In general, "damping pleasure" is not most people's experience with GLP-1 agonists. What it does is more like separate pleasurable experiences from having an urgent need to continue doing them.

I'd believe the Iceland numbers. I had a doctor once who wanted to get me on antidepressants, and got mad when I didn't want to, and completely ignored my pleadings of "But I'm not depressed", "I enjoy life", "I'm probably the least depressed person you'll meet", etc. He just really liked his patients to be on it. The Icelandic medical system is very into anything that "medicates symptoms" rather than treating diseases. For example, during COVID, it was essentially impossible to get drugs like paxlovid, but they made parkodín (tylenol with codeine) over-the-counter.

In most modern societies medication is usually a last resort.

I'm going to take a wager that if I were to open your medicine cabinet right now, there would be painkillers in it, which you take as will when you get headaches, body aches, etc.

Yes, different people have different baseline hunger levels. This is well accepted in the scientific community.

Please read: Cooked bean variety.

The "beans in your pantry" data you're looking at are probably per serving. Here, let me grab the beans in *my* pantry. Roland BLACK BEANS Habichuelas Negras Supreme Calidad. Net weight 15.5 OZ / 439g. Serving size: 130g. Calories per serving: 180.

There's 453,6 grams per pound, so that's 0,968 pounds. 439/130 = 3,15 servings, times 180 calories = 567. In 0,968 pounds, that's 586 calories.

Or look online. "172 grams of black beans (cooked, boiled, unsalted) contains 227 Calories." Do the math.

I'm not sure exactly how you expect something that is 70% carbs (of which are 36% fibre) and 26% protein to be low-cal. Do you think it has the moisture content of celery or something?

I'm thinking about starting a very low dose when the pills come out in Europe. That gives an extra year for more data.

For me it's purely about health (well, about 90% about healthj). I'm a marginal case weight-wise, but the overall health impact profile looks spectacular. If a pill seems likely to add a number of healthy years to my lifespan, yes please. But the more data the better.

One thing that held me back was, I'm very averse to addiction, to anything that might have withdrawal symptoms. People report being ravenous and needing to eat all the time when they quit. BUT - the data shows that after one year, people still retain about 25% of their weight loss, and at two years they're about baseline (some above baseline, some below - the "above" people may be due to sarcopenic obesity, in that you put fat back on faster than muscle, and so your metabolism is lower until the muscle comes back). This is very different from when you diet to lose weight and then stop dieting - you're not ravenous at all, you finally have satiation.

But given the weight regain stats, and the general way these work, what I think is going on is: when you lose weight, you've been training yourself for months on how to ignore or alleve your hunger pangs, so when you stop, you're well trained to it. Whereas GLP-1 agonists are just the opposite: you don't even need to think about resisting the temptation to eat, it just comes naturally; you can get pleasure from something, such as a tasty dessert, without feeling the need to eat everything on your plate; pleasure and craving get separated. So people who just suddenly cut off from GLP-1 agonists are "mentally unarmed" for the reversal. The weight-regain stats however suggest that it doesn't leave you long-term disabled in this regard; that you're just back to your old self once you readjust, whatever that old self may have been.

I haven't read these particular studies, but a lot of the fascinating impacts of GLP-1 agonists occur whether the person loses weight or not. For example, the cardiac benefits are massive, like 2/3rds of the scale of benefits of being on statins, and it apparently occurs independent of weight loss.

One of the annoying things about our wetware is that systems aren't isolated; a "part" that gets used for one thing might also be used for half a dozen unrelated things.

Please understand that there is a balance. Taking things to "reduce inflammation" or to "boost the immune system" run counter to each other. Inflammation *is* the reaction of the innate immune system. The immune system defends not just against pathogens, but also cancer. If you shut down the immune system too much, you can shut down cancer surveillance, which I don't need to stress, is a bad thing.

The downside to inflammation is that, yes, it is damaging. Needless inflammation is bad. And, as an added twist, from a personal example: my mother has Sjögren's and MALT lymphoma in the salivary glands. Sjögren's is an autoimmune condition that attacks exocrine glands. In doing so, it triggers a nonstop immune reaction in the salivary glands and the development of lymphoid tissue, with lymphocytes constantly proliferating. This nonstop proliferation runs the risk of - as in my mother's case - developing mutations that lead to lymphoma. So too much of a needless immune reaction can also cause cancer.

