> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
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 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.
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.
> 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%.
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.
> calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods
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.
> jjk166: You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost
Give the guy some credit... No, clearly CGMthrowaway is not assuming that at all, it's purposly left out. The first sentence mentions "back of the envelope math" and makes it clear it's a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. Also it's in response to a statement about "wondering how you could get such a high impact overall". Also, also, the last sentence is "So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet."
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.
The decrease in spend was at the household level, not aggregate, so it’s a 5% decrease across 16% of households, or a bit less than 1% overall.
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.
> But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining)
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
> the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories
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
The question is how you calculate or define excess. For one, excess calories aren't 100% stored as fat. We're not that efficient.
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.
Assuming a steady surplus of 500, and considering that a kg of human fat is roughly 8000kcal, it will take two weeks to gain a kilo. But a larger person consumes more to simply stay alive so the curve flattens out once a certain mass is reached.
Excess means above what your metabolism consumes. If I'm 200 pounds and my metabolism consumes 3200 calories per day, eating 3200 calories per day isn't 500 calories in excess. Same as if I'm 600 pounds and 4000 calorie metabolism. It isn't excess unless its excess.
These calorie numbers don't make much sense to me. The typical recommendation for how much a man should eat is 2000-2800 Cal/day, and for the average woman that is 1600-2200 Cal/day, depending on age and exercise levels [0]. So if it were true that the average American ate 3600 Cal/day, they would be eating 800-2000 excess Cal, not 400-700.
Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher.
You're right I seem to be referencing bad data, and the excess is probably more like 10-50 cals/day.
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
As you gain weight, your base metabolic rate also increases. Having fat means you inherently burn more calories, even if you don’t exercise any more.
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.
Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1.
By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
The potential for overeating chronically has not been possible for most people, in most societies, throughout most of human history. Our current caloric abundance being available to literally everyone in Western society is something unique to the past century.
If you eat 1% fewer calories than you burn every day you will die. You will also die if you eat 1% more calories than you burn every day. Is it possible, really, to suggest that the availability of calories was 100% of the daily requirement of our ancestors, and not 99%, or 101%? That is a level of accident that exceeds belief.
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?
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.
It's not necessarily about BMR - if you maintain a similar activity level as you gain weight, you consume more active calories as well, in almost every activity, particularly the most common ones such as walking.
This hits on something that seems to get lost in most of these "obese people are lazy fat slobs" circle jerks. A typical American gains 1 or 2 pounds per year as they age. This is not a candy problem, or a binge eating problem, this is way more subtle than that.
Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake.
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.
Judging from the downvotes my observation got, you're not the only person who skipped math class. I couldn't say it any better than the comment below this one that already replied to you. 10 calories a day, expressed in candy, is two M&Ms.
> That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%
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.
> Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.
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?
I don't think you've eliminated the likely hypothesis that overly processed food and GLP-1 use are significantly more prevalent in America. I don't think anyone would argue that these things don't exist at all in other countries, but we can still talk about degrees.
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 is certainly true. But now I feel like we need to talk about beer in America. Because as much as I love a real German beer, the variety and quality of beers we have to choose from in America is pretty astonishing. At least it seems that way in my bubble (and it certainly helps that I live in an area of the PNW that has a high per-capita number of breweries).
For artificial problems, artificial solutions. I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards and eating habits (and city designs) which render the incentives really perverse
These drugs are expensive and, at least in France, they're discussing offering them. I think this is the main reason explaining the difference in prevalence between the US and the EU.
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].
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.
There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body.
I agree, that has to do with "malbouffe" and other lifestyle choices. As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.
> a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
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.
> Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, ...
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.
Let it be noted that I have said overweight and not obese, if you are in the obese category you are 100% unhealthy (even the bodybuilders who inject stereoirs in this category are unhealthy).
It doesn’t change the argument. Most people who have BMI in the overweight range do not have healthy weights.
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.
It's important to note that overweight and obesity are not the same thing. Most people are overweight, and from what I've seen of modern studies, the health risk of being overweight is almost negligible.
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.
> There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
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 lived in Germany and Indonesia. It’s easier for me now back in the US than ever to eat healthy.
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.
I think there is argument to be made that the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia. I think maybe by living abroad you have adapted by default to a path (shaped by the environment) to eat more healthy.
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.
I agree that when it comes to portion size and whole foods, Europe makes it easy to follow by example. FWIW, I ate healthy in the US before because I rock climbed and needed to maintain a very lean mass. If I wanted to cut weight in Indonesia, it was easy: just eat their portion size, and I'd come in below maintenance.
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)
Here's some advice on all 3, and I don't even ask you to buy my supplements :)
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.
> 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)
They're saying this without irony? Or by "important" do they mean "the way I like it"?
> the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia
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.
The food deserts thing gets tired. It's a social media trope at this point. I lived in poorer neighborhoods growing up, and those who wanted to eat healthy made it happen. It just took more work, which is the point. Corner stores that stocked fresh fruits and veggies would just have them rot on the shelves due to no one purchasing them. It's consumer preference.
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.
Another data point for here. Not from the USA, I find the ingredients pretty good and we cook a lot at home, and we avoid anything super packaged, so yes, you could claim Americans don’t have a culture of eating appropriately
Tons of Americans want to eat healthy but don't have the energy/time/access. It's easy to cook healthy for yourself if you're single, have a good work/life balance, and have a grocery store nearby. There are a lot of Americans who eat fast food on the go because it's their only option (or they haven't been educated on how to get healthy food quickly). Others have lives where job and family responsibilities sap so much energy that by dinner time ordering a pizza is pretty tempting.
If you start looking around at the world you will likely start to notice an inverse correlation between those with “little free time due to working three jobs” and the amount of junk they feed their families.
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.
Consumer preference is a scapegoat. You can also make nicotine-free cigarettes, and people have tried, but they just don't sell. Of course consumers prefer the stuff that feels better. They have to.
Goodluck getting a healthy salad delivered outside of a major metropolitan area. In my city of a quarter million (not huge, not small) the options are pretty much limited to two or three places that only offer high caloric salads
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.
Whole Foods fresh vegetables prices are comparable to elsewhere, same with some dairy. However, everything else carries a premium and for budget minded people you need to avoid it.
The pre-chopped coleslaw mix is like 3 bucks for a huge bag. 1 pound of pre-sliced frozen peppers I think is $2. Some of it depends on where you’re shopping, I’m sure this stuff would be 50-100% more at Whole Foods the next town over.
My issue with organic stores in Germany is that they offer the exact same stuff you can get in a regular supermarket, just smaller, less flavorful and more expensive. My pet theory is that a lot of people here just don't really enjoy food, so when they have kids or simply some extra disposable income, their idea of "eating better" would be to have the same bland plate of spaghetti, just with organic pasta and organic sauce.
Whole Foods isn’t the only store providing vegetables or pre-cut vegetables.
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.
My consumption of beef is way down because of the cost. I'm almost exclusively buying poultry and pork now for meat. Occasionally I'll get something like a top round or flank cut if it's on sale.
Well, corn and potatoes are indeed vegetables, so there's that. And I think the only person who ever said ketchup was a vegetable with a straight face was Ronald Reagan 40 or 45 years ago.
"Eat your vegetables. They're good for you." shouldn't mean dipping your fries in ketchup. But that is what happens if you call corn and potatoes as vegetables.
Cause and effect is backward. The locations indicate where people are buying it. And cheap doesn't really add up either because if somebody wants the cheapest possible calories they would be buying rice, flour/pasta, potato...
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.
Cooking good food takes time. I can slap some pre-made burgers in a pan, throw some buns in a toaster and have a "meal" in 10 minutes. I can stop by fast food on the way and have the same meal (at only slightly more cost) in 5 minutes.
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).
I grew up in a poor neighborhood. Busy doing what, exactly?
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.
Well, uh, working. The less you make per hour of work means the more hours you need to maintain a normal standard of living. Obviously there's variance in standards of living, but wealthier people don't typically work two or three jobs. Poor people do, I've met people who do. The reality is that at 12 dollars an hour, 40 hours is just not gonna cut it.
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.
Fast food almost always takes longer than that unless you can literally drive through while driving home from work.
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 said on the way for fast food. Since those places are eherywhere it is likely you can find one on the way when you were going and so the time cost to go is zero.
i agree you canecook faster than I normally do - a lot of meals benefit from simmering while the flavors blend.
Plenty of ways to automate the kitchen and also cook fast and easy meals. I can spend 20 minutes on the kitchen and have food for a week. 2-3 minutes of reheating per meal
Or you slap the burgers in a pan and serve it with some broccoli, and sliced fresh red peppers or other other quick healthy sides and have a balanced meal. The bun, fries and soda are the unhealthy part of a burger, anyways (assuming it's good quality meat).
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.
When it seems like a lot of people don't want to do something that is obviously good for them but, instead, opt for things they know kill them slowly, that probably means addiction is somewhere in the mix.
lol, Alnatura is the worst. I’d prefer any Netto, Späti, or even the small shops in a gas station, anytime. Alnatura is a para-religious “anthroposophical” shop and everything you buy has low quality due to adverse selection and is overpriced by 3x
A consequence of universal healthcare that people don't talk about much is that it turns unhealthy citizens from an individual cost into more of a collective one. So it makes sense that countries with universal healthcare regulate in favor of their citizens as opposed to their food industry, because they're paying for the consequences more directly.
Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.
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.
This (French) study [0] published in 2023 on data from 2019 calculates that the costs from legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, including higher helthcare spend during the life of smokers/drinkers, are still higher than revenue from unspent money on pensions and taxes, and cost of healthy person living years.
This is both an argument in favor of universal healthcare, and my favorite argument for why the US should not implement it without first changing a whole array of perverse incentives.
Indeed, I would caution pretty much everyone else in the world (except maybe Asians, but even then) to be circumspect when taunting Americans for their obesity rates. Germany, to use an example from this discussion, has been going up steadily for decades. Doesn't seem like this is a US-specfic problem or something that Europe has a good answer for.
Demolition Man said Taco Bell would be fine dining by 2032, they might be on schedule. (It also said they'd be just about the last restaurant left, though.)
I started a GLP-1 in October. I've been eating healthy and exercising for a decade, but I was still in the obese category and blood sugar tests indicated I was at the edge of pre-diabetes. If I pushed hard on calorie reduction or exercise, I could gain 10-20% improvement, but it seemed like that would always reverse itself when I'd hit an injury or got sick. I'm hitting my mid-40s and decided it was time for a drastic change. I could have continued yo-yo dieting or opt for a solution that gets me to a healthy BMI within a year.
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.
> it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.
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.
Sorry - I think there's complexity with insulin at play that you're overlooking. When I did caloric restriction, I was constantly battling hypoglycemic events that made me not want to exercise. I don't get that with the GLP-1s. In online discussions, people tend to conflate GLP-1 with appetite suppressants - but there's also insulin stabilization that occurs.
It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us. Even in my grandparents generation of family had issues as well, and they were all blue collar manual workers that lived before processed foods.
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.
Because genetics alone aren't enough, you also have to have opportunity.
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.
I am not sure the genetic angle but there definitely is something happening at a craving level in the way the mind is responding.
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.
I have access to the same food as everyone else, I also have craving as everyone else, but as hairless monkeys we evolved a brain able to bypass instant rewards for future goals.
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
You are blinded by your experiences. I don’t think it’s as clear as “stop making excuses”. Obviously there is a healthy portion that is probably this but I do believe there is a borderline if not full blown addiction that happens where people are not able to put it out of their thoughts.
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.
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.
What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?
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.
They still have a brain capable of complex thoughts and should be able to prioritise long term health over short term pleasures.
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
I'm convinced it is but you can't help people who don't want to be helped. People who want to be helped get out of the problem in a matter of months.
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
I have done that multiple times in the past but there came a point where I couldn't "white knuckle" my diet any more. GLP-1 has really helped a much better quality of life - lower cravings for food and alcohol, meaning that I am losing weight and feeling cheerful instead of gritting my teeth.
We have decades of experience telling people to exercise more and eat better. If telling people those things worked, we would know by now. It doesn't. This is not in any way new.
Ah yes, the ever popular "they are just lazy or weak willed" rhetoric. Obesity is a disease just like addictions are. But I'm sure another round of "just try harder" pep talks and motivation posters will solve everything. Maybe stop for a moment and realize your perspective is narrow.
The obesity rate in the US tripled in 45 years... so clearly it's not about genetics or cravings. People had the same genetics, cravings and access to calories in 1980 USA as today, we're not talking 1580 here.
Yeah right, I'm obviously an elite genetical specimen and 75% of people are simply dumb animals with insane amount of cravings I cannot even begin to comprehend. And these people didn't exist 45 years ago.
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
I'm not talking to you about obesity. I'm talking to you about the idiotic statement that you have insight into the qualia of other people. Everything else you're saying is irrelevant, I'm not trying to explain all obesity or whatever by appealing to cravings, I'm saying you're an idiot if you think you have insight into qualia.
No, that's still really dumb. For example, maybe we always had radically divergent populations with regards to cravings but limited access to food. It's so easy to come up with situations to account for.
And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.
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.
No, it was probably the incredible advances in everyday automation combined with massive increases in food availability. Survival is not nearly as physically demanding today as it was in the middle of last century.
It's almost like the difference in the way ultra processed foods are digested, absorbed, and the way hormones are released in response has something to do with that. It's almost like this is a biological process. It's almost like the brain is an organ and if its hormones and chemicals are messed with, that can have health implications. Or maybe it just "don't be lazy".
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.
Obesity rate more than tripled since the 80s (1980s), people had already access to more than enough food to become obese in 1980 USA, so this alone doesn't explain much
There's negligible "genetic" difference between German and American gastrointestinal systems. No DNA mutations occurred in your grandparents that caused all of their children and children's children to be overweight.
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 just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us.
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.
You're assuming something they didn't say. Genetics might mean a poorer response to GLP1, or a poorer metabolic response to specific hormones, or how we observe that people with ADHD have poorer eating habits, or if you're genetically smaller then your metabolism may be smaller, blah blah blah. There are many genetic factors that obviously impact weight.
We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.
What are you talking about?? Meat contains no fiber. The primary fiber source is plant-based foods (e.g., vegetables). So modern populations eating lots of meat means they're getting little to no fiber.
Why is it insane? You sound like someone who says to depressed people “just be happy”.
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.
When talking about ADHD medication, a doctor asked me why someone would choose not to wear glasses if they could see well with them.
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.
The part of the population that deals better with our food system want to feel morally superior.
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
>It improves quality of life, health, reduces risk when surgery is needed,
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.
Yeah, I'll be taking minoxidil for my hair forever. And zyrtec for my allergies forever. So it goes. "What if you get lost in a cave system for 30 years? What then?" I guess I'll lose my hair and be sneezing a lot, and gain weight. So it goes. Until then, it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it that people can't seem to grasp that the brain is just as biological as the kidney or pancreas? If your pancreas isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, of course we need to treat that. But if the brain isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, then obviously its willpower or laziness or whatever.
