Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com469 points by randycupertino a day ago
469 points by randycupertino a day ago
So has anyone managed to separate the effects of semaglutide from the effects of weight loss?
If this is caused by the weight loss, it is a little disappointing that public health didn't act quicker - lots of people have been overweight for a century now, so literally 10's of millions of people could have been saved from dementia had action been taken 100 years ago.
I have some individual anecdotal evidence. I spent a long time, basically a year, relatively heavy but on a very small dose of GLP drugs due to tolerability issues, and my labs improved dramatically, to a degree we redid them out of disbelief, even without weight loss. I believe one of the suspected underlying causes is reduction in fatty liver despite constant body weight and composition, and also inflammation reduction directly through GLP influence in other areas of the body.
I'm not great evidence because N=1 and all the confounders, but I found that it absolutely made me much healthier without weight loss. I then went on to increase the dose slowly and have lost a bunch of weight and my labs improved even more, which I attribute mostly to the body mass reduction.
Similar experience here on minimal dose of GLP-1. There is definitely something going on here other than "you are just losing weight and that's really why you are healthier".
With my labs at my current weight you can not tell that I am a type 2 diabetic. Previously, when I was at this very same weight in the past - all my labs indicated I was prediabetic.
Very cool - to be clear, are both your diet composition and calorie intake similar before vs. after?
Being weight X while gaining weight is a significantly different metabolic state than being weight X while losing weight.
Could be just because you stopped eating bad food. Things improve dramatically once you limit your intake of industrialized food.
Not that dramatically. Things like fatty liver take a long time to reverse. It’s not like you stop eating junk food and then suddenly your body is chilling. No, the damage is done and takes a long time to repair. It’s like smoking. You can benefits from quitting smoking within 20 minutes. But to reach the full benefit and reversal, you need 15 years.
About 2 years ago I my cardiologist wanted to put me on medication because my blood test was already so bad ( prediabetic, liver was impacted, overweight, etc. )
However I wanted to try to get it under control myself ( cutting out almost all carbs, liver friendly diet, lot's of exercise ), she didn't think it would make a difference but she humored me and gave me a 3 month period to try and get it back to normal.
This year ( about 2 years since I started and about 1 3/4 years since my values were good ) she told me that she now has to completely remove prediabetis from my diagnosis because she can no longer justify it based on all the tests we did since then.
This isn't true, fatty liver can improve very quickly. Where are you getting "15 years" from?
The 15 years is for smoking. Fatty liver can improve but it’s not gonna be a one day thing. It’s a consistent lifestyle change.
Also, simply cutting out junk food will absolutely not reverse fatty liver. You need to eat less and lose weight.
There are other significant factors beyond the ones you mentioned, such as inflammation due to processed foods, certain oils, and more that are common in industrialized medicine.
Plenty of anecdata of people who stopped eating certain categories of food and certain conditions they had for a long time went away. In my son's case, a severe case of eczema that persisted for years went away in a matter of weeks after we significantly reduced the amount of hydrogenated oil products available to him to eat.
Sure enough, when we would visit my mom's place which had it, and he'd indulge, the symptoms came back. Same thing when we would buy it at home and he's splurge, he'd have the same problems recur. Cutting it out of the diet is the only thing that correlated highly with the absence of the condition. This happened even after a move from one state to another.
One case, not proof, but definitely repeatable in our circumstances. I have heard a LOT of similar stories. Is it proof? No, but it's an amazingly easy thing to try. It's takes an adjustment, but it intuitively makes sense. Processed food of today is something our ancestors wouldn't even recognize as food. It's just not what our bodies were designed to handle. Some can handle it better than others, but such a processed food and artificial sugar-heavy diet can't be called natural or even healthy.
A lot of this largely is not true. People think that paleothic humans ate a lot of meat - they did not. They ate very little meat, we eat the most meat we’ve ever eaten now.
And the meat they did eat was lean game meat. It was high in unsaturated fats - like our modern day oils. Not like a steak. A steak is a product of farming. It’s a new invention, <10,000 years. Prior, humans ate almost exclusively nuts, fruits and foliage.
Yes oils are “refined”, but humans have been eating unsaturated oils predominantly for almost all of our existence. The proliferation of animal fats is very, very new. Really, it’s past 100 years. Before that meat was rare, it was a delicacy, very expensive for people.
Now, high sugar is a different story. But the oil thing is complex, it’s not as a simple as oil bad animal fat good and natural. No, it’s very unnatural.
No idea where you're getting this from. The paleolithic was during an ice age full of big fatty game like sloths, mammoths, and so on. Some believe we hunted these animals to the point of extinction with a tiny population, which would imply a very high level, arguably unbelievably high, of consumption of meat. Even if we didn't hunt them to extinction we certainly did engage in relatively large scale hunting and consumption of vast quantities of them, which already largely falsifies your concept.
Meat only became more of a luxury in the agricultural age where we started squeezing more and more people into smaller and smaller regions which meant there was no longer enough to go around. So plebs got the carbs, and royalty got the protein. FWIW you can also see this in the groups that have ancient traditions dating back far into the past, like the various tribal groups in Russia, Mongolian nomads, etc. Meat, and many highly creative ways of preserving it [1], remain the majority of their diet. They probably don't date back to the paleo, but at least far back enough to falsify the claim that animal fats are even remotely novel.
[1] - https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/334150-dish-kill-kopalk...
This is just not true.
In reality we have little to no idea what the proportion of meat to non meat humans ate at the time.
More realistically, different groups of humans ate different ratios of such foods.
There were almost certainly a pretty large group of humans, for example, who were basically frugivores.
You can simply look up Wikipedia and find all the references about our limited knowledge and the high likelihood that there was no single paleo diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic
Ultimately, humans have been opportunistic omnivores capable of eating and surviving on whatever was most easily available, which is part of why they spread so successfully across the globe.
Trying to look at our history is a silly way to determine what is a good diet for humans today when we can scientifically examine humans today and identify what foods are healthier than others for them.
It’s like instead of noticing that drinking purified water has better outcomes for human beings today, insisting that we shouldn’t live drink untreated water straight out of streams and lakes because that’s what our Paleolithic ancestors did.