Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com502 points by randycupertino 2 months ago
502 points by randycupertino 2 months 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.
A lot of metabolic stuff is due to insulin and insulin sensitivity. This drives pretty much everything. Insulin sensitization is pretty terrible and it gets more important as you age. Unfortunately natural selection doesn't need to fix this as it doesn't cause issues until after reproduction and often until after your grandkids are born.
Semaglutide and glp1s resensitize it which is why they have these effects.
My opinion
I strongly suspect that it has had an impact on my insulin sensitivity as well.
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.
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.
People in certain regions always ate a lot of meat. For example, the Inuit don't really have anything else to eat. Nothing edible grows that far North. And they are neither obese nor suffer from classical diseases of civilization, until they start eating highly processed modern food.
The Maasai are also known to eat a lot of meat and dairy.
I'm sure you can eat a diet fairly high in meat and dairy and be healthy, IF you are lean enough and exercise enough. However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans. And, the meat they did eat was not the same because it was wild, not farmed.
But, humans have been eating unsaturated fat from nuts, seeds, and meat for millennia. Unsaturated fat is not the devil. We have very strong evidence that a diet high in meat, particularly farmed red meat, is both carcinogenic and causes heart disease. When you look at high processed diets across the globe today, you'll notice they have similarities:
1. Extreme consumption of fatty, farmed meats
2. Very little fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other foods high in fiber
3. Processed shelf-stable goods
4. Extreme portion sizes
When people look at the Mediterranean diet, it's not just that they eat much more food high in unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat. They also eat less and move much more.