1 agonists after they reach their goal weight, as without it cravings return and weight starts coming back on. I would guess a substantial fraction of people on the drugs are on a maintenance dose

Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher.

[0] https://www.ummhealth.org/health-library/eating-the-right-nu...

Whatever the figures are, what's interesting to me is the growing secular impact on an entire sector of the economy (the most stable and inelastic sector). If eating right means spending 5% less, extrapolating that across the entire sector, not just for the 16% using GLPs today, could be catastrophic

I suspect ultimately though supply will meet demand and prices may even rise for the food people are still eating

1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Given 500 calories a day of excess, that would lead to 1lb of fat gain per week. 52 pound average gain per year?

Take one person, say they eat 2000 calories to maintain bodyweight. If they start eating 2500 calories a day, they won’t gain 1lb of fat a week forever. As they gain fat, their body naturally burns more calories due to the increased body weight, and eventually a stable weight (higher than their original weight) will be reached.

So yeah if you’re eating 500 calories above your metabolic weight, you’ll theoretically gain weight forever. But in this case your metabolic rate is rising over time, so you would be eating more and more calories per day.

It is incredible to think this precise balance could be maintained by anything other than a closed loop of biological control. How would the wheat on a medieval farm know how much to grow each season? If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died... unless they had a mechanism for satiation.

How do you think our microbial ancestors maintained internal salinity, through the limited availability of salt in the ancient ocean?

>If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died...

You do realize that starvation was a massive killer in the past. Everyone didn't die, but the young, the old, and the weak sure did.

There exists something called a "feedback loop", something common in biology. You would probably find it interesting, you should look it up.

Basically, it means that if you try to chronically eat, say, 1% more calories than are burned, your body will try to burn more calories to compensate.

I'm not sure I grasp the rest of your comment, could you try again to explain? The wheat farm your ancestors worked did not provide the excess of cheap calories available to the present day American.

It ends up being the opposite. Rather than the body having a satiation response, it controls the metabolism.

If you've ever fasted, you've experienced this. You just don't have the energy to do much other than sit around when you are hungry.

Ancient societies realized this, it's why they'd give out calorie dense meals to their farm labor. For a serf in England, harvest time was often met with a very calorie dense meal. For roman soldiers, they had a diet of meats and cheeses.

I'd also point out that you don't need to have exactly 100% daily calorie intake. You can go a week with just 99% and catch up with 101% the next week just fine.

Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle.

Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a small excess the effects that would lead you to regulate are much more... subtle.

Probably not. Americans (households, grocery stores, and restaurants) throw away an insane amount of food.

I doubt that $ spend on the top end of caloric intake scales linearly with # of calories because of high caloric density foods.

If I spend $500 a month on groceries, lets say I need $400 to keep me alive and hygienic and the last $100 are going to be the candy and sodas that make me fat. So to give an example, reducing the caloric intake by 50% could be achieved by reducing spend by only 5% if there's very caloric foods making me fat.

Indeed, I do not announce it even to many people in my own circle of friends and family. Plenty of people (as you can clearly see just in this discussion) see the issue as one of morality and the get very judgy. If you use medication to help yourself become healthier, you have cheated.

Sometimes I wonder how much comes down to religion. After all, isn't gluttony one of the deadly sins?

Ergo its opposite is a missed branding opportunity for the religiously inclined: 'Ozempic: bring yourself closer to God'

And yet Europeans in this discussion are going out of their way to play the America Fat game without acknowledging how much fatter Europeans are than Asians.

That feels like a 2000+ change though.

Despite access to "superior food quality", weight issues are absolutely a problem in the EU, too. Maybe it's not at the same point as in the US, but 51% of the population of the EU (outside Ireland and Germany for some reason) are "overweight or obese" [0].

---

[0] https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communi... In French, from the ministry of health, but there's a chart which should be clear enough for everybody.

https://data.worldobesity.org/country/france-71/#data_trends

My country (Poland) is an unfortunate leader in childhood obesity (and close to the top in terms of obesity in general), but it's very easy to see why: people live very different lives than they did just 20 years ago.

[0] https://www.obesitefrance.fr/lobesite-cest-quoi/les-chiffres...

This is a tired argument. Most people who have BMI in the obese range do not have one of oft-cited exceptions that make BMI an imperfect measure.

Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, but the number of people who have BMI in the obesity range yet have healthy body composition is very small.

Indeed.

BMI is the best thing that people can readily calculate with easily available equipment (a tape measure and scales either at home, gym, pharmacy, etc) plus some relatively basic maths or sticking the numbers into a website.

Measuring body fat using calipers is better but hugely error prone. Similar for waist/height ratios. Body fat scales can be wildly inaccurate.

BVI is far superior but very few people have access to the equipment needed to measure that.

So we're kind of stuck with BMI as the best "simple" measure.

I say this as someone who did enough weightlifting to be in the overweight BMI range with a low percent of body fat (no steroids involved). Trust me when I say it’s a lot of work to get there. It’s not a category that includes a lot of people or invalidates the measure.

But being obese is a higher BMI than overweight, and the bar is actually quite low. Lower than most people think. A lot of people think they're overweight, but they're not, they're obese.

But the BMI takes into account the mass, not the size. Usually women have less lean muscle mass than men, which would mean that for a given size and weight, they'd have more fat, without influencing the BMI. I also think there's quite some leeway. My BMI is "normal" at 24, and I have a fair bit of belly fat.

Very athletic people also don't fit in the BMI tables, a dude like Schwarzenegger is probably well in the overweight category if not above because of all that lean muscle, but is also probably healthier than average. These people are extreme outliers, though. I don't think they're anywhere near 1% of the population, so you can't really argue they skew the numbers.

> As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.

It's apparently paid by the social security, but doctors are only to prescribe this when other means of controlling the weight have failed, such as adjusting nutrition.

I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc. Whole Foods is best in class (Alnatura doesn’t come close)

While to me, the layman, it seems health regulation in general in Europe is more conservative about what can be put on the body / be consumed, I think it’s mostly Americans don’t want to eat healthy. And the portion sizes here are insane (just look at the evolution dinner plate. 1960s plates at an antique sale only pass for salad plates)

There's a massive amount of junk food and ultra-processed food in grocery stores, even though (rough estimate) 50% of floorspace is "raw" food. (Fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish.)

Processed food tends to have more sugar (high fructose corn syrup) than other countries. The same brand in the US vs another country will have more sugar.

Cultural momentum: Everywhere you go there's unhealthy food.

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Speaking from personal experience, junk food is just plan addictive and satisfying. It's not like alcohol or other drugs where you can just abstain; you gotta eat and we all get hungry.

In the US I heard there is now parity in terms of quality products, but maybe culture takes some time to adapt to such environments.