I think it's a bit more popular outside the US than you make it out to be. As an anecdote, I know a handful of people on it in Denmark - and that's despite the local Danish price being higher than the German one and Denmark having notably lower obesity and diabetes rates than Germany.
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...
An astonishing number of people are type two diabetic in this country due to poor health and poor access to healthcare. But glp1 is covered as a diabetic treatment so a tremendous number of folks can get it at a reasonable cost.
I was curious for a UK comparison so I looked it up.
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].
I assume that translates to it being really hard to get in the NHS so people are resorting to buying it themselves. I wonder what the percentage would be if it was easy to get from the NHS?
UK numbers are always interesting because the NHS leans conservative about access to many types of care and medication.
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.
I live in the US. If those numbers are true, then it seems likely that I know at least one person on it. I however don't know that I know someone one it, since people (at least in the US) don't usually announce "Hi everybody, I'm taking weight loss drugs." Being overweight is seen as shameful, and losing weight through any means other than diet and exercise is an admission of failure.
The best part is feeling the judgement from someone who thinks taking GLP1s is a moral failure when they are carrying an extra 50+ pounds themselves. I have met many people who seem to believe that being fat is actually the higher moral ground than using medication to help solve it. And these are religious people, too! Don't they know about gluttony?
I am not American, but I think you are unfairly dismissing the massive benefits GLP-1s have for people who struggle to maintain a healthy diet. It really feels like a miracle drug.
> 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
I think you are misreading the comment you are replying to:
> 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.
If you look at the increase in overweight and obesity rates in Germany over the last 50 years, it’s clear that far more of the population “needs” GLP-1 than is using it. The rate of use will almost certainly increase dramatically.
> It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US
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.
American here who lived in Germany for 3 years and now Scandinavia. Its what makes up the food. Most of the food served in America cant be served in the EU. Its straight up poison designed to make you addicted to it.
Couple that with a very car centric lifestyle and yea. Its not great.
True, but what would sanctioning producers do? I think it's not even the availability of fresh products in the supermarket, but the willingness of customers to prepare food themselves? I agree it's postmodern funny that you need to continually buy something (a medicine) to not buy somethings (fast food) that are bad for you. I've got co-workers who only eat out. Guess what? What I think are salt and fat related health issues. Sugar, salt and fat are too easy and too nice not to be everywhere.
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.
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.
Food is addictive because all animals including humans are by our very genes instructed to be addicted to it. Even the most healthy food is addictive. Just like water and air is addictive.
I don't think "addictive" is the right term, but we have an evolutionary imperative towards eating to excess when there is food in excess, which wasn't maladaptive until recently.
I’d advise folks to consider a) the relationship between poverty, stress, and obesity Nd b) the income inequality of the United States relative to Germany
You cited poverty as a reason but then switched to income inequality as the statistic.
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.
Absolutely. The American way of life traps people in a zoo. There is nothing to do other than work (if you are lucky), eat, and consume junk media. For ones who are poor the only difference is the degree to which the food is also junk.
This is patently false -- there is plenty to do besides consume junk media; the fact that our population is addicted to the dopamine associated with short-form video doesn't mean that there aren't other options.
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.
No, I want to tell that parent to spend the hour they use scrolling TikTok to do literally anything else, it'll improve their life. I understand my experience is not typical, but there are many things besides "junk media" that are not cost prohibitive.
it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.
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.
JFC you do understand that not everyone in America is a software engineer like you who is well compensated and has a proper work/life balance? There are tons of people in America that are just ground into the dirt day in day out with no end in sight. Have some empathy.
Sure, i'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing against is the statement "there's nothing to do but eat and consume junk media"; That's simply not true, there is plenty to do, and a lot of it is not cost prohibitive.
Obesity is not evenly distributed by age or demographic. If you're a relatively young person in the workforce, you probably don't know such people. But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe. Even the places with less "healthy" diets, suprisingly.
> But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe
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.
Which has to be a pure coincidence, since the reported numbers are relative to population size. We could conclude that there are 4x4=16 times as many people with such high BMIs in the US, but that is not that useful
In my (obviously anecdotal) experience, that’s not who the primary GLP1 user is.
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.
6’1” 230 wanting 210 without having a third bike injury for it. 40 doesn’t heal like 20, turn your head wrong and you are in pain for a month. It sucks.
I really feel like this is just about the circle you are in. How many 300lb people do you know? 16% of the country is on GLP-1's as of mid 2024, Im sure its higher now. Every single massively overweight person I know has at least tried GLP-1s
It’s not just the processed foods. It’s the sedentary lifestyle. US cities are so car centric that actually getting a minimal baseline of healthy activity requires working into one’s schedule. When I lived in Japan, everything is so walkable/bikable that it makes a significant difference in the base activity level of average individual. I imagine Europe is similar.
> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
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 don't know a single person on it either (USA), but it's not exactly something that people talk about. I am naturally quite thin, as is the rest of my family, but there's certainly no shortage of hefty people here.
It’s not just hefty people. Swimsuit season is a thing. A interesting metric would be gym memberships during the run up to summer. I expect they will be going down over time.
There are vast differences in obesity rates between rural and urban areas, and red states vs blue states. Someone in San Francisco California is going to see a lot less obesity than someone in Plano Texas. I’m sure it is similar in Europe, with the caveat that Europeans are healthier than Americans in general.
I'm in the US and have a large friend circle across multiple states (from having moved for work over the years) and also do not know one single person using them. However my friends tend to be quite active.
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.
A close family member and myself are both on them. They get very upset if I ever mention them using them while I happily tell anyone about myself. Wanting to lose weight is shameful to many.
Wait for swimsuit season and I have a feeling your even active friends might start without telling anyone.
Indeed, aside from online, where I don't feel consequences from admitting it, very few people know I've taken a GLP1. None of their business, and I don't need to waste seconds of my finite lifespan nurturing their need to feel morally superior. Let everyone worry about their own problems, I'll worry about mine. And I wish they were all as easily solved with GLP1s...
I am 47, Czech, slightly overweight (183 cm / 87 kg at the beginning), but with a lot of this fat concentrating on my belly. I don't eat horrible processed food and I exercise quite a lot, but I still wasn't satisfied, so I decided to try Mounjaro on the lowest dose (2,5 mg).
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.
in europe there is a social stigma around GLP-1 drugs, a lot of people considered it cheating and lazy, so a lot of people don't dare talk about their usage
I read this online, I don't know where it was, so I can't give a source, it probably was on twitter:
"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."
The social stigma in Europe exists, because these drugs are in limited supply. So, if a person who does not really need them is using them, the people who actually need them to stay alive might have difficulty accessing them.
I think it's somewhat related. The French social security site has a page asking phamacists to make sure the prescriptions are correct, in order to guarantee availability to people who actually need this [0].
This sounds pretty much like the supply is somewhat limited for whatever reason.
Mounjaro is the tirzepatide equivalent to Ozempic (semaglutide) in that it’s prescribed for type 2 diabetes. Wegovy (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) are prescribed for obesity. Otherwise you’re spot on.
you can just order them to your home on any of the websites selling GLP-1. Stop the propaganda inferring that the public healthcare is bad and doesn't allow people to get their medicine.
This is not exactly correct. The fda approved named items require a prescription. However from the shortage years ago compounding pharmacies were allowed to sell alternative versions. Basically they add a B vitamin to the normal drug and boom non prescription GLP1.
With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.
Honestly it’s just because people who use them are considered to be weak minded and lazy. That’s all, the supply doesn’t matter.
We have been able to diet for millions of years, our body is pretty good at it, but some people NEED that to diet. Yeah, just like some people can’t be put to work. Everyone know that kind of people who are a burden on society and themselves.
It just happens that this drug is more available in the USA, but with the same availability in Europe, I bet there would be around the same percentage of user.
You also forget it is expensive and in many cases not taking charge by the respective healthcare autority of the country, so it leads to less consumption.
I've known several users of GLP1's. None ever paid more than $600/mo for them once the "patient assistance" programs started, and even in the very earliest days the prices I heard were never more than about $1100 if paid in cash.
So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.
Yeah, Zepbound is $499 now. Out of reach of many, but an improvement from $549 last year.
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 :/
And its for life. Unless you are doing it for Instagram only... "The Insta Diet" as it is called also.. When the diet finishes, you will gain the fat instantly also (just as with any diet obviously).
In Austria I have noticed a massive social stigma. I think that's embarrassing and backwards. As someone who is very athletic and takes nothing extraordinary besides creatine and whey protein I fully support anyone who wants to become healthier, with or without medication.
In my experience this is not healthy. People who had problems with weight are very quickly losing excess weight and displaying a range of symptoms related to that including sunken and starved looking faces and significant loss of lean muscle mass. Changes made to the face with rapid weight loss may become permanent and especially for older people the loss of lean muscle mass can become a major health problem. Sudden extreme changes in body composition are often neither healthy nor stable.
There might be health problems associated with these drugs but they need to be compared to the next best option. I think for a lot of people on these drugs the next best option is continuing the status quo which has a lot of negative health outcomes as well.
This is one of the major reasons why Americans are stuck with expensive private healthcare that never gets talked about. People who are used treating their insurance as an all-you-can eat buffet will feel like their health coverage is getting worse under a socialized healthcare system that is pressured to keep costs down. No government is going to foot the bill for a costly drug under patent when they can do perfectly fine with cheaper older generics a fraction of the price.
The overall food quality in Germany is significantly higher than in the US. Visit an Aldi or Lidl in Germany, then visit one in the US; night and day difference in food quality.
You can tell Germany cares for its population via food regulation and from what's offered; whereas, it's a toxic trash heap in America solved with drugs or paying a higher premium for healthier items. The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people. Feels like Americans are paying for a premium upfront or downstream via pharmaceutical/healthcare solutions.
Probably 95% of Germans live 15min from an Aldi. There are no Dollar General food wastes because the country is much denser and poor people have access to much better public transport
True. Population density differs by about 2.5x, and the US has some truly depopulated areas that essentially don't exist on the European contintent.
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.
You can't out excercise a bad diet.
You can hit the weights for 2 hours straight every day and eat those calories back with a single bad dietary choice (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).
My experience, in my mid 30s, has been that I slim down pretty damn quick when I'm able to run 10k 3-4 times a week. Unfortunately, due to my knees and my childcare responsibilities that's "not anymore". More generally, anytime I've trained for performance at anything other than pure powerlifting (climbing, kickboxing, cycling), my experience has been that my weight more or less falls in line.
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.
OP isn't saying peanuts are a poor source of nutrition. OP is saying a few peanuts are calorically dense and it is easy to consume hundreds of calories through seemingly inconsequential amounts of snacks and drinks.
Calories isn't everything, there is a lot more focus these days on how different foods affect metabolic hormones affecting satiety, blood sugar, etc. On those metrics, fat alone (which account for most of the calories in peanuts) is very satiating and does not trigger a later blood sugar drop (which causes cravings). That's why people on a diet drink 'bulletproof coffee' (coffee with butter in it), because it is extremely filling while not making you hungry later.
Depends on what your entire diet is. If you are eating only peanuts - or anything else - that is bad. If you eat a handful of peanuts once in a while that is fine. Even a cookie every few weeks is fine, but 6 cookies a day every day would be bad. Someplace in between is generally a good place to be.
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.
It's not that it doesn't work. It's not the primary tool for weight management. Gym is great for strength, muscle, cardio, and general fitness, but weight management is mostly about counting calories that go in. The calories that you burn are a function of your metabolism first and to a lesser extent the amount of exercise you do. The exercise side of things is < 500 kcal for most people per day.
If I go for a 10k, I burn ~1100 calories (I'm a big dude). I can eat that deficit no problem, hell, I was able to maintain my weight during my marathon training last summer.
It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.
Overeating doesn’t just happen in a bubble - there is a confluence of issues creating anxiety and stress in Americans’s daily lives leading to the obesity issue.
I agree with this take too. Culture influences it but I don’t think anyone can be singled out being immune. We are stressed and overworked. Simple food takes work. We no longer have a village. If you have kids so many are just stuck at home.
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.
We all drive to where we’re going we do not walk or bike daily like most Europeans do. When in Europe for my ten day trips I always come back five to ten pounds lighter.
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 :)
Most Europeans do not bike daily. Most drive cars where they need to go. You are not losing 5 to 10 pounds in 10 days (unless you are dehydrating yourself). 5 pounds would be a 17,500 calorie deficit or 1,750 per day. The base metabolism for a male is around 1800 calories. That means that you'd be eating 1/10th of a banana every day to get that type of loss. For me a century bike ride (100 miles with 5,000ft of climbing) consumes about 2,900 calories. Are you doing century bike rides every day while only eating 1,200 calories while in Europe?
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.
Because you are on vacation. That’s why you walk. Europe is much bigger than Amsterdam and Berlin. People drive everywhere here too. You should look up average steps per day by country and you will see the difference between the US and European countries is practically inconsequential, especially taking into account how few calories walking burns.
Americans (and increasingly us Europeans) are pigs.
The society is built to sit in a chair 8h, get in your car and drive 1h home and sit in a chair. Then repeat.
Also "eating 3 meals a day"
I eat 3 full meals, I blow up like a balloon. I don't get it. It's like they have to constantly eat. When I was a teen or in my 20s yes. Now in my 30s its game over.
It is also the way society, public transport, cities are designed.
I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
>> I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
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.
I eat one meal a day for as far as I can remember. Fatties love to tell me it's unhealthy, my doctor hasn't figure out yet though so I imagine it really isn't that unhealthy.
Eating three meals a day is a very very very recent thing if you account for human history, or even modern human history
180cm, 75kg, leanish, I optimise for rock climbing and do kettlebell workouts 2 to 3 times a week. I do close to the bare minimum of what is available to stay in decent shape, it takes me less than 4 hours a week total. Not counting the time I save cooking/eating
mhm! i do pretty well portioned 3 meals. small breakfast, small lunch, average sized dinner. i really like just grazing all day, eat a cracker or two, have a yogurt, have some chips etc. id honestly say im snacking a good bit whenever i feel like it. but exactly, portion and contents. im a pretty lean 150lbs
Eh, the drugs work. A great many people in the US struggle with weight despite shifting to high quality foods, fad diets, exercise etc. I'd honestly attribute the root cause to high general stress levels in daily life.
16% is a huge number. Really hope this doesn't end up being one of those cases where a hidden negative isn't known until years later because that's a really large chunk of the population that would be impacted. That said, lots of people do seem to be getting a better life now because of the drugs.
Completely different demographics, too. USA has large sub-Saharan African and Hispanic populations, which seem to have higher rates of obesity and so forth. Ethnically, Germany is probably majority North-African, Middle Eastern and Central European. Genetics plays a big part.
