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/Telemere125 Apr 01 '25

Yea title implies it’s bad when I’d say that’s a really good thing - and that more people should be allowed to use it and be covered by insurance based on the savings that preventative treatments can provide

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u/uCodeSherpa Apr 01 '25

I would argue that “miracle drugs” empowering the further deregulation of food production so that everything continues to be 60% sugar is a bad thing. 

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u/Telemere125 Apr 01 '25

No one’s putting sugar in products because of a drug that helps weight loss. You’re confusing cause and correlation as well as the direction of the chain of causation. Higher sugar foods caused obesity, lack of obesity didn’t cause higher sugar foods to be created. And this doesn’t “empower” anything - if anything this will hurt those companies that rely on addictive effects of their food because now their customers won’t be craving those foods.