What I've seen consistently amongst the non-healthy eating Americans is that they argue:

1. Dieting requires them to be hard on themselves and they're focusing on self-love, which they struggle with

2. They deserve a daily treat. They look forward to it, it brings meaning, etc

3. The taste of their food is super important to them, such that they can't imagine repetitively eating (meal-prep) or eating cleanly (no added sugar, monitoring sodium)

1. Practicing a healthy diet is self-love

2. A daily treat is not what breaks your diet. Have _a piece_ of chocolate, sweets or snacks now and then. If you (still) lack the self-control to not eat the whole package, help yourself out by repackaging in daily-compatible portions. Meaning is not gained by consuming anyway.

3. Taste preferences are in big parts a matter of habit. Also prepping doesn't necessitate you eat the same thing for a week. You can freeze a lot of things for longer and thaw them in a mixed manner.

Imo the issue is that people seem to lack a combination of knowledge, time to prep or motivation. Lack of knowledge could be solved with information campaigns, lack of time/motivation is a consequence of people having to spend so much of their time doing a dayjob just to get by, embedded in a culture that puts no value on thriving humans.

They're saying this without irony? Or by "important" do they mean "the way I like it"?

My theory is that in US compared to Europe, you are going to need the path of least resistance more often. If you are working two part-time jobs with variable hours and schedules to make ends meet, then you are going to reach for the easy & fast food options. Whereas if you have the stability of 40 hour work weeks, regular schedule and social safety nets - regardless of the total income - then you have the time and mental energy to eat healthier.

In North America there are a lot of "food deserts" especially in poorer neighbourhoods. "Healthy" foods become a class marker. Distribution of higher quality food is through more upscale grocery stores.

Same goes for walkability in neighbourhoods. To live in a place that has transit accessibility, green grocer and bakery you can walk to -- that's not possible for the vast majority of North Americans because it exists only in urban areas that have gentrified beyond the reach of most people.

When I moved to Toronto in the mid-90s it was possible for a middle-income earner to rent or live in a home adjacent to some of the corridors in the city that offer this (e.g. Roncesvalles/High-Park, Spadina/Chinatown, College&Clinton, etc) and you could see a higher diversity of people living near the stores and in the neighbourhoods off them. As a person in my early 20s making not very much money, I could make it work. That is now no longer possible, the city has become a wealthy fortress. I imagine the same for parts of Brooklyn&NYC, Chicago, SF, Vancouver etc.

Almost nowhere in the US walks to go to the grocery store. Exceedingly small portions of major cities. Where I live in Chicago is quite walkable, but the vast majority of my neighbors load up the car for the vast majority of their shopping trips. There are pockets of course, but they are rare.

My neighborhood also happens to be much more fit than the national average - obesity is somewhat rare to see. The correlation is with wealth. Why there is such a correlation is much more interesting, and it likely is not as simple as people want to believe.

Same goes for the poor inner ring suburbs where I lived in my 20's in a different state. Very high rates of obesity. In the rich outer suburbs obesity levels were visibly less.

It's far cheaper to meal prep and make your own food from base ingredients. It doesn't need to be fancy. When I grew up poor (working class) this is how we made it work. By buying staples in bulk and buying other items opportunistically on sale. We didn't even own a car for most of that time - and the nearest grocery store was at least 3 miles away. It simply wasn't an option to exist off of junk food since it was too expensive.

Eating junk is easier and more convenient. It feels good in the immediate moment and is low-effort. It's the default, and the environment around you encourages it. Add in lack of any peer pressure and it being normalized by those around you and I believe that explains nearly everything. Lack of walkability certainly hurts, but it's not a primary driver anywhere I've lived.

Turns out that if you care enough and have the work ethic to grind out that sort of living to better your family, you also tend to care what kind of foods they eat.

There are of course seasons in everyone’s lives - but this observation has held generally true no matter the demographic or geographic location I’ve lived around.

I was obese - there is no intended judgement here for folks who struggle with it. I did for the better part of my adult life. The social tropes are simply unhelpful.

All these tell that people do have a preference towards buying healthy stuff, given the choice. It's not their fault that they have been misled by the media/scientists in some of those cases.

These accessible food options come with a premium that I strongly suspect put them out of what a median income household can sustainably afford.

No they don’t. Even my local Walmart has cheap vegetable selections included pre cut versions.

You know what is expensive, though? Meat. There’s still plenty of meat consumption in the median household.

It’s not a price issue.

Most simple salads are actually more expensive than chicken (boneless thighs, ground meat) per kg!

If you compare the price per kcal, as one really should, the difference becomes absurd.

This is no joke. I picked up a 3 pound package of garden variety 80/20 ground beef last week and it was over $20. Maybe I just don't buy it often enough to notice, but that seems far higher than even a few months ago. I would have expected to buy a modest cut of steak for that price.

First, pre-cut isn't that much more expensive. Second, cutting is an accessibility thing now? A kitchen knife and 5 minute YouTube video should have anyone being to chop/dice without much trouble. And once they learn they will only get faster/better at it allowing them to use whole veggies adding more variety.

Yes, it's a boon esp. for old people who live alone, have mobility or sight issues, and don't trust themselves to hold a knife. It's also a convenience thing, but as you said, the general population can cut things just fine and won't suffer much without it; which isn't the case for this growing demographic.

Not to mention the median income (in PPP) is higher in the US all but 4 countries.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

On one hand, you a processing step. On the other hand, you can process 'ugly' produce into mince. (Mince also transports more compactly volume-wise.)

$2 at Aldi, and I'd happily pay double. Sure beats having to break down (and use) a whole head of cabbage, which are huge.

Even my local Walmart has pre-cut vegetables.

It’s not an affordability issue either. It’s cheaper to buy the same number of calories from vegetables, fruits, and legumes than meat right now. Meat prices are unusually high and it doesn’t seem to be slowing consumption.

You need to make a distinction between leafy greens and starch.

I don't know why the problem is shied away from. It is because people are addicted to fast food and to their sedentary lifestyles. It's not the price or availability of good food, not the first order effect anyway.

You'll never be able to force "whole foods" sellers into unprofitable places and if you did by some miracle, you'll never be able to force people to buy it no matter how much money you gave them. Vegetables and grains and basics could be free and many obese food addicts will go buy a burger from a drive thru.

I typically spend more than an hour in the kitchen cooking every day, and then there is half an hour clean up after my family is done eating. I eat much better and healthier food, but it takes time. (If I'm having noodles I'm making them from scratch myself - I could save some time buy less of things like that and the cost wouldn't be much different if any - but even then the whole meal takes time).

This comment is so out of touch it must be a joke right? At least I hope so.

Far more time was spent in front of the TV than any other activity by far by my peers and their families. Moving to a more middle class area opened my eyes in how many other options people had to do with their time, and how much time and effort was spent maintaining their lifestyles.

And it's a little more complicated than even just that. Another reality is that, at 12 bucks an hour, nobody is going to be giving you a steady 40 hours. You need extra shifts for buffers, and your shifts will be shorter.

Sure, working 50 hours a week across 7 days isn't technically more than 50 across 5 days. But it does certainly drain your will to live a lot more, from what I've seen.

