When you hear people talk about recent medical advances, they always talk about “the Big One”: the big side-effect that will cause a health apocalypse. It started with the COVID vaccines, with many predicting that an entire generation will drop dead because of a forewarned “Big One” that will, for many, activate at some point in their lives. Now that anxiety has spread to GLP-1 agonists.
Many so-called “health enthusiasts” are now worrying about the GLP-1 agonist “Big One”, thinking that later down the line, every person who has taken a GLP-1 agonist through to treatment completion will suffer from some horrible disease or outright die. It’s the very famous “no free lunch” philosophy: anything that’s good must in fact be bad if there are no obvious trade-offs.
But there are trade-offs. GLP-1 agonists have a bunch of them. First, they do not eliminate the need for good dieting. You WILL have to carefully plan your meals anyway to ensure you’re getting enough nutrients, mostly protein, to avoid muscle mass loss, even though some loss is always inevitable.
Second, your GI motility will be impacted. For some people (like me), this is a nothingburger that you simply have to deal with through a lifestyle adjustment. For others, it induces stomach paralysis. This is a big trade-off that, somehow, gets forgotten.
Third, weaning off the drug requires you to have done your homework. If you stop taking GLP-1 agonists without having fully committed to a restored diet, and you haven’t built proper lifestyle habits by then, you will gain some or all of your weight back.
Fourth, the main side-effect of GLP-1 agonists is not being hungry. This would have killed us for the majority of human history. That’s the “Big One”, if anything. It’s just that today it is desirable for many to eat less instead of more, which may change in the future.
Like most drugs, they make healing easier and faster, but at the cost of convenience and a lifestyle impact. GLP-1 agonists are not perfect. But they’re worth it for most of the people taking them.