There are so many things going on in the US impacting our health. Nobody's been more passionate about fixing it than RFK Jr but there are so many entrenched financial interests it's a long road.
Nothing surprising for me. Unless you're in the top percentiles in terms of self-discipline, becoming obese is usually a one-way road. GLP-1 is a lazy solution for a problem that primarily stems from laziness.
"Lazy" is a pejorative term, which makes your comment sound denigrating to users of GLP-1s. If that is your intent, then your issue with people using medicine to help them avoid diabetes and heart disease is that....it's too easy?
So what? Why does that bother you? Is the (European) hatred towards your fellow brothers and sisters so strong that you prefer them to be chronically unhealthy, when there is a solution for them?
idk about them but to me people who don't value their own life and well being to that point are repulsive to me. Such a lack of discipline and self esteem, if you can't even control what you put in your mouth what can you even control? Why even bother if all you're capable of doing is mindless consumption? What can I trust you with if you can't even be trusted with yourself?
Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system when they're obese and still a major strain when we have to put them on drugs for the rest of their lives because the drugs will never fix their willpower and only temporarily fix the symptoms
We should also obviously send 90% of food industry CEOs for a life long retreat in a dark cell somewhere underground because they clearly are part of the problem. I understand some people have legit health issue making them more prone to being overweight but these people don't even account for 10% of the total.
I hope one day you'll realize how easy it is to be judgmental on the internet and think of people you don't know as somehow less than human. If you think people who "can't control what you put in your mouth" are incapable of self control, you should see the amount of self control it took me not to post the things I wanted to post about you. Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
> Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
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
People are cable of recreating themselves and digging themselves out of holes, sometimes even to later become greatly admirable.
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.
> 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".
Some are way more avoidable, and much more of a burden (cig, alcohol, obesity, &c.). Nobody's upset at old people who get the flu and use an ICU bed. But if you're 40, smoking, obese and get the flu imho you're ripping what you sow and I won't be crying for your demise.
> Europeans bla bla bla
If you want to go into caricature I could tell you Americans are trying to recreate Matrix style pods, for them it would be paradise, you could go from birth to death without any single inconvenience. All of your problems come from over consumption... of foods, of medicine, of tech, and you keep piling more on top of it thinking the next layer will solve the previous layer's consequences.
This headline is a touch misleading as it gives the impression of being across all US households, the quote is:
>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%.
The question is what average; some people apparently view "in the US" as implying US population-level averages (which it does not explicitly imply), whereas authors report the average within adopting households, which for this study's data source, all happen to be in the US
If the claim was just that grocery spending is down 5.3% across the country they wouldnt have said average, the title would just be "Ozempic reduced grocery spending by 5.3% in the US"
That works out to something like $30-100 a month for most households. A bit disappointing for those hoping the savings on food would pay for the drug at the current drug prices.
The cash-payer (no insurance) price of GLP-1's has fallen by about 70% since I started on them 18 months ago, from around $1100/mo to $350/mo, for brand-name non-compounded (Ozempic, Zepbound, etc). Many people also stretch that 1 month supply to last longer, as well (eg "click counting").
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.
About $6/day, Canadian. Only for myself. Not counting energy costs.
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.
Thanks for sharing, this is useful advice for a fellow Canadian. If you don't mind me asking follow-ups:
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> ..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%.”
Maybe a bias on wealthier households in the US who can afford these drugs. Personally, my total food spending is down 30%. GLP 1 is $66CAD after insurance.
I can't say exactly what the numbers are, but anecdotally, there are a lot of "research" users buying tirz (and reta, for that matter) for a few bucks a week on the gray market. The better known sources sell out batches in a week or two, which amounts to 750K-1M worth of product (at gray prices, not retail). There's a reason you're starting to see regular news stories about it.
I'm curious how these below-the-radar users skew the numbers. Maybe not at all?
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US
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.
And crucially, many of those bad foods can be pretty addictive. They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more. So it’s not surprising many people struggle to change that habit when the food ecosystem is working against you. Junk food both tastes better and is easier to eat than home-cooking a very healthy meal. You’re not exactly set up for success here.
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period.
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.
Insurance companies should have to refund your premium when they do this for the time period they are making a decision. It's gotten absurd how badly they are abusing patients.
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.
Both those drugs are also known to suppress appetite in many people - to the point that some used them solely as appetite suppressants.
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)
Since we are taking about ADHD, these drugs also help with executive function and impulsivity. Even without their appetite suppression effects, they might help ADHD sufferers stay on task with losing excess weight.
This comment is more insightful than it may appear initially. It looks like the 5% drop is in comparison to the pre-Ozempic spending. To what extent is the cut on spending monetary i.e. "I am spending more on this drug and will cut back my other expenses." Sure, Ozempic will kill the cravings, and that is probably the main driver, but from a 5000 foot view, this is using money to buy drugs instead of foods. In a very abstract way, it's the same as buying amphetamines to lose weight, just with a different (arguably smaller) set of side effects.
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.
That’s crazy cheap, I pay close to 400€ (!!!) monthly for Tirzepatide (GLP-1) and close to 50€ for Lisdexamfetamine (ADHD) in Spain. Truth be told, the ADHD meds are covered by the Social Security health insurance or I’d be paying double that, but I don’t think GLP-1s will ever be covered here.
I do think this could only be temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry. It's only a matter of time until food additives or varieties are discovered that partially ameliorate the effects of ozempic.
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.
They are eating healthier, the above is not at all evidence for the original claim.
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.
I'm baffled how messed up the food industry in the US has gotten over the last decades. When I was in the US I remember ordering pancakes in the morning. Those pancakes for like 10 bucks lasted for the whole week because I couldn't stuff so much in my stomach.
I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil. Good luck trying to get an actual healthy salad where the toppings aren't full of sugar or oil. When we cook something with oil here and fry it, it's too much if you use 5 spoons of oil. When people in the US fry something in oil, they pour at least a gallon in the pot, and call it "good food" afterwards.
It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU. I'm really glad I don't live in the US anymore. It was so exhausting having to buy whole foods and things without peanut, corn/maple, oil or sugar in it.
It's like 99% of processed food is made out of waste of those industries, can't explain it otherwise because it doesn't make sense to me. 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 funny, I feel I had the opposite experience going into EU. Maybe it's regional? Anyway we were eating out a bunch around Slovenia and menus had a lot of "mixed meat" "fried cheese" type foods and servers would look at you funny if you wanted just vegetables. I got the vibe that they felt like they were letting you down if they didn't offer you their best meat so maybe it's a cultural leftover from hungrier times
I've just learned to ignore everything that's not factual on a box. I'm basically flipping it over to read the ingredients.
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 dont think nearly anyone in the US considers anything fried to be healthy.
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
It's a prediction. Not a terribly unreasonable one as far as I can see. If a drug can move 5% of the ~trillion dollars spent on groceries in the US, there's a lot of money available for clawing those 5% back.
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?
There are sometimes truly bizarre demands for evidence. I once posted a pure opinion piece -- essentially a moral judgment on what is good and what is bad (in the domain of technical writing) -- and got hit with "source?"
I think if there were certain foods which, for some reason, aren't as affected by Ozempic-type drugs' (GLP-1 agonists?) appetite suppression effect - and I'm not an expert, but I totally wouldn't be surprised if there was - then I think the food industry would be very interested in finding them.
Fair enough. The ~trillion dollars also includes things which presumably wouldn't be affected by ozempic, like overpriced razors. But either way you look at it, it's probably going to move enough money to seriously hit the food industry.
At what point does a demand for evidence come back around to making the requestor seem less like a prudent, rational truth seeker and more like someone with naive lack of personal, lived experience? Like, not a single soul will say "got evidence for that assertion?" when it's a news story about EA or Oracle or Adobe acquiring a company and people are predicting that the acquired product will be destroyed, and isolated demands for rigor will be laughed out of the comment section. Why is that - when does it flip over to "oh, so I guess it's okay to just nakedly assert that food companies will seek profit by reformulating their recipes, even though there isn't a shred of evidence to support that, therefore, we're now allowed to predict anything!"
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.
Destroying a product is a well understood process, and we've witnessed many big companies do it. That's evidence!
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.
This should be viewed like attempts to put the cocaine back in coca-cola. The industry may be able to get away with "our food is naturally delicious", but engineering it for superior addictiveness should be banned. Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.
Capitalism creates these monstrous corpo-organisms, and while we have found one way to strangle "Big Processed Food" this article shows that BPF has a will to survive.
I don't know about a full on conspiracy, but it's no secret that in the US they put a lot of additional sugar into products you wouldn't think had them.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
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.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
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.
Fiber mostly, but that's not an addictive, I guess that's a subtractive.
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.
I have evidence reedf1 thinks this could only be temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry, yes. My evidence is the comment above by reedf1, where he says it could only be a temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry.
> “The data show clear changes in food spending following adoption,” Hristakeva said. “After discontinuation, the effects become smaller and harder to distinguish from pre-adoption spending patterns.”
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?
People must be getting prescribed this medication in a vacuum without any corresponding nutritional guidance. I can't see any way of going back to my previous eating habits, mainly because I've really had my eyes opened to how mindless some of my eating was before.
Which is no surprise to anybody with common sense, the data for discontinuing GLP-1s show exactly the intuitive outcome. Zero diet change, zero habit change for the vast majority of users. Weight loss is accomplished via biochemical tricks to eat less volume of calorie dense junk food, rather than diet substitution. When the artificial appetite suppression ends, volume of the same food increases again leading to weight yo-yo. Plus why start to exercise when you’ve got a magic weight loss drug?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people using these drugs to get out of a pit of inertia with weight and sedentary lifestyles. But it’s small. GLP-1 drugs will have most users hooked for life because they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss without it. Cha-Ching!
> they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss
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?
Why do we need to try anything? This comes down to individualism versus collectivism.
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.
It's possible that there could be long term side effects that we don't know about, but given the number of people taking these drugs we would likely already have seen some indication of them. I guess we will find out!
Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
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.
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
> 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.
There was an interesting study recently that showed coming off actually caused weight re-gain an order of magnitude worse than yo-yo dieting.
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.
There are a couple recent stories that people put on weight something like 4x as fast if they go cold turkey after a GLP1 than if they quit a normal starvation diet. This intuitively makes sense, because an average GLP1 weight loss is way higher than most people can attain with willpower alone. So when they stop, the body screams "feeeeeeed me!" at incredible volume.
"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."
My brother was on it for a bit (and should go on it again) and the thing he noted was that it makes it easy to not eat but it gives you no useful habits to keep that up because it's so easy.
Which makes sense. I still calorie count everything generally because I know I'll let myself creep portion sizes unchecked.
Agreed 100%. I think if your strategy for maintaining a good diet relies on weighing food and counting every last calorie, you are inevitably going to fail. Something more fundamental, natural, habit forming, whatever -- that will be the right answer. Naturally trim people don't count calories to stay that way, either.
I think durable habits there are just hard honestly. I was losing weight when I was very strict about calorie counting and lived with a roommate who was on the same diet, but when I moved out and stayed with family my habits and intuition about safe foods didn't last long and temptation got me again.
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?
> 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.
Around here fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks. In fact, replacing the snacks with healthy food in our case increased spending. So it is awesome that these households managed to cut spendings.
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.
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.
> When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.
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.
I don't know how else to understand "When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.", other than as a claim that ultra-processed versions of things like bread and butter are much cheaper than non-ultra-processed versions of them.
I decided to check one of my local grocery stores because I honestly wasn't sure where they stood relative to each other.
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.
Modern apples have been bred to be larger and a lot sweeter than "natural" apples which are smaller and more sour. Not saying they are equivalent to a processed snack cake but they aren't especially healthy either.
That’s what I’m noticing about apples more and more these days: all of them are incredibly sweet like candy. The only variety I’ve found that seems suitable for regular eating ate the Granny Smith variety, but I hate their tough skins.
When you think of it in the context of a person with not much cash or time to work with, there's other advantages Little Debbie brings...
- 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.
If you're going to use those excuses, don't forget to add that economically disadvantage folks can't buy in bulk because they don't have enough money, and live in food deserts where people can't buy in bulk, and they don't have anywhere to store those items.
Yep, totally agree. Point 3 is probably a bit moot with apples but applies to almost every vegetable out there. But IMO the best selling point for unhealthy, sugar-rich snacks is easy of storage. You go to the supermarket and can buy 1 month of snacks easily, you cannot do it with fruits.
I don't think the evidence really supports the nutrition claim. The dehydration process might destroy certain vitamins at a chemical level, but those are extraordinarily cheap to replace (nobody in the developed world is at serious risk of deficiency disease) and the minerals aren't going anywhere as far as I'm aware. (Of course, our produce has lower mineral content than that of yesteryear, because of agriculture that prioritizes accumulating water and starch, and because of poor soil quality.) You just have to drink water along with them.
As for the taste, chacun a son gout, but I quite like them.
Yeah, I'm not on ozempic (though considering it, to get the last bit of the way to where I want to be and ensure I don't bounce back, which is frankly a lot harder than "just" the initial loss) but lost 20kg+ on diet changes, and the price of fruit and berries is shockingly high. But my dietary change still saved us a lot more from cutting takeaways alone...
For those that really need to lose weight I think these drugs are likely hugely beneficial. Obesity has so many downsides and is a huge net drain on healthcare systems.
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.
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...
People who start on a new drug also make lots of other lifestyle adjustments. Especially when it's a weightloss drug.
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.)
It’s hard to force yourself to eat at all while on Ozempic. Yet, you need the protein, and yogurt, cottage cheese and protein bars go down easier than regular meals.
I'd believe probiotics are involved. It seems to cause some gut issues as digestion slows down, so you really want to stay on top of fiber and a few other things?
I wonder how much the 2026 SNAP food stamp item rule changes will move this needle further, with several states using new federal waivers to restrict "junk food" items like soda, candy, energy drinks, or prepared desserts?
I thought it was interesting to see this around late 2023. Walmart had said the noticed a reduction in cart spend by those filling GLP1 prescriptions at their pharmacy.
This is why if we can get them down to ~$50 I think they are clearly +ROI just on the individual level.
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.
Your comment completely doesn't understand how hard it can be to be on a sustained diet.
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.
Self control is only effective for some people, so for others, meds can be the best option. We have plenty of natural selection that makes us crave calorific foods and often that craving will override our decision making. (Disclaimer - I'm not on weight management drugs nor intend to be)
Something feels extremely dystopian about this statement and I have no issue putting my finger on it. Stop judging others for how they want to live their life
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.
I agree with this take 100%. But also, anecdotally, I do know a number of people who saved enough on their grocery bill to pay for their GLP1. But whether that applies across the whole population, I've no idea.