And using numbers to support that idea doesn't work, it actually goes against you. A small (much smaller than most obese people will eat in one sitting) fast food meal costs about an hour of minimum wage! Buying stable calories in cereals where the time to buy and cook them can be amortized into many more servings can be amortized is actually cheaper and also takes less time.

In the US, obesity rates rise as income drops, but it continues to rise beyond the point at which income drops below a full time federal minimum wage income.

It's over-eating and under-exercising. I know this is hard for certain ideologies to accept because it means obesity is not inflicted upon victims against their will and beyond their control. If you really need to minimize their agency and responsibility for their choices you can call it addiction to food and addiction to sedentary lifestyle if it helps.

Also, you're comparing making noodles from scratch to a typical meal. I can do an asian style chicken/veggie/rice meal in < 30 minutes and have the kitchen mostly cleaned by the time the rice is done.

i agree you canecook faster than I normally do - a lot of meals benefit from simmering while the flavors blend.

Protein + carb + veg is cheap and takes less than 30 minutes to prepare, I have no idea what people are talking about in these threads.

This does not address what I wrote though because it is not what I was arguing against.

I agree part of the reason people buy junk food and fast food rather than "whole food" is because the real or perceived effort required to turn it into something they will eat. Or they don't know how to make things that can compete on taste and satisfy their food addiction like those fast foods. It's not because they are time-poor either. They are just addicted to this sedentary "lazy" lifestyle. 30 minute drive to get fast food and eat it while watching TV or tiktok for the next hour or so beats making food and cleaning up for an hour.

It's shocking.

Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.

[0] https://www.ofdt.fr/sites/ofdt/files/2023-08/field_media_doc...

It has to do with culture and wealth. Europe is getting fatter and richer.

This is like thinking medieval peasants or sub-saharan Africa are skinnier because of their robust paternalistic governments

What quality standards are you referring to?

Or, perhaps, the state of mental health in the US is really bad.

I gained a lot of weight during puberty, coupled with a less healthy diet in my youth. I suspect many folks are in the same boat - by the time they realize they need to eat/exercise, it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.

In four months on a GLP-1, I've dropped about 18kg and since I coupled resistance training, I've increased on various strength parameters. The sudden reduction in weight has benefited my activity level substantially. There tends to be two classes of folks - those who need to stay on this drug forever and those who don't - I'm hoping in the end I fall into the don't, but I'm going to let the data from my continuous glucose monitor decide that.

I highly recommend the book "Ozempic Revolution" if you're considering the pros/cons of this path.

And how did surpressing your hunger via GLP-1 drugs (a pure change to a more healthy diet for you) lead to big changes, if you apparently already had such a healthy diet.

Seems to me your diet was unhealthy for a decade and now isn't.

I do want to be clear to anyone reading: there is no "too late". One's system does not become somehow damaged at some cliff of weight and eating habits. It doesn't become irreparably meaningfully physically more difficult to lose weight. What can happen is a shift in many systems that effectively make one feel hungry all the time and psychologically react very strongly to those hunger cues, which makes people eat more. Outside rare circumstances, if you eat less, you will lose weight. I do have a lot of compassion for the psychological side of things being extremely difficult, though.

This is not to say you are wrong. The food supply in the US is not healthy. The bad news is that the same greed that destroyed our food will find ways to get around the ways GLP-1s work.

Weird that it virtually did not exist pre ww2 and that it now affects 75%+ of your population

We know that people just have different metabolisms, different levels of hunger response, different levels of "food noise," etc.

We see obesity rates raising in nearly every country across the world as economic power and access to ultra-palatable hyper-calorie dense food increases. This is universal across the developed world with very few exemptions - Japan seems to largely be immune, but Korea and other portions of Asia aren't.

The growth curves look very similar, despite many of these cultures across the world putting even more emphasis on discipline and responsibility than America, things that in theory directly align with being more responsible about diet. If genetics weren't involved and it was all willpower (and where does the capacity for willpower come from? Is there no genetic component to it?) we wouldn't see these growth trends be so similar to America and each other.

On the flip side I don’t think your comment holds much weight either. A large portion of the population worked trade jobs and the access junk food was a lot less prevalent. You kind of have a good recipe for unhealthy population now. Low quality foods and less activity.

My step dad was obese and blamed everything and everyone but himself. We installed an app to count calories on his ipad, he lost 1/3rd of his bodyweight in less than a year and he's now cruising at an healthy weight, it really isn't rocket science

People who look for excuse will always find something, it's genetics, today is a cheat day, today was a bad day, I'm not feeling good, I crave chocolate, #healthyatallsizes, &c. people who stop making excuses get out of the hole surprisingly fast

How could you possibly know that? You don't even know how your brain works, let alone how other people's brains work.

I can drink alcohol and be perfectly fine, but a lot of people can't, because they're alcoholics. Similarly, Ive met people who have tried to smoke but couldn't pick it up, meanwhile for me it will be a lifelong, every day, struggle.

The mind is complex, have some humility. You are not necessarily a beacon of purity by your own doing.

This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else. This takes a complex process (the feedback from the body to the brain on feelings of hunger, satiety, etc.) and pretends that it is a simple A-B thing. Just for type 1 diabetics, their insulin levels have a huge effect on feelings of hunger, with hyperphagia (feelings of insatiable hunger) being common. Diabetes is just an extreme example of the spectrum of how individual bodies regulate insulin, and insulin is just one hormone effecting and effected by food.

We didn't go from sub 10% obesity to 40%+ obesity in 50 years because of people cravings.

I laughed at loud at this. What an insane thing to claim. "I can experience the qualia of others, quantify it, and claim that mine is identical" lol

Also it's empirically false that all people experience the same level of craving. We have studies demonstrating different dopamine responses etc.

Feel free to guide me to the literature explaining these phenomenons, it seems extremely interesting, I'm especially interested in knowing how the genetics of 3/4th of the population somehow converged to this "uncontrollable cravings" pattern over two generations

> you have insight into the qualia of other people.

Yeah that's called statistics, averages, &c.

And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.

I don’t think we fully understand why but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s a real problem. After all there is a reason that glp1 show efficacy with other addictions.

Accountability is important and I even think there is a healthy level of social shaming to be made, we should not be normalizing obesity. But I also realize that there is something at play that’s more than simply excuses.

I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.

Again I don't really care, I managed to help people around me following this dead simple recipe, if you want to make excuses for yourself or others go ahead and suffer. Suffering from obesity is much harder on the body and soul than "suffering" from skipping a snack or counting calories

Fix your shit, it's much better than taking pills for life to fix your obesity, which is arguably the very last link of a long chain of problems. Eat clean, exercise, understand that food is fuel, understand how the fuel is used, learn discipline, learn timing, learn to recognise good and bad fuels... pills won't do any of this, and being skinny won't bring health if you don't do/learn the things I just enumerated. Obese people need a complete lifestyle overall, not pills. No amount of pills will help if they keep everything else the same, and if they implement the changes they don't need the pills to begin with

Why is that so bad?

