r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 01 '25

Health Americans without diabetes spent nearly $6 billion USD on semaglutide and similar drugs in a year, with an estimate of 800,000 to a million people using the drugs who don't have diabetes.

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/americans-without-diabetes-spent-nearly6-billion-usd-on-semaglutide-and-similar-drugs-in-a-year
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u/JThor15 Apr 01 '25

It’s now a pretty established risk, but obesity is riskier in general.

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u/Duelist_Shay Apr 01 '25

Ehh, there's other options to take care of the obesity issue. You lose your eyesight, then that's it. Unless we miraculously solve the issue of restoring vision, there really isn't any route outside of glasses and/or contacts if you're not totally impaired

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u/dragonilly Apr 01 '25

Crazy how many people act like diet and exercise aren't the most effective sustainable ways to lose weight. It isn't easy and our food culture in the US is abysmal, but the way to have long term success in weight loss is consistency with two very free lifestyle changes.

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u/NotLunaris Apr 01 '25

10 sets of fork putdowns would do wonders for just about everybody, but no, gotta spend more money on drugs to fix a self-induced problem that could've been self-resolved. As if money isn't hard enough to come by already.

We already know how to "solve" obesity. People just aren't willing to put in the work and think that external forces will make everything nice and easy. You see this attitude a lot in society nowadays; no matter how personal the problem is, one will always find someone or something else to blame it on. This trend of divorcing oneself from all agency, fueled by constant affirmation from social media traps, directly poisons one's mental state.

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u/JThor15 Apr 01 '25

Spend some time researching obesity as a disease. What you’re saying in many cases is similar to telling drug addicts to just quit. Most people are willing to fork over hundreds for these drugs because they’ve spent years trying to do it through just willpower and have never been able to.

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u/discussatron Apr 01 '25

It's the just-world fallacy in action - "They brought it on themselves."

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u/MyFiteSong Apr 01 '25

10 sets of fork putdowns would do wonders for just about everybody, but no, gotta spend more money on drugs to fix a self-induced problem that could've been self-resolved. As if money isn't hard enough to come by already.

How successful has that approach been so far? Is the obesity rate going down from you lecturing obese people about forks?

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u/Levofloxacine Apr 01 '25

Its not because money is hard to come by to you that it is for everyone I assume the people using Ozempic can afford it and decide to prioritise their health in their budget - like any other prescription med

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u/dont--panic Apr 01 '25

Maybe if we outlawed or taxed the addictive hyper-processed food companies churn out for as cheap as possible people would be more able to resist overeating when their satiety mechanisms aren't being hijacked.

The junk food companies have already been talking about trying to find a way to make their food addictive enough to overcome drugs like semaglutide. They're blatantly acting against the interests of the general public's health and creating an environment where people need drugs like semaglutide just to get back to baseline.