I'd guess a majority of people could save more than enough in groceries just by planning meals and making an effort to budget instead of going on autopilot to afford GLP-1 drugs. Heck, I'd bet a majority of households eat way too much fast food and restaurant meals, and just doing things on purpose would mean hundreds of dollars a month per person in savings.
"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.
it's frustrating how much the entire world operates this way. the only solution i've found is to close my laptop and spend less time on the internet reading these things. maybe my apathy isn't the best thing ever but it certainly makes me feel better to ignore the things i can't change
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.
There are other major factors also influencing grocery prices, such as tariffs. It may because that was are seeing a significant influence on price, but one that is counteracted by other influencers.
If they aren't competing on price, what were they competing on to have Wal-Mart take over so much market share? Did people just switch to shopping at Wal-Mart because they like the greeters?
And what about Aldi and Lidl? Why do people put up with these weird German hard discounters, if not for lower prices?
We’re seeing similar in the UK, fast food restaurants are having to adapt and dieting companies have outright collapsed.
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.
How are they baseless? Why wouldn’t you gain the weight back? You have less muscle mass, out of control cravings, and the thought that you can just get back on later.
This isn't surprising to me. I'm on Topamax as an appetite suppressant & I notice a similar effect. A lot of the time a Soylent will do the trick, or a small snack that can't even be considered a meal.
Only strange because everyone who likes to be holier-than-thou claims the problem is all about stuffing your face with candy. Your number is off by as much as a factor of 10, by the way. The average American gains a pound a year or so, which is 1% or even less of a surplus.
Your conclusion is correct but the average weight gain is rather misleading. If people were actually gaining weight at that rate, then obesity would take decades to develop. In reality it's really more of an S curve where people quickly put on a lot of weight and then it levels off afterwards. So the overwhelming majority have stable weight, but a small fraction have very quickly increasing rates at any given time, leading to a small positive average.
This study looks at households where someone is using something like Ozempic, not all households. It's the second paragraph of the story and the first sentence of the linked study.
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period. When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels – and their grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before they started
That’s very interesting and it confirms what i thought about this drug. It’s a life long commitment. As soon as you stop, you end up becoming your old self whereas you don’t lose all the gains when you stop paying a nutrition expert.
This is more like someone who is bipolar who is functional when on meds, and goes back to being bipolar when they go off their meds. A nutrition expert cannot fix your brain chemistry, and will power is an illusion. A long term fix is needed for the GLP-1 pathway to properly regulate to the target metabolic profile. Fractyl Health is working on this.
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.
The shopping app I have used in my area for the past 7 or 8 years shows the number of "deals" in each category. This week there are 36 deals in "Cookies, Snacks & Candy" (up from 20-25 from winters past) and 19 in "Frozen Food" which is also higher than years past.
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)
hopefully it's reducing the demands of snacks filled with artificial crap and shifting the trend to give manufacturers an incentive to focus on healthier alternatives
There is lots of talk about food in these comments but the other part of the equation is exercise. You can eat as much as you want but then you have to burn those calories with exercise and most people don't.
That is pretty astonishing given 10% of Americans use semaglutide / tirzepitide.
> 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.
I personally do not use it, but know someone who does. She says it is more like a appetite suppressant. You just do not feel that hungry. Her doctor also said 'if you eat like crap this stuff will punish you'. Basically you will have some stomach cramps.
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.
It's the change for households where at least one person is taking it, not the entire population. So the effect size doesn't seem that large considering
People know in GLP-1 will tell me it “changed their metabolism”. Few fat people want to admit that they’re simply eating less, and if they ate less without drugs they’d also lose weight.
I worry that eventually fat people on GLP-1 will figure out a way to over eat, just as people with stomach reduction learned to sip calories all day long and get fat again…
>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024.
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.
> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
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 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.
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.
> 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%.
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.
>> calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods
How much is a bag of Doritos? Compare it with a bag of white rice, dry lentils, raw potatoes - processed is often more expensive.
> calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods
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.
>You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost
Not falsely. Back of the envelope. If you want to improve the model go right ahead, but I was upfront with its limitations.
> jjk166: You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost Give the guy some credit... No, clearly CGMthrowaway is not assuming that at all, it's purposly left out. The first sentence mentions "back of the envelope math" and makes it clear it's a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. Also it's in response to a statement about "wondering how you could get such a high impact overall". Also, also, the last sentence is "So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet."
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.
The decrease in spend was at the household level, not aggregate, so it’s a 5% decrease across 16% of households, or a bit less than 1% overall.
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.
> But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining)
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
> the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories
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
The question is how you calculate or define excess. For one, excess calories aren't 100% stored as fat. We're not that efficient.
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.
If I throw away 500 calories of food, I'm not eating an excess 500 calories. Let's not engage in equivocation
Assuming a steady surplus of 500, and considering that a kg of human fat is roughly 8000kcal, it will take two weeks to gain a kilo. But a larger person consumes more to simply stay alive so the curve flattens out once a certain mass is reached.
Excess means above what your metabolism consumes. If I'm 200 pounds and my metabolism consumes 3200 calories per day, eating 3200 calories per day isn't 500 calories in excess. Same as if I'm 600 pounds and 4000 calorie metabolism. It isn't excess unless its excess.
Hm, good point
These calorie numbers don't make much sense to me. The typical recommendation for how much a man should eat is 2000-2800 Cal/day, and for the average woman that is 1600-2200 Cal/day, depending on age and exercise levels [0]. So if it were true that the average American ate 3600 Cal/day, they would be eating 800-2000 excess Cal, not 400-700.
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...
You're right I seem to be referencing bad data, and the excess is probably more like 10-50 cals/day.
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
I'm not sure how this math checks out.
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?
As you gain weight, your base metabolic rate also increases. Having fat means you inherently burn more calories, even if you don’t exercise any more.
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.
Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1.
By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
The potential for overeating chronically has not been possible for most people, in most societies, throughout most of human history. Our current caloric abundance being available to literally everyone in Western society is something unique to the past century.
If you eat 1% fewer calories than you burn every day you will die. You will also die if you eat 1% more calories than you burn every day. Is it possible, really, to suggest that the availability of calories was 100% of the daily requirement of our ancestors, and not 99%, or 101%? That is a level of accident that exceeds belief.
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?
> unless they had a mechanism for satiation
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.
It's not necessarily about BMR - if you maintain a similar activity level as you gain weight, you consume more active calories as well, in almost every activity, particularly the most common ones such as walking.
This hits on something that seems to get lost in most of these "obese people are lazy fat slobs" circle jerks. A typical American gains 1 or 2 pounds per year as they age. This is not a candy problem, or a binge eating problem, this is way more subtle than that.
More subtle as in still not a healthy diet with exercise?
Let's take a pound of fat as 3500 calories. To gain one pound in a year is an average of 9.59 excess calories per day. Or about 0.5% of the typical total daily intake.
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.
Judging from the downvotes my observation got, you're not the only person who skipped math class. I couldn't say it any better than the comment below this one that already replied to you. 10 calories a day, expressed in candy, is two M&Ms.
> If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%
Probably not. Americans (households, grocery stores, and restaurants) throw away an insane amount of food.
> That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%
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.
Also need to account for restaurant spending.
> Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.
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?
> 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'
I don't think you've eliminated the likely hypothesis that overly processed food and GLP-1 use are significantly more prevalent in America. I don't think anyone would argue that these things don't exist at all in other countries, but we can still talk about degrees.
> we can still talk about degrees
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.
Ah but you see that's unfair, because Europe has much better beers than Asia.
That is certainly true. But now I feel like we need to talk about beer in America. Because as much as I love a real German beer, the variety and quality of beers we have to choose from in America is pretty astonishing. At least it seems that way in my bubble (and it certainly helps that I live in an area of the PNW that has a high per-capita number of breweries).
> the variety and quality of beers we have to choose from in America is pretty astonishing
That feels like a 2000+ change though.
1 in 12 is wild. That means about 50% of all obese germans are on GLP-1s.
It also likely includes T2 diabetics, where these meds are more or less best-in-class treatment now.
Are overweight but non-obese people unable to get GLP1s in Germany?
You need a BMI >30 or a BMI >27 + some risk factor like high blood pressure.
Well said, to add though they do make you crave certain foods differently - fruit more, processed foods less.
Mintel (market data company) claims 8% of Germans have tried a weight-loss drug in the last year and a further 15% are interested. https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/08/11/glp-1-affec...
For artificial problems, artificial solutions. I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards and eating habits (and city designs) which render the incentives really perverse
These drugs are expensive and, at least in France, they're discussing offering them. I think this is the main reason explaining the difference in prevalence between the US and the EU.
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].
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[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.
I can't get a solid statistic on this, but didn't the obesity rate basically plateau last decade in countries like Italy, France and Germany?
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.
According to [0] the overweight rate looks stable, but obesity went up.
[0] https://www.obesitefrance.fr/lobesite-cest-quoi/les-chiffres...
There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body. I agree, that has to do with "malbouffe" and other lifestyle choices. As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.
> a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
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.
> Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, ...
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.
Let it be noted that I have said overweight and not obese, if you are in the obese category you are 100% unhealthy (even the bodybuilders who inject stereoirs in this category are unhealthy).
It doesn’t change the argument. Most people who have BMI in the overweight range do not have healthy weights.
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.
Fair points
It's important to note that overweight and obesity are not the same thing. Most people are overweight, and from what I've seen of modern studies, the health risk of being overweight is almost negligible.
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.
> There are valid counterarguments to the overweight values, a lot of women who might be overweight are healthy because different % of fat are acceptable depending on the structure of the body
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 lived in Germany and Indonesia. It’s easier for me now back in the US than ever to eat healthy.
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)
It's a combination of a few things:
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.
I think there is argument to be made that the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia. I think maybe by living abroad you have adapted by default to a path (shaped by the environment) to eat more healthy.
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.
I agree that when it comes to portion size and whole foods, Europe makes it easy to follow by example. FWIW, I ate healthy in the US before because I rock climbed and needed to maintain a very lean mass. If I wanted to cut weight in Indonesia, it was easy: just eat their portion size, and I'd come in below maintenance.
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)
Here's some advice on all 3, and I don't even ask you to buy my supplements :)
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.
> 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)
They're saying this without irony? Or by "important" do they mean "the way I like it"?
> the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia
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.
As usual the difference is in distribution.
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.
The food deserts thing gets tired. It's a social media trope at this point. I lived in poorer neighborhoods growing up, and those who wanted to eat healthy made it happen. It just took more work, which is the point. Corner stores that stocked fresh fruits and veggies would just have them rot on the shelves due to no one purchasing them. It's consumer preference.
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.
Another data point for here. Not from the USA, I find the ingredients pretty good and we cook a lot at home, and we avoid anything super packaged, so yes, you could claim Americans don’t have a culture of eating appropriately
Tons of Americans want to eat healthy but don't have the energy/time/access. It's easy to cook healthy for yourself if you're single, have a good work/life balance, and have a grocery store nearby. There are a lot of Americans who eat fast food on the go because it's their only option (or they haven't been educated on how to get healthy food quickly). Others have lives where job and family responsibilities sap so much energy that by dinner time ordering a pizza is pretty tempting.
This is narrative ignores consumer preference. A salad can be delivered as easily as a pizza.
If you start looking around at the world you will likely start to notice an inverse correlation between those with “little free time due to working three jobs” and the amount of junk they feed their families.
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.
Consumer preference is a scapegoat. You can also make nicotine-free cigarettes, and people have tried, but they just don't sell. Of course consumers prefer the stuff that feels better. They have to.
Sugar free soda?
... is an exception, and not the rule.
Goodluck getting a healthy salad delivered outside of a major metropolitan area. In my city of a quarter million (not huge, not small) the options are pretty much limited to two or three places that only offer high caloric salads
> I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc.
These accessible food options come with a premium that I strongly suspect put them out of what a median income household can sustainably afford.
> 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.
> You know what is expensive, though? Meat.
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.
> These accessible food options
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.
The premium is surprisingly small (primarily because chopped goods ship better and need less protection than whole ones)
I'm not sure I believe that.
Not to mention the median income (in PPP) is higher in the US all but 4 countries.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
Whole Foods fresh vegetables prices are comparable to elsewhere, same with some dairy. However, everything else carries a premium and for budget minded people you need to avoid it.
> These accessible food options come with a premium
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.)
The pre-chopped coleslaw mix is like 3 bucks for a huge bag. 1 pound of pre-sliced frozen peppers I think is $2. Some of it depends on where you’re shopping, I’m sure this stuff would be 50-100% more at Whole Foods the next town over.
My issue with organic stores in Germany is that they offer the exact same stuff you can get in a regular supermarket, just smaller, less flavorful and more expensive. My pet theory is that a lot of people here just don't really enjoy food, so when they have kids or simply some extra disposable income, their idea of "eating better" would be to have the same bland plate of spaghetti, just with organic pasta and organic sauce.
Yes, whole foods is great, but if you look are they locations, name Americans don't have access to one and or cannot afford it.
Whole Foods isn’t the only store providing vegetables or pre-cut vegetables.
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.
Is it? Chicken breasts are 2.69/lb at my store. I guess it's been creeping up over the years, but doesn't seem unusually high to me.
My consumption of beef is way down because of the cost. I'm almost exclusively buying poultry and pork now for meat. Occasionally I'll get something like a top round or flank cut if it's on sale.
Vegetables are pretty terrible for caloric sustenance. Low density and high price.
It depends on what you call a vegetable. In the US, corn, potatoes, and ketchup are considered vegetables.
You need to make a distinction between leafy greens and starch.
Well, corn and potatoes are indeed vegetables, so there's that. And I think the only person who ever said ketchup was a vegetable with a straight face was Ronald Reagan 40 or 45 years ago.
"Eat your vegetables. They're good for you." shouldn't mean dipping your fries in ketchup. But that is what happens if you call corn and potatoes as vegetables.
Also price. What percentile of income do you need to feed a family of 4 on Whole Foods?
Cause and effect is backward. The locations indicate where people are buying it. And cheap doesn't really add up either because if somebody wants the cheapest possible calories they would be buying rice, flour/pasta, potato...
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.
Cooking good food takes time. I can slap some pre-made burgers in a pan, throw some buns in a toaster and have a "meal" in 10 minutes. I can stop by fast food on the way and have the same meal (at only slightly more cost) in 5 minutes.
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).
The average American spends five hours a day watching television. They could find the time if they wanted.
Not poor people, they are too busy to watch TV.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood. Busy doing what, exactly?
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.
Well, uh, working. The less you make per hour of work means the more hours you need to maintain a normal standard of living. Obviously there's variance in standards of living, but wealthier people don't typically work two or three jobs. Poor people do, I've met people who do. The reality is that at 12 dollars an hour, 40 hours is just not gonna cut it.
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.