No you dont. Have some epistemic humility. People experience reality in unique ways, you can not push your experience onto anyone else with any level of confidence. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

If you don't have enough food, no one is going to be fat. If you have plenty of food availability, then certain people are going to have genetics that make it more likely they end up fat.

Are all these lean and healthy people from archive videos actually suffering and in distress? Poor souls...

Vast numbers of these 'lean and healthy people' were suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies. Pellagra (generally caused by eating nothing but corn) wasn't really knocked out until around WWII, for example.

There may be cultural or behavioral issues - attitudes and habits around cooking, expectations of what a meal includes or does not include, taste preferences on what's too sweet or too fatty, etc - but it's not genetic.

It's not genetic, this is just your family refusing to take responsibility for their own eating habits. The proof is people who have bariatric surgery so that they can't eat as much, and people on GLP 1 drugs so they aren't hungry. Both groups lose weight. It's not your genes, it's the fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food). As an overeater myself, knowing this does not help reduce intake... People have to make changes and stop blaming genetics, or thyroid (there are drugs for that too) or whatever it is they think is beyond their control.

We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.

Source needed.

I do think there's a strong argument that lack of fiber and protein are huge contributors to the world's obesity problems.

Nobody really knows how GLP-1 agonists work, but given the other effects (e.g. insulin stability, change in other addictive behaviours etc.) it's definitely not just this.

I’m on tirzepatide but not for obesity. It completely cures my life long IBS. These are miracle drugs imo and should be as cheap and widely available as possible.

There are some flaws with this argument, but I keep it in mind when I feel like others are "cheating" by getting a good trait that I was born with. We should not insist on people getting things the hard way.

While I am in that part, I realize that having a fairly balanced feeling of hunger is just as much of a privilege as needing glasses to see is a disadvantage. Certainly some people just say fuck it and ballon to 200kg but a lot are just unhappy at 90kg in what should be a 65kg body being hungry every day and still overweight.

Yes if they ate only carrots and Brokkoli they would probably solve their weight problem but it is a hard ask to make in a world that looks like ours. Makes alcoholism look like child’s play since you cannot just abstain from food

Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?

And as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, needs to be taken forever as the vast majority of patients regain most or all of the weight they lose after taking GLP-1s.

>Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?

Red herring. My account was not created today, I’ve participated in numerous other threads prior to this one, and it’s irrelevant to the content of my comment.

Oh well. I'll be taking my omeprazole medication for the rest of my life, too. Sometimes the body has a chronic issue that needs lifetime management, frequently with medication. Only with GLP1 does this suddenly seem like a moral issue for some.

I imagine the perceived gap here is that “those” people understand thermodynamics and the failure to grasp is entirely in your hands.

I imagine you'll find that people of certain lifestyles tend to cluster together a bit, with those with more active lifestyles and healthy diets likely to have their friends and family be of active lifestyles and healthy diets, and in turn less likely to be in need of such drugs. Lifestyle changes are difficult to implement by nature.

Although, the term "processed food" is awful as it covers so many unrelated things. The problem is ultra-addictive, ultra-high glycemic index foods consumed in large amounts partly due to their addictive qualities - a quality some processed foods have.

For reference, Danish sausage sandwich toppings are highly processed foods, but it won't drive anyone to obesity or diabetes. Elevated blood pressure, perhaps. Junk takeaway, candy and sugary cereals on the other hand...

Nothing to do with "processed foods" in general, despite a good portion of the affected foods being under that label. It's simply a matter of malicious companies combined with unknowing, unempowered consumers.

By trying to single out something as massively generic as "processed foods", you're just making it easy for companies to avoid the problem: Using and manipulating official definitions to be removed from it as a "solution", justifying the whole thing in the basis of numerous good things being in the same category, drawing attention to other foods in the same category that are more commonly associated with the term despite theirs being way worse, etc.

If you want to fix the problem, you need to attack the problem. That is not processing - it is addiction and glycemic value. Going for the underlying attributes means you cannot redefine your way out of it, and gives consumers a better chance to learn what to actually avoid.

At the start of 2025, about 3% of adults in UK had used GLP-1 drugs in past year in the UK. And "most GLP-1 for weight loss in the UK is from private, rather than NHS provision" [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12781702/

For another example, rates of COVID-19 vaccination are significantly lower in the UK not because people there don’t want vaccines, but because the NHS only makes them narrowly available to people above a certain age or with a strict set of conditions.

> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.

Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant

> Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant

It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US (and other countries like Canada)? This is the insanity they are talking about, not the users of the medication.

Aside from whether the local healthcare coverage will pay for it, and the rate of GLP1 usage probably being proportional to the obesity rate, what is the basis for assuming there is disproportionately fewer people in Germany using these medications? Most people don't announce it.

I'd love to hear any sort of actual facts backing that claim. It sounds truthy.

There can be a discussion about the perverse incentives of systems without judging the individuals.

He implies that people who are using Ozempic are eating too much processed food. And more or less also that mostly Americans eat processed food?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ultra-processed-food-consum...

https://nutri.it.com/who-eats-the-most-processed-food-a-glob...

The food producers need to be sanctioned. It's unsustainable for a whole nation to be on these expensive drugs.

If you think an outside perspective is irrelevant I'm also not sure why you don't just move on and not comment.

We used to make baby food ourselves. That was like twenty portions of baby food in ten minutes, for pretty much no cost (all basis fresh staples are pretty much free: fresh carrots, potatoes, rice, onions, pumpkin). Chop some vegetables and perhaps add little leftover meat, steam it, blend it, freeze it. Philips had a great machine for that. But we were somewhat 'out there' here too. Most people give babies food from glass pots. Then I see [1]. Got healthy teens now who eat pretty much everything. We still cook most of the stuff ourselves, although time constraints are a bit harder now than a decade ago.

Same as for walking. That is the most basic instrument for health. But if you cannot go out for a good walk because your environment is car only, what can you do? You can sanction the car makers for not making us walk. But that's a bit silly? (You are not saying that, trying to make an analogy with the food producers.) I'm blessed with lots of forests nearby, with separate paths for walking, cycling, MTB-ing and horseriding. Going outdoors is trivial here.

Point I'm trying to make is that an unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle is a lot of factors working combined. That's why international comparisons are so hard (or impossible). I think the 'Boulder, Colorado'-lifestyle is comparable with my local EU-lifestyle. But all environments are different on many vectors.

[1] Nearly two-thirds of baby foods in US supermarkets are unhealthy, study finds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXyVJpTe8NQ

Unless I've been horribly misled, it is the whole world that has very steadily increasing obesity rates. Framing this as a US problem is deluding yourself.

When citing poverty, simply look at poverty rates, not a different statistic. Income inequality is higher in countries with higher incomes, like the United States.