The immune system is an extremely complex, with hundreds of known cytokines, each causing various activation / suppression effects in others and having various other interactions with the body. So it's extremely hard to say, if you tweak this one thing, what will be the overall impact in the long term?

These GLP-1 agonists inhibit the NF-kB pathway and downregulate pro-inflammatory cytokines like TNF-a, IL-6, and IL-1. We think that this sort of downregulation is probably in general beneficial, in that in most cases it should not weaken cancer surveilance, and actually can help with certain types of cancers (but still can be harmful to some). Everything is situation dependent, and there's a lot we don't know.

I decided to randomly pick one of your claims to fact check - that beans are "less than 300 calories a pound!" Here's the info I find:

Cooked Bean Variety Calories per 100g Calories per Pound (approx.)
Red Kidney Beans 127 kcal ~576 calories
Black Beans 132 kcal ~600 calories
Navy Beans 140 kcal ~635 calories
Pinto Beans 143 kcal ~649 calories
Chickpeas (Garbanzo) 164 kcal ~744 calories
Great Northern Beans 139 kcal ~630 calories
Lentils (Cooked) 116 kcal ~526 calories

According to FAO, the average person eats 1,88kg (4,1 pounds) of food (wet mass) per day. Thus beans, with an *average* dietary wet mass (not that one can't readily just eat more!) corresponds to 2157-3050 calories per day.

Globally, most hunter-gather tribes get most of their calories from plants, not animals. Meat commonly acts like a multivitamin - while not that much is eaten compared to plant matter, it provides nutrients that are hard to get (or impossible) from plants. My favorite example is that there are tribes that get the vast majority of their calories from sago, with the Yimar/Yimas getting 93% of calories purely from sago alone. BUT they also eat the sago grubs they find while pounding sago. Sago provides the energy, and the other 7% (commonly shrimp and small fish) provide critical protein and nutrients that aren't present in the starchy sago.

GLP-1 isn't a drug at all...

You know what else distributes spike proteins throughout the body in orders of magnitude greater quantities (rather than the barely-measurable quantities you're referring to)? *Getting infected*. And the lower your antibody titres, the more the spike proteins. Also, vaccine spike proteins are mostly disabled. They're double-proline stabilized; while they can still bind with ACE2, they can't retract the way the virus does for cell entry.

You know what causes far more significant long-term antigen persistence? *Infection, particularly without preexisting immunity, such as from vaccination*.

You know what also causes cardiovascular distribution, prolonged antigen production, and immune-mediated injury vastly more often and more seriously than vaccination* *Infection, particularly without preexisting immunity, such as from vaccination*.

Modern diets barely resemble early diets. While hunter-gatherer diets have varied greatly (paleoarctic people eating significantly more meat than average, for example), modern diets compared to the average paleodiet are high meat, high protein, and very low fibre.

If you want an "average caveman diet", you'd be swapping out a lot of the red meat for plant fibre.

If you hear "Israeli" and immediately translate it to "ALL JEWS IN ALL THE WORLD", the problem is you.

That Wix is Israeli.

Other related terms:

  * Pseudo-quotation: Putting a paraphrase or the general "gist" of someone’s argument inside quotation marks, rather than their literal verbatim words. Acts structurally like a quote, but semantically is a summary.
  * 'Fictive Direct Speech (Esther Pascual): The structure of direct speech used to express a non-conversational concept, such as a belief, attitude, or general stance.
  * Constructed Dialogue (Deborah Tannen): Used for "reported speech" - when people "quote" others in conversation, they are rarely reciting a literal transcript. Instead, they construct dialogue to dramatize a stance, represent a general attitude, or summarize a complex argument in a digestible way.

Sneer quotes (also called scare quotes) are similar, in that they summarize a person's stance, but have the distinction of also being dismissive of the person / stance as well.

That's not what "sneer quotes" do.

(And the quotes in the above are neither direct quotation nor sneer quotes, but use-mention distinction quotes, which let the sentence "know" that the thing in the quotes is the word/phrase itself, not what it refers to)

(And the quotes in the above are signaling quotes, to convey that a word is being used in an unconventional manner; it's a "clever" way to distance yourself from the word)

(And the quotes in the above are irony quotes....)