As Ozempic turns consumers off processed foods, junk food industry fights back
27 points by 2four2 7 months ago | 48 comments- unixpickle 7 months ago> I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible.
Never really thought about this before. The food industry is a virus and current weight loss drugs are the best vaccine we have, but it'll forever be an arms race.
- keybored 7 months agoYou give the game away with that analogy.
We wouldn’t throw our hands up if private corporations were able to sell more and more dangerous guns to civilians (arms race). "Ah but what can we do, it's an arms race." We would make it illegal.
- tstrimple 7 months agoActually we are explicitly throwing our hands up over more and more dangerous guns in civilian hands. We haven't made it illegal and all attempts at even moderate regulation are met with outrage over losing "freedom".
- keybored 7 months agoWe as in Humans.
EDIT: But not even Americans just Throw Their Hands up over guns. Many, but not all! In fact many are very concerned about the lack of gun regulation.
Contrast with the food industry. There the status quo is to throw your hands up as long as people are making a profit. No matter how underhanded the tactics. Oh well if there is a demand then that is just their god-given right (to make a profit).
- keybored 7 months ago
- tstrimple 7 months ago
- Teever 7 months agoIt would probably be ridiculously illegal to put substances in products that are designed to counter the function of prescription medication.
It's the kind of thing that I hope would result in not only massive fines for the corporations but jail time for the people involved in the decision making and the R&D.
- gizmo686 7 months agoThey don't need to be designed to do that. Companies don't really understand why things sell. They have a lot of ideas about what makes a successful product that are generally accurate. But at the end of the day, they just try stuff, see what sells, then do more of that.
If a sizeable portion of the market is on Ozempic, then this will naturally lead to there being a portion of the market that sells well to those people. At that will likely happen a decade before any human understands the mechanics by which that food sells well to people on Ozempic.
- tonyedgecombe 7 months agoThey already put substances in food to make us crave them more. It's not a huge leap from there.
- Teever 7 months agoIt is a huge leap from the status quo to intentionally disrupting the effects of prescription drugs.
One is unscrupulous and the other is blatantly illegal.
- Teever 7 months ago
- dns_snek 7 months agoI think we can consider ourselves lucky if government(s) act quickly to prohibit things before they cause too much damage. I'd love to live in a world where these sorts of people are held accountable but unfortunately we weren't born in the right timeline to experience that.
- whaleofatw2022 7 months agoIdk. One challenge is that plenty of natural things can interfere with prescription medication... grapefruit juice comes to mind.
- Vampiero 7 months agoCoca Cola has phosphoric acid in it so you don't puke from the fact that it contains unnatural amounts of sugar.
Sugar itself, in its processed form, is quite unnatural and causes cravings and addiction.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't get much sugar aside from fructose.
Conclusion: sugar is mostly used by the industry because it's addictive.
- pvaldes 7 months agoProcessed sugar is glucose. Glucose is all except "quite unnatural" in our metabolism. Physiology in animals is based on energy provided by any stuff that can be converted into sugar. Our brains will die in a few minutes without glucose. This reminds me the lemon juice panic when used as additive.
We can talk about if this sugar has pesticides or other substances mixed with it in the post process that are toxic, but this trend of people saying that glucose is addictive is ludicrous. Unlike real drugs, we really need it to live. Would you trust somebody saying that oxygen is a drug and people should stop consuming it?
- addicted 7 months agoOur hunter gatherer ancestors didn’t wear clothes, live in housing, use technology, or anything like we do today.
This is literally the worst justification for anything.
Even the “unprocessed” food we eat today, including plants or dead animal flesh is nothing like what the hunter gatherer ancestors ate.
- scotty79 7 months agoI don't think there's anything sinister about using acid to make sugar taste better.
You can put ungodly amount of sugar in your tea if you squeeze half a lemon into it and it's delicious.
- Mumps 7 months agoThe phosphoric acid - vomit thing is a factoid. Trivially, consider that you can just eat pure sugar and not vomit.
Also, a glass of orange juice is about 1tbsp of sugar away from coke.
- pvaldes 7 months ago
- tayo42 7 months agoThe US is about enter an era of no government regulation...
- bamboozled 7 months agoI love the excuse given for destroying the FDA, “they are corrupt and allow food coloring in front loops”, you ain’t seen nothing yet boy …
- bamboozled 7 months ago
- fazeirony 7 months agoya! just like we did with the sackler family right? they're doing hard time for creating the opioid epidemic. oh wait, they're billionaires so i forgot they get a different set of rules.
don't hold your breath on any jail time for food companies doing this is my point.
- gizmo686 7 months ago
- keybored 7 months ago
- ciconia 7 months ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7 months agoWorks where archive.ph is blocked:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241120032300if_/https://www.ny...
- adt 7 months agoSouth Park did it six month ago...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_The_End_of_Obesity...
- fhfjfk 7 months agoAs a skinny guy in the US, is there a way that I can get an GLP-1 prescription?
I want to see if it will decrease compulsions - substance use and trichotillomania.
- sct202 7 months agoYou maybe be able to get a doctor to prescribe it off-label for those reasons. A lot of the compounding pharmacies have relationships with prescribers so you're more likely to find a prescriber who may consider doing that there.
- SoftTalker 7 months agoGo to one of the online sellers, tell them you are fat, and one of their staff "doctors" will prescribe it.
- sct202 7 months ago