Regardless, obesity is not limited to people in poverty.

I've made a concerted effort to consume less "junk media" in the last couple of years. In that time I've gotten an Amateur radio licence, I've built a couple of keyboards and speakers, I've started golfing (after a 20 year hiatus), I've learned to bake bread (from scratch, including grinding wheat!), I've read a lot of novels, and I'm happier for all of it.

Everyone has to work -- this is not unique to the United States. But outside of that, eating and living healthier is absolutely possible, it just takes some effort.

Get a hobby (or several!)

For a lot of people, finding the time to do either (let alone the financial outlay) is impossible.

You want to tell single parent working two jobs in an apartment that's moldy to "try playing golf. Read more!"?

my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).

theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.

> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

Let's put this into perspective. On average, the US has about twice the obesity rate as Europe (though in both cases there is a fairly wide variation regionally). And Europe has 4 or 5 times the obesity rate of Japan. So relatively speaking, Europe is not in a position to argue that their regulations or lifestyles are the answer.

That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078951/

Most of the industrialized west is following very similar growth curves here to the US. America just got their first. Even Asia isn't immune - Korea has been following similar trends, as have parts of southeast asia, etc.

I suspect the prevalence of GLP-1 class drugs will halt this trend before the rest of the world catches up, but without them or similar drugs, I would have bet that 50 years form now much of the rest of the world would look just like America

How does that compare to, say, Japan? Why is Germany so much fatter?

It’s the suburban mom (or dad sometimes) who wants help losing a little weight. Instead of being 300lbs like your example, she’s 160lbs and wants to be 140lbs.

Those that still want to reduce their weight: All of them are on GLP-1s now (and losing weight!)

Those that had totally given up: They had long since stopped attempting anything to reduce their weight

I suspect that the larger you are, the more likely you are to fall into that second category - getting to 300+ lb involves a certain level of accepting defeat to begin with.

I do want to get back into biking though. Haven’t ridden in a long time.

It's my understanding in the EU that it's generally harder to get. Generic GPL-1s in the US are pretty easy to get shipped direct with very little doctor interaction.

I think many Germans will start using these drugs once they become cheaper

  > such a high impact overall

"People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others, when they're not that important in the grand scheme of things. Now you'll just have to find another easy visual marker for ranking people by moral superiority."

That's the first time I hear about this. A close friend of mine uses it and she just goes to the pharmacy. Never heard about any problems with supply.

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-c...

Currently, only Liraglutide is officially in shortage. Although others have been in shortage in the last couple years.

This sounds pretty much like the supply is somewhat limited for whatever reason.

---

[0] https://www.ameli.fr/pharmacien/actualites/antidiabetiques-a...

There were previously supply issues with these drugs throughout Europe, but those were mostly resolved by the end of 2024.

By mid-2025, it was (and still is) possible to easily get all of the medicines for any of the approved uses, including weight loss and diabetes.

With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.

Compounding a drug doesn't suddenly make it non-prescription. You still need one for them.

It just lets you buy stuff where the raw API is made in China by some random pharma lab instead of from Novo or Lilly.

So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.

The terms and conditions are confusing. You can only use the half-off coupon they provide if you have prescription drug insurance. Even if insurance doesn't cover it, they still require the processing pharmacy to check that you have some sort of valid insurance and only process the coupon if so. If you fall into that bucket, it's $1200 or something. (Had to pay that amount one month because Amazon Pharmacy was very confused about my gender marker changing on my insurance. Many, many support tickets later, and it got fixed.)

There is also some price difference between the autoinjector and the single-use vial + provide your own needle and syringe. I haven't looked into that because it's the same with the coupon, but if you can't get the coupon to work, it's an option to just inject it yourself. Honestly I prefer not using the autoinjectors (I inject other medications), but it's the path of least resistance.

Finally, the coupon claims it only works for 7 fills, but I've been taking the medication for a couple years and all my fills have been covered. I don't really understand it. I have a feeling that I'm the only person in the world that read the fine print, including the pharmacies and manufacturer :/

https://presse.inserm.fr/en/obesite-et-surpoids-pres-dun-fra...

The Added Sugars (that's how they are listed on labels in the US) are _insanely_ and insidiously pervasive in US food. it's truly nefarious.

Wait for swimsuit season and I have a feeling your even active friends might start without telling anyone.

I don't think that I told anyone in my friend circle, so if you were my friend, you would not know.

4 kg down in 2 months, effortlessly, plus many metabolic parameters improved. My blood results are now similar to what I had when I was half that age.

What is more interesting is the general feeling of being better. Something subtle shifted in my overall bodily feeling, in a positive direction. I am more optimistic, sleep better, I like to go to the gym more. They opened a brand new gym right next to where I live and I didn't omit a single day since January 2, because I enjoy it.

But most people on the internet that I speak to that are on them have had specifically negative encounters from people learning - lots of moralizing, lots of denigration. A whole lot of them now specifically don't bring it up unless explicitly asked.

The obesity problem is a lot lower in Germany compared to the US. As all things I am sure it’s a combination of factors.

I don’t think it’s fair to call purely a processed food problem but I am sure it does not help.

If you understood how super stimulants work, then you wouldn't have found it "insane."

Although, rural Americans are also used to driving longer distances than rural Germans. I would venture that a 30-40 minute trip is not thought of as significant, especially if only done 1-2 times per week.

Rural grocery shopping (real food, not snacks), is typically done at Walmart or a smaller grocery brand or independent. For quick errands, DG does get a lot of it. You're starting to see grocery store logistics push in to what were traditionally gas-and-convenience-store corners, including Aldi, so the commutes for groceries are getting shorter.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the US with the price war over GLP-1 weight loss pills. Unlike Ozempic injections, they're going to penetrate into low income and rural households.

what percentage of people on Ozempic etc. are poor enough that they would be priced out by healthier food?

for everyone who says "i've tried etc doesnt work" all i would say is, possibly if you dont have the time due to kids etc.

Otherwise, get to it!

It's not like I live off McDonald's or anything. But I'll be overweight, change only my exercise habits, and notice big changes in body comp on the timescale of a couple months.

So clearly I'm out-exercising my evidently-bad diet.

IDK. Maybe it's different with this kind of functional exercise vs 30 minutes on the elliptical or whatever.

I'm assuming of course that you are "normal". If you are allergic to peanuts they are of course worse than a cookie. If you are diabetic cookies are bad.

> (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).

If you live in a suitable city, there is an even simpler solution. Just walk to wherever place you need to go.

Unfortunately, the century of individual automobile ownership has made most cities unsuitable for this natural mode of transportation.

It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.

If you eat only vegetable and meat, you’re going to have a hard time gaining weight.

I compare it to my childhood which was a while ago but not that far and I would go out in the middle of the day with instructions to come back home before dark. I would be running all over town on my bicycle. Now parents in the US are obsessing over travel sports and keeping booked calendars for their kids. Both parents will be working. There is nobody around put a meal together.