You are correct. I should have added /s
Fast food almost always takes longer than that unless you can literally drive through while driving home from work.
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 said on the way for fast food. Since those places are eherywhere it is likely you can find one on the way when you were going and so the time cost to go is zero.
i agree you canecook faster than I normally do - a lot of meals benefit from simmering while the flavors blend.
So you're buying premade burgers (which take 2 minutes to make from fresh ingredients) but are making noodles from scratch every time, are you?
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.
Plenty of ways to automate the kitchen and also cook fast and easy meals. I can spend 20 minutes on the kitchen and have food for a week. 2-3 minutes of reheating per meal
Or you slap the burgers in a pan and serve it with some broccoli, and sliced fresh red peppers or other other quick healthy sides and have a balanced meal. The bun, fries and soda are the unhealthy part of a burger, anyways (assuming it's good quality meat).
> Cooking good food takes time [...]
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.
People do not want to be accountable for what they put in their body. "Cooking is hard. Eating healthy is hard."
It's shocking.
When it seems like a lot of people don't want to do something that is obviously good for them but, instead, opt for things they know kill them slowly, that probably means addiction is somewhere in the mix.
lol, Alnatura is the worst. I’d prefer any Netto, Späti, or even the small shops in a gas station, anytime. Alnatura is a para-religious “anthroposophical” shop and everything you buy has low quality due to adverse selection and is overpriced by 3x
A consequence of universal healthcare that people don't talk about much is that it turns unhealthy citizens from an individual cost into more of a collective one. So it makes sense that countries with universal healthcare regulate in favor of their citizens as opposed to their food industry, because they're paying for the consequences more directly.
Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.
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.
This (French) study [0] published in 2023 on data from 2019 calculates that the costs from legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, including higher helthcare spend during the life of smokers/drinkers, are still higher than revenue from unspent money on pensions and taxes, and cost of healthy person living years.
[0] https://www.ofdt.fr/sites/ofdt/files/2023-08/field_media_doc...
This sounds like an interesting proposition, do you happen to have the numbers to back it up?
This is both an argument in favor of universal healthcare, and my favorite argument for why the US should not implement it without first changing a whole array of perverse incentives.
That doesn’t seem to be working in the UK. We are nearly as bad as the US for obesity.
Indeed, I would caution pretty much everyone else in the world (except maybe Asians, but even then) to be circumspect when taunting Americans for their obesity rates. Germany, to use an example from this discussion, has been going up steadily for decades. Doesn't seem like this is a US-specfic problem or something that Europe has a good answer for.
Nonsense. This is essentially a bottom-up process, not the result of government regulation.
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
> I think the state of food in the US is really bad, and one cannot compare such products to the superior EU food quality standards
What quality standards are you referring to?
Meanwhile, YUM foods is probably working overtime trying to find a way to work around the effects of GLP-1.
I saw a Taco Bell ad for new "luxury" meal boxes. So perhaps their solution is to move up-market and high-margin
Demolition Man said Taco Bell would be fine dining by 2032, they might be on schedule. (It also said they'd be just about the last restaurant left, though.)
Most out of shape guy I know is German fellow who likes "healthy food".
I started a GLP-1 in October. I've been eating healthy and exercising for a decade, but I was still in the obese category and blood sugar tests indicated I was at the edge of pre-diabetes. If I pushed hard on calorie reduction or exercise, I could gain 10-20% improvement, but it seemed like that would always reverse itself when I'd hit an injury or got sick. I'm hitting my mid-40s and decided it was time for a drastic change. I could have continued yo-yo dieting or opt for a solution that gets me to a healthy BMI within a year.
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.
> it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.
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.
Sorry - I think there's complexity with insulin at play that you're overlooking. When I did caloric restriction, I was constantly battling hypoglycemic events that made me not want to exercise. I don't get that with the GLP-1s. In online discussions, people tend to conflate GLP-1 with appetite suppressants - but there's also insulin stabilization that occurs.
It's not just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us. Even in my grandparents generation of family had issues as well, and they were all blue collar manual workers that lived before processed foods.
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.
> there is also a genetic struggle as well.
Weird that it virtually did not exist pre ww2 and that it now affects 75%+ of your population
Because genetics alone aren't enough, you also have to have opportunity.
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.
I am not sure the genetic angle but there definitely is something happening at a craving level in the way the mind is responding.
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.
I have access to the same food as everyone else, I also have craving as everyone else, but as hairless monkeys we evolved a brain able to bypass instant rewards for future goals.
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
You are blinded by your experiences. I don’t think it’s as clear as “stop making excuses”. Obviously there is a healthy portion that is probably this but I do believe there is a borderline if not full blown addiction that happens where people are not able to put it out of their thoughts.
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.
> also have craving as everyone else
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.
What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?
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.
They still have a brain capable of complex thoughts and should be able to prioritise long term health over short term pleasures.
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
“Again I don’t really care”. Yet you keep coming back saying your way is the only way.
I'm convinced it is but you can't help people who don't want to be helped. People who want to be helped get out of the problem in a matter of months.
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
I have done that multiple times in the past but there came a point where I couldn't "white knuckle" my diet any more. GLP-1 has really helped a much better quality of life - lower cravings for food and alcohol, meaning that I am losing weight and feeling cheerful instead of gritting my teeth.
Why is that so bad?
What's your plan? pills for life? Life is tough, fighting cravings is on the easier side of what life's going to throw at us
Yes. What's wrong with that? There are large portions of the population that already do that for other health related issues.
We have decades of experience telling people to exercise more and eat better. If telling people those things worked, we would know by now. It doesn't. This is not in any way new.
natural selection. you can only cheat it so far.
Wow, you have solved all mental illness. Just change the way your brain works so its normal. Brillant!
Ah yes, the ever popular "they are just lazy or weak willed" rhetoric. Obesity is a disease just like addictions are. But I'm sure another round of "just try harder" pep talks and motivation posters will solve everything. Maybe stop for a moment and realize your perspective is narrow.
This is loser thinking: you are skinny because of luck. You are successful because of luck. You are rich because of luck.
> I also have craving as everyone else,
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.
The obesity rate in the US tripled in 45 years... so clearly it's not about genetics or cravings. People had the same genetics, cravings and access to calories in 1980 USA as today, we're not talking 1580 here.
Your point about having the same cravings as others is exactly as stupid as it was before you made this unrelated point about obesity rates.
Yeah right, I'm obviously an elite genetical specimen and 75% of people are simply dumb animals with insane amount of cravings I cannot even begin to comprehend. And these people didn't exist 45 years ago.
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
I'm not talking to you about obesity. I'm talking to you about the idiotic statement that you have insight into the qualia of other people. Everything else you're saying is irrelevant, I'm not trying to explain all obesity or whatever by appealing to cravings, I'm saying you're an idiot if you think you have insight into qualia.
But surely you realise something doesn't add up... Either cravings somehow automagically drastically changed in two generations or you're plain wrong.
> you have insight into the qualia of other people.
Yeah that's called statistics, averages, &c.
No, that's still really dumb. For example, maybe we always had radically divergent populations with regards to cravings but limited access to food. It's so easy to come up with situations to account for.
And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.
>I also have craving as everyone else
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.
> This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else.
We didn't go from sub 10% obesity to 40%+ obesity in 50 years because of people cravings.
No, it was probably the incredible advances in everyday automation combined with massive increases in food availability. Survival is not nearly as physically demanding today as it was in the middle of last century.
It's also a matter of making foods more addictive to increase sales. And creating marketing to do the same thing. And then creating food deserts, etc.
It's almost like the difference in the way ultra processed foods are digested, absorbed, and the way hormones are released in response has something to do with that. It's almost like this is a biological process. It's almost like the brain is an organ and if its hormones and chemicals are messed with, that can have health implications. Or maybe it just "don't be lazy".
> I also have craving as everyone else
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
Not remotely weird: people were poorer and food was more scarce across the board pre-WWII.
But how did people survive their craving, they must have all been completely on the verge of insanity right?
Are all these lean and healthy people from archive videos actually suffering and in distress? Poor souls...
> Are all these lean and healthy people
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.
“Eating disorders didn’t exist one century ago” is indeed some take.
Many people pre ww2 were perpetually hungry. Now they can afford as much food as they want
Obesity rate more than tripled since the 80s (1980s), people had already access to more than enough food to become obese in 1980 USA, so this alone doesn't explain much
It went up sharply in all countries. What is the common factor, if it is not the cultural moral failure you are painting it to be?
Or that it happens overwhelmingly in specific places with a very broad genetic mix.
There's negligible "genetic" difference between German and American gastrointestinal systems. No DNA mutations occurred in your grandparents that caused all of their children and children's children to be overweight.
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 just processed foods, there is also a genetic struggle as well. Looking at my family living in the US and in the EU, being overweight is a thing for a large portion of us.
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.
You're assuming something they didn't say. Genetics might mean a poorer response to GLP1, or a poorer metabolic response to specific hormones, or how we observe that people with ADHD have poorer eating habits, or if you're genetically smaller then your metabolism may be smaller, blah blah blah. There are many genetic factors that obviously impact weight.
We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.
I’m sure in 5 years all processed microwave meals and fast food will be “fortified with GLP-1”.
Historically, this is called "fiber", and has already been regulated to be required in European breads
> and has already been regulated to be required in European breads
Source needed.
I find this humorous but I’m also genuinely curious what the analogy is between fiber and GLPs?
Fiber is essentially mass with little to no nutrition in it. So it makes you feel fuller without adding calories, like GLP-1 drugs.
I do think there's a strong argument that lack of fiber and protein are huge contributors to the world's obesity problems.
In most developed countries people eat lots of fiber. Like just unbelievable amounts of meat, more than ever before in human history and prehistory.
What are you talking about?? Meat contains no fiber. The primary fiber source is plant-based foods (e.g., vegetables). So modern populations eating lots of meat means they're getting little to no fiber.
Sorry, that was a mistype, I mean lots of meat, very little fiber.
Probably simply "makes you feel full longer".
Why is it insane? You sound like someone who says to depressed people “just be happy”.
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.
When talking about ADHD medication, a doctor asked me why someone would choose not to wear glasses if they could see well with them.
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.
The part of the population that deals better with our food system want to feel morally superior.
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
Do you seriously think that you’re not in a minority of people taking GLP-1 drugs for IBS and not weight loss?
Why is taking it for weight loss such a bad thing? It improves quality of life, health, reduces risk when surgery is needed, etc., etc.
Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?
>It improves quality of life, health, reduces risk when surgery is needed,
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.
> needs to be taken forever
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.
Yeah, I'll be taking minoxidil for my hair forever. And zyrtec for my allergies forever. So it goes. "What if you get lost in a cave system for 30 years? What then?" I guess I'll lose my hair and be sneezing a lot, and gain weight. So it goes. Until then, it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it that people can't seem to grasp that the brain is just as biological as the kidney or pancreas? If your pancreas isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, of course we need to treat that. But if the brain isn't producing the right chemicals in the right quantities at the right times for normal healthy functioning, then obviously its willpower or laziness or whatever.
> Why is it that people can't seem to grasp
I imagine the perceived gap here is that “those” people understand thermodynamics and the failure to grasp is entirely in your hands.
I think it's a bit more popular outside the US than you make it out to be. As an anecdote, I know a handful of people on it in Denmark - and that's despite the local Danish price being higher than the German one and Denmark having notably lower obesity and diabetes rates than Germany.
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...
Processed foods are easier to modify. Hence, given corporate greed, they are addictive and unhealthy.
An astonishing number of people are type two diabetic in this country due to poor health and poor access to healthcare. But glp1 is covered as a diabetic treatment so a tremendous number of folks can get it at a reasonable cost.
I was curious for a UK comparison so I looked it up.
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/
I assume that translates to it being really hard to get in the NHS so people are resorting to buying it themselves. I wonder what the percentage would be if it was easy to get from the NHS?
UK numbers are always interesting because the NHS leans conservative about access to many types of care and medication.
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.
I live in the US. If those numbers are true, then it seems likely that I know at least one person on it. I however don't know that I know someone one it, since people (at least in the US) don't usually announce "Hi everybody, I'm taking weight loss drugs." Being overweight is seen as shameful, and losing weight through any means other than diet and exercise is an admission of failure.
The best part is feeling the judgement from someone who thinks taking GLP1s is a moral failure when they are carrying an extra 50+ pounds themselves. I have met many people who seem to believe that being fat is actually the higher moral ground than using medication to help solve it. And these are religious people, too! Don't they know about gluttony?
It's household spending, not nationwide. Presumably you'd see similar findings among German households on "this stuff".
> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.
I am not American, but I think you are unfairly dismissing the massive benefits GLP-1s have for people who struggle to maintain a healthy diet. It really feels like a miracle drug.
> 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
I think you are misreading the comment you are replying to:
> 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.
If you look at the increase in overweight and obesity rates in Germany over the last 50 years, it’s clear that far more of the population “needs” GLP-1 than is using it. The rate of use will almost certainly increase dramatically.
> It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US
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.
American here who lived in Germany for 3 years and now Scandinavia. Its what makes up the food. Most of the food served in America cant be served in the EU. Its straight up poison designed to make you addicted to it.
Couple that with a very car centric lifestyle and yea. Its not great.
> Most of the food served in America cant be served in the EU.
I'd love to hear any sort of actual facts backing that claim. It sounds truthy.
It does not read dismissive to me. They are surprised, yet not necessarily judging those who use it.
There can be a discussion about the perverse incentives of systems without judging the individuals.
> not necessarily judging those who use it.
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?
It's actually true that American's eat mostly processed food ... (Canadian's are not much better at just under 50%)
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ultra-processed-food-consum...
https://nutri.it.com/who-eats-the-most-processed-food-a-glob...
I didn't dismiss any benefits. But so many people needing an anti-addiction drug to get off addictive foods IMO should raise alarm bells.
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.
True, but what would sanctioning producers do? I think it's not even the availability of fresh products in the supermarket, but the willingness of customers to prepare food themselves? I agree it's postmodern funny that you need to continually buy something (a medicine) to not buy somethings (fast food) that are bad for you. I've got co-workers who only eat out. Guess what? What I think are salt and fat related health issues. Sugar, salt and fat are too easy and too nice not to be everywhere.
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
> It's unsustainable for a whole nation
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.
Food is addictive because all animals including humans are by our very genes instructed to be addicted to it. Even the most healthy food is addictive. Just like water and air is addictive.
I don't think "addictive" is the right term, but we have an evolutionary imperative towards eating to excess when there is food in excess, which wasn't maladaptive until recently.
No you can’t say that. Fat people don’t get fat on eating vegetables and water.
French fries are vegetables ;)
I’d advise folks to consider a) the relationship between poverty, stress, and obesity Nd b) the income inequality of the United States relative to Germany
You cited poverty as a reason but then switched to income inequality as the statistic.
