Patriot Health Digest
The weight loss industry is always trying to come up with a new “better” way to shed weight. And sometimes, they find something great. Other times, not so much.
We looked at the newest tricks to losing weight, and have all the details here. The best one we could find is a new science-tested medication that has doctors excited.
Semaglutide. Yup, it’s a drug.
Weight-loss meds—from Belviq and fen-phen to the Brazilian Diet Pill —all have a shady history, with many ending up being ineffective and actually harmful. But experts are saying in the June approval of semaglutide that it is a game changer in weight loss. The drug, a weekly injectable, is now approved for people who are medically said to be obese or overweight—they have a BMI of over 30—or who have a BMI of 27 or more and at least one weight-related health problem.
In lower doses, semaglutide was used for years to control type 2 diabetes; in the higher dose, it was found to work on the brain and lower appetite. It is the most effective prescription drug yet for weight management—people lost around 15 percent of their bodyweight (that is 30 pounds if you begin at 200) in 17 months, according to the University of Pennsylvania study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. People who took the placebo lost around 2.5 percent of their bodyweight.
The efficacy numbers are very welcome news in this high-demand field. But what has doctors even more excited about this medication is its possibility for making your entire body healthier—and possibly your mind, too.
“This amount of weight loss can have a huge impact on type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arthritis, and even sleep apnea, just to name some of the conditions it helps with,” says MH obesity expert Fatima Cody Stanford, M.D.
The drug could also help lower the “blame the patient” stigma that surrounds obesity, says Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. the medical director at the Ontario Bariatric Medical Institute.
“People do not decide to have obesity any more than they decide to have high blood pressure. With the latter, though, nobody blinks about medications that help to fight it, and hopefully soon the the same will be said about obesity.”
Author: Blake Ambrose