Myself I count calories (1500 to 1800 a day for middle aged dude) and lol drive to do my daily five mile walks on a rail trail.

Foods here if ur lazy and just buy whatever indeed are lasted with preservatives but you can put some effort into ur health to maintain a European look :)

I'm someone whose weight easily oscillates by 2kg (1kg up/down from my average trend line), and it took a while to accept only the trend line over several weeks matters.

I was in Europe in April for ten days and same amount of time in December. As noted I weigh myself daily and each time I came back i was 169 pounds and maintained my weight to under 175 for awhile the 1st time and not so long 2nd time (Christmas).

hah, they're not using them to get off of processed foods... they're using them to reduce the impact of processed foods

Completely agreed. That said, I've been to Germany a handful of times but not in the last 7 years (sadly) and two things always stuck out to me:

* There's way more attractive/healthy looking people.

* There's wayyyy more young attractive people that smoke (wtf!).

Not sure if the smoking has subsided, but it was far more prominent than in NA since I've last visited.

I had a business trip to Germany (from the US) and found it enlightening. We all went out to eat after work one night and a couple of the local Germans had to walk 20 minutes from the restaurant to the train station to go home and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a big deal to walk, but you'd never do that here in the US - or at least in Michigan where we have no real public transportation.

My small Swedish town of 50k has buses going everywhere every 10min. An American town of 50k is a village where there is maybe 1 bus line.

I mean, why on earth would they think anything of it?

People usually lie or have no idea how many calories they consume.

Eating three meals a day is a very very very recent thing if you account for human history, or even modern human history

Yea I can down a familiy pizza if its all I eat for the day.

Also, the rise of zero/light drinks have actually helped.

But the trend is the same worldwide. Obesity is on the rise. I don't think demographics has as big of an influence as you assume.

My position is way more empathetic than the other side who think people are dumb beasts or cattle who can't do anything about their conditions and need external magic pills to save them from themselves

An Ozempic cure might be just the right push needed for someone to start a healthy cycle, which then has massive beneficial effects in all aspects of life for that person, as well as for others.

> Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system

Except for victims of crime, you cannot point to a single adult receiving healthcare services, who is not to blame for "burdening the system". Whether that is obesity as you mention, or chronic injuries, or sports injuries, or traffic accidents, work accidents, any disease spread by virus or bacteria, and so on. All of those could be avoidable, and the patient is solely to blame for that and for "burdening the system".

Europeans generally have the perspective that people are born a certain way and cannot change. That's why it is a continent with immense hatred against the rich and successful, because those are considered inherited statuses, something you get from estates and serfs. That's why so much focus in European politics is to ease out differences instead of striving for success. And naturally, that's why Europeans are (the only people in the world) against Ozempic. Because it's seen as helping people who are inherently bad to cheat on their discipline and gain benefits they don't "deserve". Not as a first step to a great new life for the individual.

Just look at the angry European hackers censoring and [dead]ing the other guy's comment below mine, where an already admirable individual used this medicine for great personal health benefits.

Here are some first steps:

Earlier this year, Conagra started labeling some of its Healthy Choice frozen meals with high protein and fiber as "GLP-1 friendly." A spokesperson said those meals are selling faster than rival products making similar claims on their packaging. The company plans to introduce new Healthy Choice recipes with the same labeling in May and work with grocers like Walmart (WMT.O), and Kroger (KR.N), to market them, the spokesperson said.

Nestle, the world's biggest food company, has also introduced new frozen meals that cater specifically to GLP-1 users, called Vital Pursuit.

Fast-casual Mexican chain Chipotle (CMG.N),on Tuesday added a "High Protein Menu" that features, among other items, a single cup of chicken or steak.

Aren't they just selling healthier meals with smaller portion sizes?

All research on GLP-1 diet changes shows that people on GLP-1 naturally shift away from junk snacks, soda, and fast food. With a significant increase in high protein food, especially "mushy" one like yogurt and cottage.

Most of the fruit and vegetables in the supermarket aren't grown locally, those are usually imported (and rarely from other US states, most from South America). Farmers markets have the local stuff.

Nutrition labels are hit or miss. Portions are pretty much a useless, arbitrary measure so I'm really just look at them to understand the general ratios.

Tolerate what, stupid misleading advertising on frozen junk food? Normal people just don’t buy it.

>I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil.

Did you travel here and only go to fast food places or something?

>It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU.

When I traveled to EU, I was surprised at the number of nasty people smoking cigarettes outside at cafes, walking down the street, everywhere. You’d sure think that a lot of younger people don’t care about their health in EU based on all the smoking.

>You have really great vegetables and fruits there because of having enough sun to grow them locally, yet it seems like nobody wants to eat them.

That’s a weird assumption because the produce section of my grocery store is pretty much the most crowded section.

I attribute much of the weird slop like that post to bots or paid trolls driving an agenda. They say things that only really make sense in the online fantasy world.

i agree everything is very sugar-filled though, i think in part because of the misguided culture shift around everything needing to be fat free and manufacturers simply replaced fats with sugars

Demanding evidence for predictions like this is a bit... hm. Arrogant, maybe. A prediction is a commitment. We want people to make predictions. The evidence we get when those predictions come true or not. Would you be willing to make the opposite prediction?

Me.

I am the source.

I don’t have any evidence that you will, but since you seem to think that’s ok, here goes!

The complement of the claim is essentially "food manufacturers will never again attempt to modify their recipes to make them more hyperpalatable, now that GLP-1 exists." Does that need evidence? It's the null hypothesis, but it certainly sounds a lot more unrealistic than the opposite.

Designing a food to be more appealing is also a relatively well understood process that is already carried out, but Ozempic seems to blunt the effectiveness of it.

Food companies will surely try to make food that is appealing for Ozempic users, and will do so if they can. But it is a massive assumption that they will be able to, given that they're already doing as much as possible to make food appealing to people.

So there is significant uncertainty that the food companies can do what the parent suggested they would do.

Predictions operate on events that will happen in the future.

Proofs typically operate on things that already exist.

Not going to get there under any FDA. The FDA never cared about food engineering and never will.

Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.

There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.

I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.

Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.

> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.

Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.

You've never had a steak au poivre or a red wine reduction?

Sauce is good enough for Ruth's Chris. https://ruthschris.net/blog/choose-best-entree-complement-st...

So, let’s not act like it’s not something normal there. These sugary sauces are everywhere in the USA. From low level to high level eating places.

Hell, you can't even get all the European ingredients in all of Europe. Good luck finding all the Danish ingredients in Italy.

But think about, say, oranges. They naturally have fiber in them to make you feel more full and to slow the absorption of sugar. Then we remove all the fiber by juicing them, and now you can eat 6 oranges in 60 seconds, which is typically impossible or, at least, very uncomfortable.

It's the same story for the entire food industry. Whole foods are complex, we often zone in on some aspect of them and extract it, essentially concentrating it.