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.
Absolutely. The American way of life traps people in a zoo. There is nothing to do other than work (if you are lucky), eat, and consume junk media. For ones who are poor the only difference is the degree to which the food is also junk.
This is patently false -- there is plenty to do besides consume junk media; the fact that our population is addicted to the dopamine associated with short-form video doesn't mean that there aren't other options.
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!)
I don't think you understand the situation the parent is describing. Golf is a luxury. Baking one's own bread is a huge luxury.
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!"?
No, I want to tell that parent to spend the hour they use scrolling TikTok to do literally anything else, it'll improve their life. I understand my experience is not typical, but there are many things besides "junk media" that are not cost prohibitive.
it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.
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.
JFC you do understand that not everyone in America is a software engineer like you who is well compensated and has a proper work/life balance? There are tons of people in America that are just ground into the dirt day in day out with no end in sight. Have some empathy.
Sure, i'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing against is the statement "there's nothing to do but eat and consume junk media"; That's simply not true, there is plenty to do, and a lot of it is not cost prohibitive.
... and that "bad" food in the US is frequently cheaper and easier to find than "good" food.
Over 50% of the German population is overweight, and over 20% is obese
I think many Germans will start using these drugs once they become cheaper
Obesity is not evenly distributed by age or demographic. If you're a relatively young person in the workforce, you probably don't know such people. But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe. Even the places with less "healthy" diets, suprisingly.
> But it is true that obesity is much less prevalent in most of Europe
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.
But obesity rates are going up there, too, they are just lagging behind the Anglo world.
Your friend circle in Germany probably doesn't have many members who were a proud big boned 5"7' 300lbs (~140kg).
For good reason.
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/
> In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011
How does that compare to, say, Japan? Why is Germany so much fatter?
The US population (~350m) is about 4 times that of Germany (~85m)...
Which has to be a pure coincidence, since the reported numbers are relative to population size. We could conclude that there are 4x4=16 times as many people with such high BMIs in the US, but that is not that useful
Several studies conducted during the last 50 years have shown that lower intelligence is associated with a higher body mass index.
So this is why SE Asia is kicking the crap out of the US and Europe?
In my (obviously anecdotal) experience, that’s not who the primary GLP1 user is.
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.
6’1” 230 wanting 210 without having a third bike injury for it. 40 doesn’t heal like 20, turn your head wrong and you are in pain for a month. It sucks.
I hear ya. Someone once told me there are 2 things no one can ever prepare you for: having kids and getting older.
I do want to get back into biking though. Haven’t ridden in a long time.
I really feel like this is just about the circle you are in. How many 300lb people do you know? 16% of the country is on GLP-1's as of mid 2024, Im sure its higher now. Every single massively overweight person I know has at least tried GLP-1s
Yeah that could be - I don’t know many 300lb people well enough to talk about that.
It’s not just the processed foods. It’s the sedentary lifestyle. US cities are so car centric that actually getting a minimal baseline of healthy activity requires working into one’s schedule. When I lived in Japan, everything is so walkable/bikable that it makes a significant difference in the base activity level of average individual. I imagine Europe is similar.
Perhaps they are less forthcoming about taking it. I wasn't aware my father was on it until I saw his medicine cabinet.
It's not just a US thing. Obesity rates in the UK and Germany are similar and I know plenty of people on GLP-1 drugs in the UK.
The supermarket "super user" category of people who bought a lot of food and people who are using it is likely not a small crossover
> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
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 don't know a single person on it either (USA), but it's not exactly something that people talk about. I am naturally quite thin, as is the rest of my family, but there's certainly no shortage of hefty people here.
It’s not just hefty people. Swimsuit season is a thing. A interesting metric would be gym memberships during the run up to summer. I expect they will be going down over time.
There are vast differences in obesity rates between rural and urban areas, and red states vs blue states. Someone in San Francisco California is going to see a lot less obesity than someone in Plano Texas. I’m sure it is similar in Europe, with the caveat that Europeans are healthier than Americans in general.
>It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
If you understood how super stimulants work, then you wouldn't have found it "insane."
I'm in the US and have a large friend circle across multiple states (from having moved for work over the years) and also do not know one single person using them. However my friends tend to be quite active.
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.
A close family member and myself are both on them. They get very upset if I ever mention them using them while I happily tell anyone about myself. Wanting to lose weight is shameful to many.
Wait for swimsuit season and I have a feeling your even active friends might start without telling anyone.
I live in the US and I don't know of anyone taking this drug. But if they were, why would I know?
Indeed, aside from online, where I don't feel consequences from admitting it, very few people know I've taken a GLP1. None of their business, and I don't need to waste seconds of my finite lifespan nurturing their need to feel morally superior. Let everyone worry about their own problems, I'll worry about mine. And I wish they were all as easily solved with GLP1s...
I am 47, Czech, slightly overweight (183 cm / 87 kg at the beginning), but with a lot of this fat concentrating on my belly. I don't eat horrible processed food and I exercise quite a lot, but I still wasn't satisfied, so I decided to try Mounjaro on the lowest dose (2,5 mg).
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.
in europe there is a social stigma around GLP-1 drugs, a lot of people considered it cheating and lazy, so a lot of people don't dare talk about their usage
I read this online, I don't know where it was, so I can't give a source, it probably was on twitter:
"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."
The social stigma in Europe exists, because these drugs are in limited supply. So, if a person who does not really need them is using them, the people who actually need them to stay alive might have difficulty accessing them.
> because these drugs are in limited supply
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.
this is the remains of the moral outrage that was online and in the media a few years ago when ozympic was first mediatised
Here's a short history of the official shortage statuses for various GLP1s from the FDA:
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.
Where is that? I'm pretty sure in France you can't just walk into a pharmacy and buy it, you need a prescription.
Yes, she has a prescription. I did not think it was relevant to the supply.
I think it's somewhat related. The French social security site has a page asking phamacists to make sure the prescriptions are correct, in order to guarantee availability to people who actually need this [0].
This sounds pretty much like the supply is somewhat limited for whatever reason.
---
[0] https://www.ameli.fr/pharmacien/actualites/antidiabetiques-a...
That is nearly a year old now.
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.
that's actually not true, Mounjaro and Wegovy are pretty much meant for weight loss and there is no competition over them for people with diabetes
Mounjaro is the tirzepatide equivalent to Ozempic (semaglutide) in that it’s prescribed for type 2 diabetes. Wegovy (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) are prescribed for obesity. Otherwise you’re spot on.
you can just order them to your home on any of the websites selling GLP-1. Stop the propaganda inferring that the public healthcare is bad and doesn't allow people to get their medicine.
In Spain you can't. You need to be authorised by a doctor to buy those drugs.
This is also true in the US -- these are prescription drugs.
This is not exactly correct. The fda approved named items require a prescription. However from the shortage years ago compounding pharmacies were allowed to sell alternative versions. Basically they add a B vitamin to the normal drug and boom non prescription GLP1.
With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.
Honestly it’s just because people who use them are considered to be weak minded and lazy. That’s all, the supply doesn’t matter.
We have been able to diet for millions of years, our body is pretty good at it, but some people NEED that to diet. Yeah, just like some people can’t be put to work. Everyone know that kind of people who are a burden on society and themselves.
It just happens that this drug is more available in the USA, but with the same availability in Europe, I bet there would be around the same percentage of user.
You also forget it is expensive and in many cases not taking charge by the respective healthcare autority of the country, so it leads to less consumption.
It is for sure expensive (~300€ / month) but from my understanding nothing like the prices you see in the US (+2'000 $)
I've known several users of GLP1's. None ever paid more than $600/mo for them once the "patient assistance" programs started, and even in the very earliest days the prices I heard were never more than about $1100 if paid in cash.
So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.
Yeah, Zepbound is $499 now. Out of reach of many, but an improvement from $549 last year.
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 :/
Wegovy tablets are $299 now.
that's good to hear, the sticker prices are insane
It's $66CAD including taxes where I am after insurance. I save 3-4x that on less groceries.
And its for life. Unless you are doing it for Instagram only... "The Insta Diet" as it is called also.. When the diet finishes, you will gain the fat instantly also (just as with any diet obviously).
There may be, but I haven't seen anyone lose significant weight either since this started.
In Austria I have noticed a massive social stigma. I think that's embarrassing and backwards. As someone who is very athletic and takes nothing extraordinary besides creatine and whey protein I fully support anyone who wants to become healthier, with or without medication.
In my experience this is not healthy. People who had problems with weight are very quickly losing excess weight and displaying a range of symptoms related to that including sunken and starved looking faces and significant loss of lean muscle mass. Changes made to the face with rapid weight loss may become permanent and especially for older people the loss of lean muscle mass can become a major health problem. Sudden extreme changes in body composition are often neither healthy nor stable.
There might be health problems associated with these drugs but they need to be compared to the next best option. I think for a lot of people on these drugs the next best option is continuing the status quo which has a lot of negative health outcomes as well.
Or, you know, just less obese people
We have quite a few obese people. Not as many as the US, but not few either.
> France [...] 2020 [...] excess weight was 47.3%, with 17% of subjects being obese
https://presse.inserm.fr/en/obesite-et-surpoids-pres-dun-fra...
Many of my not obese friends started using it out of pure laziness. But in general I believe that obese factor too :)
Maybe it's just not as talked about. Why would anyone bring it up. I can already sense the condescension in your statement.
Title is misleading, it’s “[Among households with an ozempic user], grocery spending reduced by 5.3% on average. It’s not overall
Look he's doing the "we are not like that in Germany" meme
They wouldn’t tell you that they are on it
I don’t think it’s any more insane than 40% of Germans believing in the efficacy of homeopathic remedies. Different cultures and different problems.
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.
This is one of the major reasons why Americans are stuck with expensive private healthcare that never gets talked about. People who are used treating their insurance as an all-you-can eat buffet will feel like their health coverage is getting worse under a socialized healthcare system that is pressured to keep costs down. No government is going to foot the bill for a costly drug under patent when they can do perfectly fine with cheaper older generics a fraction of the price.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iM103vKdI5E
The overall food quality in Germany is significantly higher than in the US. Visit an Aldi or Lidl in Germany, then visit one in the US; night and day difference in food quality.
You can tell Germany cares for its population via food regulation and from what's offered; whereas, it's a toxic trash heap in America solved with drugs or paying a higher premium for healthier items. The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people. Feels like Americans are paying for a premium upfront or downstream via pharmaceutical/healthcare solutions.
I haven’t seen that difference between German Aldi/Lidl and American Aldi; are you thinking of any particular items? Americans just buy more food.
Probably 95% of Germans live 15min from an Aldi. There are no Dollar General food wastes because the country is much denser and poor people have access to much better public transport
True. Population density differs by about 2.5x, and the US has some truly depopulated areas that essentially don't exist on the European contintent.
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.
>The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people.
what percentage of people on Ozempic etc. are poor enough that they would be priced out by healthier food?
The rate of type 2 diabetes in Germany is almost the same as the USA at 9.8% vs 10.7%. Ozempic is a T2D drug.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
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.
They are probably still eating processed food just less of it...
i considered it, but the gym was a much better option.
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!
You can't out excercise a bad diet. You can hit the weights for 2 hours straight every day and eat those calories back with a single bad dietary choice (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).
My experience, in my mid 30s, has been that I slim down pretty damn quick when I'm able to run 10k 3-4 times a week. Unfortunately, due to my knees and my childcare responsibilities that's "not anymore". More generally, anytime I've trained for performance at anything other than pure powerlifting (climbing, kickboxing, cycling), my experience has been that my weight more or less falls in line.
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 must’ve missed when peanuts became a bad dietary choice. What’s the evidence for this?
OP isn't saying peanuts are a poor source of nutrition. OP is saying a few peanuts are calorically dense and it is easy to consume hundreds of calories through seemingly inconsequential amounts of snacks and drinks.
Calories isn't everything, there is a lot more focus these days on how different foods affect metabolic hormones affecting satiety, blood sugar, etc. On those metrics, fat alone (which account for most of the calories in peanuts) is very satiating and does not trigger a later blood sugar drop (which causes cravings). That's why people on a diet drink 'bulletproof coffee' (coffee with butter in it), because it is extremely filling while not making you hungry later.
Depends on what your entire diet is. If you are eating only peanuts - or anything else - that is bad. If you eat a handful of peanuts once in a while that is fine. Even a cookie every few weeks is fine, but 6 cookies a day every day would be bad. Someplace in between is generally a good place to be.
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.
But GP literally said
> (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).
A handful of peanuts is roughly the amount of excess calories burned in a 30 minute cardio workout (I'm assuming).
It's not that it doesn't work. It's not the primary tool for weight management. Gym is great for strength, muscle, cardio, and general fitness, but weight management is mostly about counting calories that go in. The calories that you burn are a function of your metabolism first and to a lesser extent the amount of exercise you do. The exercise side of things is < 500 kcal for most people per day.
> but the gym was a much better option.
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.
If I go for a 10k, I burn ~1100 calories (I'm a big dude). I can eat that deficit no problem, hell, I was able to maintain my weight during my marathon training last summer.
It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.
Even easier than the gym, and cheaper ! Eat less shit. Simply.
If you eat only vegetable and meat, you’re going to have a hard time gaining weight.
I mean, 75% of americans are overweight or obese right? It's wild that the richest / least obese counties in the US still have 15% of people who are obese ( https://datacommons.techsoup.org/ranking/Percent_Person_Obes... )
Overeating doesn’t just happen in a bubble - there is a confluence of issues creating anxiety and stress in Americans’s daily lives leading to the obesity issue.
I agree with this take too. Culture influences it but I don’t think anyone can be singled out being immune. We are stressed and overworked. Simple food takes work. We no longer have a village. If you have kids so many are just stuck at home.
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.
We all drive to where we’re going we do not walk or bike daily like most Europeans do. When in Europe for my ten day trips I always come back five to ten pounds lighter.
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 :)
Most Europeans do not bike daily. Most drive cars where they need to go. You are not losing 5 to 10 pounds in 10 days (unless you are dehydrating yourself). 5 pounds would be a 17,500 calorie deficit or 1,750 per day. The base metabolism for a male is around 1800 calories. That means that you'd be eating 1/10th of a banana every day to get that type of loss. For me a century bike ride (100 miles with 5,000ft of climbing) consumes about 2,900 calories. Are you doing century bike rides every day while only eating 1,200 calories while in Europe?
Math checks out.
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.
Because you are on vacation. That’s why you walk. Europe is much bigger than Amsterdam and Berlin. People drive everywhere here too. You should look up average steps per day by country and you will see the difference between the US and European countries is practically inconsequential, especially taking into account how few calories walking burns.
Nobody telling you because you have only judgements about it instead of empathy
Americans (and increasingly us Europeans) are pigs.
The society is built to sit in a chair 8h, get in your car and drive 1h home and sit in a chair. Then repeat.