> Households with at least one GLP-1 user reduce grocery spending by 5.3% within six months of adoption,

The reduction is only within those households using GLP-1 drugs, NOT across the US as a whole. Same for the other claims in the paper.

(That still suggests that these drugs are responsible for a 0.8% drop in total grocery spending in the US, which is remarkable.)

It looks like it’s just for users, not across the board.

> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

In terms of long term effects the only medical study I saw that concerned me was done on rats and showed a decrease specifically in the muscles of the heart. This was taking into account general weight loss and appetite suppression (which might more generally affect muscle mass). Not hugely concerning for the obese that might see massive benefits but for those who are already a healthy weight and taking it to get 6 pack abs it might be something to consider.

My grocery spending has fallen significantly since I started ADHD medication. Both lisdexamfetamine and methylphenidate absolutely zeroed my appetite. When I walk around a grocery store I'm no longer tempted by anything I didn't actively go in to buy. This is a huge shift from my pre-medication days.

They also do have significant risk of side effects (not trying to say anything about their used for ADHD which is well proven). Probably not a great idea to be prescribing tons of stimulants to people who don't need them (especially because these are drugs which are in large shortage often)

Also, I can't find the comparison in the study to spending by non-Ozempic households. Is it possible that they decreased their spending during the time frame too, for other economic reasons? All this to say is that I think the story is more complex than the headline indicates.

I'm in the UK and got my ADHD diagnosis on the NHS (well, via Right To Choose) so the maximum I'll ever pay for my medication is about US$150/year. [1]

If I had a private diagnosis I'd be paying about half that a month for the same medication.

Anyone with a BMI over 35 is likely to qualify for GLP-1 type drugs on the NHS too. Not sure how long they'll keep prescribing them to you if you take them and lose lots of weight. Most people I know on GLP-1 type things are paying lots (US$200 or more) a month privately.

1. £114.50 for a Prepayment Certificate covering all prescriptions for a year: https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/help-nhs-prescription-costs/nhs-pr...

There's no economic correction. They're making causal claims without identifying mechanisms. Self selection bias, self reporting, the people being polled are the type of people who answer polls. Massive conflicts of interest with one of the authors benefiting from the company collecting the data. They don't collect causal medical information, and cannot justify any of the causality claims they're asserting, with virtually none of the confounders able to be corrected for from the data that was collected, nor able to be trusted or validated, based on how the data was collected.

Oh, Journal of Marketing Research. The paper is the marketing, got it.

This Numerator guy on the paper is an enshittification leech doing his best to profit off of the casual corruption of science. Stuff like this should be ridiculed and torched wherever it surfaces.

All the legitimate universities and publication platforms should try having actual standards and nuke these types of submissions from orbit, but instead I'm sure they're happy to get their little chunk of clickbait revenue.

This is legitimately nuts. We can choose not to let this be how people become wealthy and degrade everything they touch.

edit: Go down the rabbit hole and look how these people grift. Companies like this are exactly and precisely why we can't have nice things.

"Doctors recommend this one simple life hack to revolutionize your grocery budget!" Or something like that.

GLP1 confounds things with the psychological impact as well; it apparently allows for more executive agency, disrupts the impulsive behaviors and cycles people get into, and might allow for some high discipline strategies that the simple calories difference in groceries don't account for.

It's not that there's no interesting questions to be asked, this paper is just awful. Everything about it is bad.

SNAP is supposed to be about nutrition.

All economies have deep and sometimes non-obvious dependencies. I'm interested in what happens next.

Will food stores lay off workers? Will they change their mix of offerings? Where is the new equilibrium going to be?

As an example from the piece:

> Only a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.

Will the unit prices of these products go up to compensate for the losses in savory snacks?

I snack, drink less, and feel like eating out significantly less. Or when I do those things, I eat the take-out meal over multiple-meals. 1-2 less takeaway meals and a svelter grocery bill due to the less booze or snacks probably is at least $50 if not more.

It's not like obese people don't know they should be eating less and healthier foods.

The funny thing is that ever since starting to take GLP-1, I've kind of gain empathy to the "just stop eating so much" crowd. When you are on GLP-1, you lose a lot of the feeling towards food, so it's easier to understand how a person who has never had the same level of urges and difficulty would feel.

FWIW, there is no research on "natural" diet that shows sustained long term meaningful weight loss. And even the most controlled and extreme short term diets of people in controlled living spaces with prepared food shows 17% weight reduction at the state of the art. While GLP-1 medication reach 20%+ on average without any lifestyle change. It's just not comparable.

Snacks could also be healthier. The bread we are sold could be less like pound cake. Easier said than done.

And so far it's 5.3% reduction in the spending of <16% of households on the drug for a total reduction of less than 1%. Compared to eg tariffs and general inflation, that's a bit hard to distinguish from noise.

And what about Aldi and Lidl? Why do people put up with these weird German hard discounters, if not for lower prices?

Sounds conspiratorial, but when you look at the revenue impact this is having, the deluge of baseless articles about it making your eyes fall out or “users who stop taking it gain the weight back” or whatever malady they can make a tenuous link to, it all make a lot more sense.

The biggest food companies do not want people to be thinner. They want people to buy their low-quality, high-margin products.

Is anyone surprised that hunger-affecting drugs used on a large scale are causing changes in consumer habits?

One might want to consider inflation in the balance...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348199

Lol, what? No one has ever abstained from anything, huh? No one ever quits drugs or alcohol, and no one was ever able to control their weight before this drug? Well, guess that absolves us of all personal responsibility then!

Yes, it is managing a chronic disease, you can expect to take it indefinitely. People suggesting otherwise are doing a disservice. Especially when they are medical professionals who should know better.

> Ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods – the kinds most closely associated with cravings – saw the sharpest declines. Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies.

The big processed food brands are clearly more aggressive in their discounts. Lower demand overall from GLP1s or common sense is part of it. But the other factor relates to the huge increases in prices starting during the pandemic.

I mean, 13 ounce bag of Doritos for $7.29? A box of freaking Cheerios for $5.99? Few people will touch that, so they're in a situation where they must discount heavily to move product. These particular products are on sale 2-3 weeks every month at $2.29 to $2.99 (see https://www.starmarket.com/weeklyad)

When I’m hungry, I eat, and that’s it, I don’t think about food until hours later when I get hungry again. It blows my mind that there’s people that just never stop thinking about food, even shortly after they’ve eaten, even when they’ve had their fill. We don’t have to live this way. Try to think about food less, it starts in the mind.

This was me up until my mid/late 20s. I never understood how people got fat. I didn't get it. It wasn't difficult for me to remain at a healthy weight.

Then my life changed. Worked my way farther up the corporate ladder. More work. Higher stakes on that work. Less time and mental energy for cooking, etc. More eating out, more ordering in. Less time in the gym. Eventually that turned into cooking only for special occasions or special meals (and these certainly weren't healthier, though they were delicious), and that less time in the gym turned into no time. Eventually I became obese.