Also "eating 3 meals a day"
I eat 3 full meals, I blow up like a balloon. I don't get it. It's like they have to constantly eat. When I was a teen or in my 20s yes. Now in my 30s its game over.
It is also the way society, public transport, cities are designed.
I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
>> I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?
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.
That's not uncommon in New York either.
One (1) city in the USA with 10million people vs most of Europe depending on how urban it is.
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.
> 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
I mean, why on earth would they think anything of it?
One of the heaviest people I worked with only ate one meal a day.
> One of the heaviest people I worked with only ate one meal a day.
People usually lie or have no idea how many calories they consume.
The entire world eats 3 meals a day. Even if you eat 6 meals a day you can easily lose weight. It’s about the contents of the meal, not the frequency.
I eat one meal a day for as far as I can remember. Fatties love to tell me it's unhealthy, my doctor hasn't figure out yet though so I imagine it really isn't that unhealthy.
Eating three meals a day is a very very very recent thing if you account for human history, or even modern human history
You need to include more info about your one meal, height and your actual weight. If your 5'2 this is alot less interesting
180cm, 75kg, leanish, I optimise for rock climbing and do kettlebell workouts 2 to 3 times a week. I do close to the bare minimum of what is available to stay in decent shape, it takes me less than 4 hours a week total. Not counting the time I save cooking/eating
mhm! i do pretty well portioned 3 meals. small breakfast, small lunch, average sized dinner. i really like just grazing all day, eat a cracker or two, have a yogurt, have some chips etc. id honestly say im snacking a good bit whenever i feel like it. but exactly, portion and contents. im a pretty lean 150lbs
Yes but US portions are anything but small
Okay, you are correct but not realistic. 3 realistic meals in USA and Western Europe then. Cofee/toast or cereal/musli for breakfast, bought lunch
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.
Eh, the drugs work. A great many people in the US struggle with weight despite shifting to high quality foods, fad diets, exercise etc. I'd honestly attribute the root cause to high general stress levels in daily life.
16% is a huge number. Really hope this doesn't end up being one of those cases where a hidden negative isn't known until years later because that's a really large chunk of the population that would be impacted. That said, lots of people do seem to be getting a better life now because of the drugs.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
hah, they're not using them to get off of processed foods... they're using them to reduce the impact of processed foods
You really don’t know what you’re talking about and should not make inflammatory comments.
Completely different demographics, too. USA has large sub-Saharan African and Hispanic populations, which seem to have higher rates of obesity and so forth. Ethnically, Germany is probably majority North-African, Middle Eastern and Central European. Genetics plays a big part.
Germany is at 24% obesity rate and the US is about 10% higher.
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.
Germany is simply further from the origin of the Maize incident.
There are so many things going on in the US impacting our health. Nobody's been more passionate about fixing it than RFK Jr but there are so many entrenched financial interests it's a long road.
Nothing surprising for me. Unless you're in the top percentiles in terms of self-discipline, becoming obese is usually a one-way road. GLP-1 is a lazy solution for a problem that primarily stems from laziness.
"Lazy" is a pejorative term, which makes your comment sound denigrating to users of GLP-1s. If that is your intent, then your issue with people using medicine to help them avoid diabetes and heart disease is that....it's too easy?
There is no way approximately one-sixth of a population are taking GLP-1 strictly for legitimate health issues.
Obesity is a legitimate health issue.
I would rephrase it as "lacking high sense of self-control leads to legitimate health issues".
So what? Why does that bother you? Is the (European) hatred towards your fellow brothers and sisters so strong that you prefer them to be chronically unhealthy, when there is a solution for them?
idk about them but to me people who don't value their own life and well being to that point are repulsive to me. Such a lack of discipline and self esteem, if you can't even control what you put in your mouth what can you even control? Why even bother if all you're capable of doing is mindless consumption? What can I trust you with if you can't even be trusted with yourself?
Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system when they're obese and still a major strain when we have to put them on drugs for the rest of their lives because the drugs will never fix their willpower and only temporarily fix the symptoms
We should also obviously send 90% of food industry CEOs for a life long retreat in a dark cell somewhere underground because they clearly are part of the problem. I understand some people have legit health issue making them more prone to being overweight but these people don't even account for 10% of the total.
I hope one day you'll realize how easy it is to be judgmental on the internet and think of people you don't know as somehow less than human. If you think people who "can't control what you put in your mouth" are incapable of self control, you should see the amount of self control it took me not to post the things I wanted to post about you. Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
> Try to have more empathy and compassion in your life.
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
You don't actually know the definition of empathy, do you?
I suspect if you verbalized that to people they would find you equally repulsive.
People are cable of recreating themselves and digging themselves out of holes, sometimes even to later become greatly admirable.
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.
> 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".
Some are way more avoidable, and much more of a burden (cig, alcohol, obesity, &c.). Nobody's upset at old people who get the flu and use an ICU bed. But if you're 40, smoking, obese and get the flu imho you're ripping what you sow and I won't be crying for your demise.
> Europeans bla bla bla
If you want to go into caricature I could tell you Americans are trying to recreate Matrix style pods, for them it would be paradise, you could go from birth to death without any single inconvenience. All of your problems come from over consumption... of foods, of medicine, of tech, and you keep piling more on top of it thinking the next layer will solve the previous layer's consequences.
This headline is a touch misleading as it gives the impression of being across all US households, the quote is:
>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%.
Thank you. It didn't make sense that if 16% of the population was on these drugs that grocery spending overall would be down over 5%.
That's not "a touch" misleading. It's very misleading.
Unless the title was changed, it says "average" which to me pretty clearly means it's measuring individual or household consumption
The question is what average; some people apparently view "in the US" as implying US population-level averages (which it does not explicitly imply), whereas authors report the average within adopting households, which for this study's data source, all happen to be in the US
If the claim was just that grocery spending is down 5.3% across the country they wouldnt have said average, the title would just be "Ozempic reduced grocery spending by 5.3% in the US"
That works out to something like $30-100 a month for most households. A bit disappointing for those hoping the savings on food would pay for the drug at the current drug prices.
The cash-payer (no insurance) price of GLP-1's has fallen by about 70% since I started on them 18 months ago, from around $1100/mo to $350/mo, for brand-name non-compounded (Ozempic, Zepbound, etc). Many people also stretch that 1 month supply to last longer, as well (eg "click counting").
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.
> The cash-payer (no insurance) price of GLP-1's has fallen by about 70% since I started on them 18 months ago, from around $1100/mo to $350/mo
My total food bill is still a fraction of that.
You are spending a fraction of $350/mo on food? I'm actually interested in learning more...
About $6/day, Canadian. Only for myself. Not counting energy costs.
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.
Thanks for sharing, this is useful advice for a fellow Canadian. If you don't mind me asking follow-ups:
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.
> 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?
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.
Cheers. This is great advice, thanks.
Thanks for sharing, I am also a Canadian. I'll read and digest (no pun intended) what you wrote.
n=1, I pay $300/month for 2.5mg of Zepbound (tirzepatide) for cash pay direct via http://lilly.com/, shipped to my door.
(no affiliation, I just like the drug)
LillyDirect is $400-450 for standard doses though. 2.5mg is just a starter and most people should be off of that dose pretty soon after they start.
FWIW tirzepatide is the more expensive of the GLP1s right now.
> 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.
While you might be right in what you have presented, your calculation of the total savings is not including reduced medical spending.
I mean considering most drugs don't result in any cost savings on routine household spending, that's still pretty welcome.
Yet they seem to be spending more in restaurants:
> 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)
Maybe a bias on wealthier households in the US who can afford these drugs. Personally, my total food spending is down 30%. GLP 1 is $66CAD after insurance.
I can't say exactly what the numbers are, but anecdotally, there are a lot of "research" users buying tirz (and reta, for that matter) for a few bucks a week on the gray market. The better known sources sell out batches in a week or two, which amounts to 750K-1M worth of product (at gray prices, not retail). There's a reason you're starting to see regular news stories about it.
I'm curious how these below-the-radar users skew the numbers. Maybe not at all?
GLP-1s are a fairly strong proxy for having enough discretionary income to justify luxury expenditures like eating out or whatever.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US
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.
And crucially, many of those bad foods can be pretty addictive. They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more. So it’s not surprising many people struggle to change that habit when the food ecosystem is working against you. Junk food both tastes better and is easier to eat than home-cooking a very healthy meal. You’re not exactly set up for success here.
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period.
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.
Insurance companies should have to refund your premium when they do this for the time period they are making a decision. It's gotten absurd how badly they are abusing patients.
Frankly, it should be considered fraud.
It's not just GLP-1 type drugs.
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.
Both those drugs are also known to suppress appetite in many people - to the point that some used them solely as appetite suppressants.
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)
Since we are taking about ADHD, these drugs also help with executive function and impulsivity. Even without their appetite suppression effects, they might help ADHD sufferers stay on task with losing excess weight.
This comment is more insightful than it may appear initially. It looks like the 5% drop is in comparison to the pre-Ozempic spending. To what extent is the cut on spending monetary i.e. "I am spending more on this drug and will cut back my other expenses." Sure, Ozempic will kill the cravings, and that is probably the main driver, but from a 5000 foot view, this is using money to buy drugs instead of foods. In a very abstract way, it's the same as buying amphetamines to lose weight, just with a different (arguably smaller) set of side effects.
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 am spending more on this drug...
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...
That’s crazy cheap, I pay close to 400€ (!!!) monthly for Tirzepatide (GLP-1) and close to 50€ for Lisdexamfetamine (ADHD) in Spain. Truth be told, the ADHD meds are covered by the Social Security health insurance or I’d be paying double that, but I don’t think GLP-1s will ever be covered here.
This happened when I started Adderall, but eventually appetite came back after a few years.
I do think this could only be temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry. It's only a matter of time until food additives or varieties are discovered that partially ameliorate the effects of ozempic.
... do you have any evidence to back up this claim?
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
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.
I don't really understand how this is big food "winning against GLP-1 agonists."
Aren't they just selling healthier meals with smaller portion sizes?
They are eating healthier, the above is not at all evidence for the original claim.
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.
bowl-slop is getting smaller and is now cup-slop
How do citizens of the US tolerate this?
I'm baffled how messed up the food industry in the US has gotten over the last decades. When I was in the US I remember ordering pancakes in the morning. Those pancakes for like 10 bucks lasted for the whole week because I couldn't stuff so much in my stomach.
I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil. Good luck trying to get an actual healthy salad where the toppings aren't full of sugar or oil. When we cook something with oil here and fry it, it's too much if you use 5 spoons of oil. When people in the US fry something in oil, they pour at least a gallon in the pot, and call it "good food" afterwards.
It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU. I'm really glad I don't live in the US anymore. It was so exhausting having to buy whole foods and things without peanut, corn/maple, oil or sugar in it.
It's like 99% of processed food is made out of waste of those industries, can't explain it otherwise because it doesn't make sense to me. 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 funny, I feel I had the opposite experience going into EU. Maybe it's regional? Anyway we were eating out a bunch around Slovenia and menus had a lot of "mixed meat" "fried cheese" type foods and servers would look at you funny if you wanted just vegetables. I got the vibe that they felt like they were letting you down if they didn't offer you their best meat so maybe it's a cultural leftover from hungrier times
It's more typical of that country and especially the balkans.
I've just learned to ignore everything that's not factual on a box. I'm basically flipping it over to read the ingredients.
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.
>How do citizens of the US tolerate this?
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 dont think nearly anyone in the US considers anything fried to be healthy.
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
It's a prediction. Not a terribly unreasonable one as far as I can see. If a drug can move 5% of the ~trillion dollars spent on groceries in the US, there's a lot of money available for clawing those 5% back.
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?
There are sometimes truly bizarre demands for evidence. I once posted a pure opinion piece -- essentially a moral judgment on what is good and what is bad (in the domain of technical writing) -- and got hit with "source?"
Me.
I am the source.
Why wouldn't they have already been looking for a way to make their food more palatable? There was already a lot of money on the line
I think if there were certain foods which, for some reason, aren't as affected by Ozempic-type drugs' (GLP-1 agonists?) appetite suppression effect - and I'm not an expert, but I totally wouldn't be surprised if there was - then I think the food industry would be very interested in finding them.
The figure isn’t 5% of all grocery spending, it’s a 5% household change after one member starts GLP-1.
Fair enough. The ~trillion dollars also includes things which presumably wouldn't be affected by ozempic, like overpriced razors. But either way you look at it, it's probably going to move enough money to seriously hit the food industry.
I predict you’ll retract this comment.
I don’t have any evidence that you will, but since you seem to think that’s ok, here goes!
At what point does a demand for evidence come back around to making the requestor seem less like a prudent, rational truth seeker and more like someone with naive lack of personal, lived experience? Like, not a single soul will say "got evidence for that assertion?" when it's a news story about EA or Oracle or Adobe acquiring a company and people are predicting that the acquired product will be destroyed, and isolated demands for rigor will be laughed out of the comment section. Why is that - when does it flip over to "oh, so I guess it's okay to just nakedly assert that food companies will seek profit by reformulating their recipes, even though there isn't a shred of evidence to support that, therefore, we're now allowed to predict anything!"
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.
Destroying a product is a well understood process, and we've witnessed many big companies do it. That's evidence!
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.
It IS OK. You're on.
They'll be hard pressed to find something that isn't running into medical regulation territory.
But will medical regulation be an obstacle? All sorts of laws feel like they aren't the protection they used to be.
Wanting evidence for random claims is arrogant? I'd say magical thinking is whats arrogant.
A prediction is not a claim.
Predictions operate on events that will happen in the future.
Proofs typically operate on things that already exist.
As meta as this comment is, I can't help but note that parent may simply be engaging in pattern recognition.
it’s actually true and they’re trying to develop GLP-1 resistant foods by using other sensory channels: https://archive.is/N0whF
This should be viewed like attempts to put the cocaine back in coca-cola. The industry may be able to get away with "our food is naturally delicious", but engineering it for superior addictiveness should be banned. Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.
> Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.
Not going to get there under any FDA. The FDA never cared about food engineering and never will.
Capitalism creates these monstrous corpo-organisms, and while we have found one way to strangle "Big Processed Food" this article shows that BPF has a will to survive.
I don't know about a full on conspiracy, but it's no secret that in the US they put a lot of additional sugar into products you wouldn't think had them.
I was in the US for 4 weeks as a tourist, the amount of additional time and effort it takes in the US to eat healthy is mind boggling.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
I experienced the same, and no it isn’t.
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
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.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
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.
What kind place were you eating at the puts sauce on steak? Are you complaining about a BBQ restaurant, they are notoriously unhealthy.
> What kind place were you eating at the puts sauce on steak?
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...
One of those places, was a very fancy restaurant in Washington DC, with photos of presidents dining there hung on its walls.