And I realized my relationship with food had massively changed compared to where I was before. Physical hunger? Still easy to ignore. If it was just a matter of beating the feeling of hunger, it'd be easy. But I could not get food out of my mind. I tried mindfulness exercises, meditating, all sorts of things. No luck. But GLP-1s fixed it in a hurry.

I had to eat crow on all the thoughts and comments I had made about how easy it was to just not eat.

I think I’d rather be fat than a thin, condescending jerk, because at least then I could GLP1s to help lose weight.

- Every large/medium train station is rammed full of food. Everyone on the train is constantly shoving food and alcohol in their mouths

- Every high street is full of fast food

- Every service station is full of fast food

- Every coffee shop has pastries etc all on display staring at you

- Even at the gym the other day I had to listen to two women talking about their favourite steak and chicken etc for 15 minutes (it's a small gym)

- People's homes are full of snacks and temptations and friends/family can't comprehend the concept of my wanting to lose weight.

- Grocery shops place unhealthy food at the entrance and the staples are often placed in a way to make you walk past the unhealthy foods. Online grocery shops force you to look at unhealthy food during your shop

- People just walking around town are eating in the street

We have a massive snack culture generally in the UK and it's become so normalised. Another thing you notice taking public transport is it's the default mechanism to entertain and keep children quiet, so kids are being taught to have a snack constantly.

Food is everywhere all the time here!

> Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies. Even staples like bread, meat and eggs declined.

I can't read the paper (paywall), but that means something like the 10% of Americans who are on it must switch to purchasing almost no junk food.

Now are you saving money? Not particularly. The food which is better for you is also a decent amount more expensive. On top of the 1k per month the meds cost. Now many people can get the meds covered by insurance but some cant.

Cost wise it is pretty much a wash. As you are eating less but you are spending more. So there could also be people are watching what they eat more closely in addition to the medication.

My wife also says it is a change of diet not a diet.

You can do this for months if needed.

You will reset your immune system, insulin response, eat off cancerous cells, etc.

The bigger opportunity is to figure out why all of these things are going on, typically unprocessed emotional trauma, environment, and choices.

If epigenetic markers have activated there is no meditating them "off". Many other factors existthat foster diverse set of biological traits that are not toggled off by sitting by water.

Don't play doctor online as observers may be confused and make poor choices relative their unique circumstances.

Stick to over-charging people wracked with guilt and seeking salvation, and the bizarre longtermism you think you're bringing to fruition. Gonna stick around 10,000 years to ensure it all goes according to plan?

But I do appreciate the life advice from someone with a 4 day old anonymous account!

The whole point of us doing all we do is to ensure that we get good at making more and more shortcuts.

>Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.

Not to say that it's cheap, but they are no longer the high-priced drugs only for the glitterati that you may be thinking.

My total food bill is still a fraction of that.

The core of it is the stuff you'd expect, at least if you remember older stereotypes of the diets of the poor. But it doesn't have to be just the things that would drive you mad. There's room for quite a bit of variety, really. In fact, there's room to eat out sometimes at my current price level.

I buy a lot of dry food (naturally dry or dehydrated in processing) in bulk: flour, rice, dried fruit (carefully portioned out), legumes (split peas and kidney beans are what I like; I could get others if I wanted), skim milk powder (many culinary uses). Mostly frozen meat (not pre-made things in boxes), or ground meat that I buy in quantity and freeze. Boring old generic cheese in the full-sized bars, not sliced or shredded and definitely not the plastic crap. (I really should get eggs more often. Even at regular prices, which have nearly doubled since 2020 for the most basic offering, they're still reasonably priced for what you get.) Not a whole lot of fresh vegetables, or rather, just starchy ones like carrots and potatoes when they go on sale.

I drink tea that I make myself (I haven't crunched the numbers but I assume homemade drip coffee is comparable). I don't buy pop (er, "soda") and my selection of snack foods is quite limited: generally bottom-shelf generic-brand cookies and biscuits (even then I shop around) and sometimes generic-brand potato chips. I used to get generic-brand ice cream sometimes but those prices have gone way out of control.

And I read the flyers.

Can I hear more about the frozen meat? I usually go for chicken thighs or pork (almost always one is on sale), it's about 8-9cad/kg. What's your cuts of frozen meat, and price point?

Also, no frozen nor canned veggies in your budget?

And finally, can you describe your typical breakfasts, lunchs, and suppers? You say it's "what you'd expect", but I grew up affluent and only recently going through a budget crunch so I don't really have any reference for what to expect.

Cheers.

I wouldn't get anything with the bones in if I can avoid it. Even fresh boneless skinless chicken breast is often under 11 cad/kg.

No Frills carries pre-cooked (I still fry them a bit to give flavour and heat them up) meatballs in 1.5 (used to be 1.8) kg bags for $10. If you check labels and do the math they're a pretty good deal. Ground chicken and turkey can be found a few places at $11 (or at least not much more) for 4 lb (beef has gone up quite a bit though). It's not the most pleasant looking stuff, but it works fine for things like chili.

Pork tenderloin often goes on sale in the cryovac 2-packs for $6.60/kg. Sometimes it's even Canadian produce.

Every now and then I might treat myself to some T-bone steak. It's harder to find on sale now, though, and when it is available it's often "cut from ungraded Mexican beef" which I find rather a turn-off. It's probably been a couple years now, actually.

> Also, no frozen nor canned veggies in your budget?

Frozen vegetables are probably still fine but I got annoyed seeing them go from $4 pre-COVID for a 2kg bag to at least $6.50 now. (I can still remember getting them at $2.79.) Canned have, overall, always been more or less a rip-off in my estimation, but I do still get canned tomatoes on sale. Again, chili is a great way to stretch out meat and get lots of healthy veggies and fiber.

(If you really just can't have pasta without a tomato sauce, 2 parts of crushed tomato to 1 part of a basic cream sauce — one of the many uses for that skim milk powder — should get you fairly close for less money. At least based on my reading the labels and doing some napkin math. I haven't actually tried it.)

> You say it's "what you'd expect"

I meant that things like rice and legumes make up a fair bit of it. (As another side dish, I also buy flour in large bags and make dumplings. Pasta is definitely more expensive than it used to be, but it's really going to be meat that drives expense when you cook for yourself.) I don't really eat on a typical schedule; I tend to cram most of my daily intake into a single meal and snack (and drink tea) the rest of the time.

Best of luck out there.

(no affiliation, I just like the drug)

FWIW tirzepatide is the more expensive of the GLP1s right now.

That's not surprising, it is the most effective -- for now. On the gray market, reta is even more expensive than tirz, and also more effective. I expect it will be the most expensive at retail, as well, and I hope that the net effect is to make tirz more affordable.

(However, you can probably compare it to other lifestyle changes people on previous weightloss drugs did. If we presume that going on a weightloss drug at all is roughly the same impact on associated lifestyle change choices.)