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.
Where did you visit? I don't think I've ever lived in a city where it wasn't trivially easy to find healthy food in abundance.
All the ingredients you get in Europe you can get in the US easily
Most of them, sure. But I doubt all of them. Just like you can't get all the different American ingredients in Europe.
Hell, you can't even get all the European ingredients in all of Europe. Good luck finding all the Danish ingredients in Italy.
Truly spoken like someone who's never been out of their region.
Name an ingredient and I guarantee I'll be able to find it in either walmart or walgreens.
The evidence is the future event/state/action that proves or disproves the prediction.
Additives already added to food exist to circumvent natural protections. Small leap to extend this to bypassing glp.
What natural protections?
Natural protection against overeating.
Such as?
Fiber mostly, but that's not an addictive, I guess that's a subtractive.
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.
I have evidence reedf1 thinks this could only be temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry, yes. My evidence is the comment above by reedf1, where he says it could only be a temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry.
Why bother when the junk food industry can just lobby hard and make these drugs illegal
> “The data show clear changes in food spending following adoption,” Hristakeva said. “After discontinuation, the effects become smaller and harder to distinguish from pre-adoption spending patterns.”
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?
After discontinuation of Ozempic, people start to gain the weight again (and buy again more food), that’s why the spending changes again.
People must be getting prescribed this medication in a vacuum without any corresponding nutritional guidance. I can't see any way of going back to my previous eating habits, mainly because I've really had my eyes opened to how mindless some of my eating was before.
Which is no surprise to anybody with common sense, the data for discontinuing GLP-1s show exactly the intuitive outcome. Zero diet change, zero habit change for the vast majority of users. Weight loss is accomplished via biochemical tricks to eat less volume of calorie dense junk food, rather than diet substitution. When the artificial appetite suppression ends, volume of the same food increases again leading to weight yo-yo. Plus why start to exercise when you’ve got a magic weight loss drug?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people using these drugs to get out of a pit of inertia with weight and sedentary lifestyles. But it’s small. GLP-1 drugs will have most users hooked for life because they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss without it. Cha-Ching!
> they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss
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?
> That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time.
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.
Why do we need to try anything? This comes down to individualism versus collectivism.
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.
It's possible that there could be long term side effects that we don't know about, but given the number of people taking these drugs we would likely already have seen some indication of them. I guess we will find out!
Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
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.
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
> 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.
> It's interesting that overall spending doesn't decrease that much in the end
Only after discontinuation. GLP-1s should be considered chronic medication for most people.
There was an interesting study recently that showed coming off actually caused weight re-gain an order of magnitude worse than yo-yo dieting.
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.
> but really it hints towards obesity being more than just “fixing your relationship with food”
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.
Citation? Sounds dubious
There are a couple recent stories that people put on weight something like 4x as fast if they go cold turkey after a GLP1 than if they quit a normal starvation diet. This intuitively makes sense, because an average GLP1 weight loss is way higher than most people can attain with willpower alone. So when they stop, the body screams "feeeeeeed me!" at incredible volume.
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304
"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."
My brother was on it for a bit (and should go on it again) and the thing he noted was that it makes it easy to not eat but it gives you no useful habits to keep that up because it's so easy.
Which makes sense. I still calorie count everything generally because I know I'll let myself creep portion sizes unchecked.
I don't think it's natural (in the sense of defining health) for adequate homeostasis to require special rituals and constant attention.
Agreed 100%. I think if your strategy for maintaining a good diet relies on weighing food and counting every last calorie, you are inevitably going to fail. Something more fundamental, natural, habit forming, whatever -- that will be the right answer. Naturally trim people don't count calories to stay that way, either.
Look at the modern world and tell me where natural is supposed to fit in though?
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.
So what do you suggest instead?
I think durable habits there are just hard honestly. I was losing weight when I was very strict about calorie counting and lived with a roommate who was on the same diet, but when I moved out and stayed with family my habits and intuition about safe foods didn't last long and temptation got me again.
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?
> 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.
Snacking (defined as between-meal eating) has had a massive uptrend (in the USA) since the 1970s:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10097271/#:~:text=S...
Around here fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks. In fact, replacing the snacks with healthy food in our case increased spending. So it is awesome that these households managed to cut spendings.
> fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks
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.
> In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo:
That's definitely not something I expected to be cheaper in Canada than the US.
Well, some fruits are cheap. But there's plenty of expensive fruits that people might want to eat, too.
There are plenty of expensive snacks.
I can buy a bag of apples for less than what a pack of Little Debbie snacks cost.
You're probably not living off either.
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.
> When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.
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.
I think you completely misunderstood what I wrote.
I don't know how else to understand "When comparing things like bread and butter, the ultra processed versions are much cheaper.", other than as a claim that ultra-processed versions of things like bread and butter are much cheaper than non-ultra-processed versions of them.
I decided to check one of my local grocery stores because I honestly wasn't sure where they stood relative to each other.
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.
Maybe I should have compared individuals then. One apple can be had for less than dollar and one snack cake is over a dollar
Either way people should be eating apples, bananas, pears (as well as cheese, nuts...), instead of snack cakes.
Modern apples have been bred to be larger and a lot sweeter than "natural" apples which are smaller and more sour. Not saying they are equivalent to a processed snack cake but they aren't especially healthy either.
That’s what I’m noticing about apples more and more these days: all of them are incredibly sweet like candy. The only variety I’ve found that seems suitable for regular eating ate the Granny Smith variety, but I hate their tough skins.
When you think of it in the context of a person with not much cash or time to work with, there's other advantages Little Debbie brings...
- 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.
If you're going to use those excuses, don't forget to add that economically disadvantage folks can't buy in bulk because they don't have enough money, and live in food deserts where people can't buy in bulk, and they don't have anywhere to store those items.
1 box of snack cakes still has better shelf life than 1 bag of apples.
Yep, totally agree. Point 3 is probably a bit moot with apples but applies to almost every vegetable out there. But IMO the best selling point for unhealthy, sugar-rich snacks is easy of storage. You go to the supermarket and can buy 1 month of snacks easily, you cannot do it with fruits.
I buy 3-pound bags of dried fruit all the time.
Dried fruits are not as good as fresh fruit though (and can be less palatable)
I don't think the evidence really supports the nutrition claim. The dehydration process might destroy certain vitamins at a chemical level, but those are extraordinarily cheap to replace (nobody in the developed world is at serious risk of deficiency disease) and the minerals aren't going anywhere as far as I'm aware. (Of course, our produce has lower mineral content than that of yesteryear, because of agriculture that prioritizes accumulating water and starch, and because of poor soil quality.) You just have to drink water along with them.
As for the taste, chacun a son gout, but I quite like them.
Now I'm picturing someone peeling their Zebra Cakes and cutting it into slices.
Calorie wise you'd need to 2-3 apples to equal most Little Debbie snacks, but in terms of satiation the opposite is true.
I don't disagree. I was responding to the specific claim in the post I replied to:
> 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.
Yeah, I'm not on ozempic (though considering it, to get the last bit of the way to where I want to be and ensure I don't bounce back, which is frankly a lot harder than "just" the initial loss) but lost 20kg+ on diet changes, and the price of fruit and berries is shockingly high. But my dietary change still saved us a lot more from cutting takeaways alone...
To clarify the headline, this is the effect for households that use a GLP-1, not the country overall.
> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.
For those that really need to lose weight I think these drugs are likely hugely beneficial. Obesity has so many downsides and is a huge net drain on healthcare systems.
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.
I'm confused by the language...
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...
Presumably it's difficult to figure out individual grocery spending, so they measured the household level spending.
So when one (or more) people in a household begins taking the drug, the household spending goes down by that much.
How can they measure individual grocery spending habits? People buy groceries for their whole household.
The title snippet here is potentially misleading. From the paper:
> 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.)
> a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.
Interesting. Wonder what it is about yogurt and ozempic users. Probiotics?
People who start on a new drug also make lots of other lifestyle adjustments. Especially when it's a weightloss drug.
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.)
It’s hard to force yourself to eat at all while on Ozempic. Yet, you need the protein, and yogurt, cottage cheese and protein bars go down easier than regular meals.
I'd believe probiotics are involved. It seems to cause some gut issues as digestion slows down, so you really want to stay on top of fiber and a few other things?
Yeah, I found out the hard way about that about two weeks into my journey and it was not a pleasant experience.
protein
My initial question was whether this 5% was overall or just for households with someone using ozempic.
It looks like it’s just for users, not across the board.
Households that contain one or more users.
> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.
I wonder how much the 2026 SNAP food stamp item rule changes will move this needle further, with several states using new federal waivers to restrict "junk food" items like soda, candy, energy drinks, or prepared desserts?
I thought it was interesting to see this around late 2023. Walmart had said the noticed a reduction in cart spend by those filling GLP1 prescriptions at their pharmacy.
This is why if we can get them down to ~$50 I think they are clearly +ROI just on the individual level.
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.
Something feels extremely dystopian about this statement that I cannot quite put my finger on.
I hate to say it, but I do not think taking meds to curb snacking sounds healthy. Just learn some self control.
Your comment completely doesn't understand how hard it can be to be on a sustained diet.
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.
Easier said than done.
Snacks could also be healthier. The bread we are sold could be less like pound cake. Easier said than done.
Poor people can stop being poor by just earning more money.
Self control is only effective for some people, so for others, meds can be the best option. We have plenty of natural selection that makes us crave calorific foods and often that craving will override our decision making. (Disclaimer - I'm not on weight management drugs nor intend to be)
Something feels extremely dystopian about this statement and I have no issue putting my finger on it. Stop judging others for how they want to live their life
This is wild. 5.3% isn't a small amount, at least not for US consumers.
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?
Happened as such on my home as well. And, although i wasn't expecting it, cut off lots of money on booze and beer.
How does this pass as science?
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.
I agree with this take 100%. But also, anecdotally, I do know a number of people who saved enough on their grocery bill to pay for their GLP1. But whether that applies across the whole population, I've no idea.
I'd guess a majority of people could save more than enough in groceries just by planning meals and making an effort to budget instead of going on autopilot to afford GLP-1 drugs. Heck, I'd bet a majority of households eat way too much fast food and restaurant meals, and just doing things on purpose would mean hundreds of dollars a month per person in savings.
"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.
it's frustrating how much the entire world operates this way. the only solution i've found is to close my laptop and spend less time on the internet reading these things. maybe my apathy isn't the best thing ever but it certainly makes me feel better to ignore the things i can't change
That’s an astonishing number. Wouldn’t that be more than enough to cause a decrease in grocery prices?
It depends on how elastic grocery prices are.
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.
There are other major factors also influencing grocery prices, such as tariffs. It may because that was are seeing a significant influence on price, but one that is counteracted by other influencers.
Do you think we get our little Debbie snacks from Paris?
No but the wood pulp for the cardboard boxes and the parts to keep the manufacturing lines running come from abroad.
Your assumption of the existence of a grocery market competing on price might be wrong.
If they aren't competing on price, what were they competing on to have Wal-Mart take over so much market share? Did people just switch to shopping at Wal-Mart because they like the greeters?
And what about Aldi and Lidl? Why do people put up with these weird German hard discounters, if not for lower prices?
We’re seeing similar in the UK, fast food restaurants are having to adapt and dieting companies have outright collapsed.
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.
Regaining the weight quickly after stopping taking the drugs seems reasonably well substantiated? https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304
How are they baseless? Why wouldn’t you gain the weight back? You have less muscle mass, out of control cravings, and the thought that you can just get back on later.
This isn't surprising to me. I'm on Topamax as an appetite suppressant & I notice a similar effect. A lot of the time a Soylent will do the trick, or a small snack that can't even be considered a meal.
Strange to think that the whole obesity epidemic was essentially people buying 5% more calories than they should have.
Only strange because everyone who likes to be holier-than-thou claims the problem is all about stuffing your face with candy. Your number is off by as much as a factor of 10, by the way. The average American gains a pound a year or so, which is 1% or even less of a surplus.
Your conclusion is correct but the average weight gain is rather misleading. If people were actually gaining weight at that rate, then obesity would take decades to develop. In reality it's really more of an S curve where people quickly put on a lot of weight and then it levels off afterwards. So the overwhelming majority have stable weight, but a small fraction have very quickly increasing rates at any given time, leading to a small positive average.
I think it’s not ozempic, it’s people not able to afford as much as before
This study looks at households where someone is using something like Ozempic, not all households. It's the second paragraph of the story and the first sentence of the linked study.
True, but another factor is that the families where someone is taking a 300$-per-month medication have less money left to spend.
It’s not cheap, especially in the US. That extra expense has to come from somewhere
Maybe? Although it sounds the study was able to differentiate between families where people were taking a GLP-1 vs families who were not.
Read the article or just the headline?
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period. When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels – and their grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before they started
That’s very interesting and it confirms what i thought about this drug. It’s a life long commitment. As soon as you stop, you end up becoming your old self whereas you don’t lose all the gains when you stop paying a nutrition expert.
This is more like someone who is bipolar who is functional when on meds, and goes back to being bipolar when they go off their meds. A nutrition expert cannot fix your brain chemistry, and will power is an illusion. A long term fix is needed for the GLP-1 pathway to properly regulate to the target metabolic profile. Fractyl Health is working on this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348199
> It’s a life long commitment
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.
But why is a Danish product being accused of something that an American product also does
Anyone else notice the lack of crowds at their gym post new years?
No, I quit the gym last year.
The shopping app I have used in my area for the past 7 or 8 years shows the number of "deals" in each category. This week there are 36 deals in "Cookies, Snacks & Candy" (up from 20-25 from winters past) and 19 in "Frozen Food" which is also higher than years past.
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)
Interesting to consider the effects of GLP-1 drugs on the environment then
hopefully it's reducing the demands of snacks filled with artificial crap and shifting the trend to give manufacturers an incentive to focus on healthier alternatives
This matches with another study that found that Ozempic reduced people pooping by 4.2% on an average.
There is lots of talk about food in these comments but the other part of the equation is exercise. You can eat as much as you want but then you have to burn those calories with exercise and most people don't.
That is pretty astonishing given 10% of Americans use semaglutide / tirzepitide.
> 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.
I personally do not use it, but know someone who does. She says it is more like a appetite suppressant. You just do not feel that hungry. Her doctor also said 'if you eat like crap this stuff will punish you'. Basically you will have some stomach cramps.
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.
It's the change for households where at least one person is taking it, not the entire population. So the effect size doesn't seem that large considering
People know in GLP-1 will tell me it “changed their metabolism”. Few fat people want to admit that they’re simply eating less, and if they ate less without drugs they’d also lose weight.
I worry that eventually fat people on GLP-1 will figure out a way to over eat, just as people with stomach reduction learned to sip calories all day long and get fat again…
So, the body positivity campaign was a psyop.