Human Performance Scientist: Are GLP-1 weight loss drugs a solution or a risk? | Andy Galpin

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10The thing that I see when it comes to metabolic health is that people are just overwhelmed. They're just overwhelmed and ultimately they want to get to a good way. And we are living in this conundrum of an obesity epidemic versus a mental health epidemic. I don't think that it's a coincidence that there's two epidemics. kind of rising at the same time, they're interlinked. It's like metabolic health is at the base of it. I see a little bit differently, but it's not completely wrong in the sense that it is incredibly related to dang near every chronic disease. So yes, I don't actually think it's fair to say it's at the base of it or the single most important thing, but it's a very relevant and incredibly critical variable.

0:59And I'll say it differently, maybe. One thing I would accept is if you said, what would be the single biggest chronic disease or single biggest thing we could do that would have the net biggest impact on the human race? Every single person would say obesity. Jeez, we actually do have a medication that is peeling kilos and kilos off of general population people, boy, how do we think about this now? And it's a really challenging thing. And it's hard for me to make the argument that those drugs are net bad. Really? It's hard. Because if you look at it and go, okay, there's holes. There's potential side effects for sure.

1:41There are people that are using it inappropriately, 100%. There's a lack of long-term data all these things are true and should not be forgotten so i do not see weight loss ozempics and so on and so forth to be clear what we're talking about the grp ones grp one yeah are they perfect no are they panaceas no are they the most interesting thing that's happened in the weight loss space in our lifetimes yes yes they are are they probably going to save millions of lives yeah they probably will and it's the first time we can really say that no diet no strategy no regime as you called it no supplement has come close to even making a dent in the obesity problem across the globe until these things and when you when you have success like that you go okay for the average plumber who has 70 kilos to lose and is 38 years old.

2:41Okay. Will he lose some muscle mass? Maybe. Will some of the other side of, but you tell me what's going to happen. That guy's not going to live to 60. He's going to die. If this is the first step in that journey, if this finds him success, if this shows positive benefit, I think you're going to save a lot of lives. And then there's going to be a bunch of problems on the backend. And I'm sure we'll find more side effects that we don't even realize right now. and maybe we'll, but it's really, there is something there for the first time in my life where I'm like, okay, the shortcut might be, like might be okay here.

3:19Like there might be something here to this one. But do you know what I worry about? That plumber who's 38 that needs to lose that much weight. It's two things. I agree with you. I think it's one of the most like revolutionary things we have towards weight loss. But there's two things I worry about is that there's not enough support there in the retraining of how they're going to keep that weight off. Not changing lifestyle and habits or education at all. Right? So it's not being delivered in that context. So we put somebody on it for eight months. And what we're seeing now from data is that they just rebound back to the same weight.

3:50If they come off the drug, yep. And so that's the kind of issue. If people are already struggling before they get onto the drug with any types of these lifestyle interventions, that's the problem. I think they go, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And then they go through this whole cycle again, like a bit of yo-yo dieting, but more extreme. And they put the weight back on to the cost. Yep. Like it's so expensive right now. You'll hear no pushback from me on those. Right. And so if you're thinking about a plumber who maybe doesn't have huge disposable income, like how are they going to maintain that?

4:20Yeah. So I think that's the like kind of caveat. And I know especially with like the long-term trial research we don't have yet, but there's no discussion on that because we don't know what that's going to be. But they're like the two things that I kind of see as the crux of the issue. Yeah. Fully agree. And there's probably, if we sat here, we could probably come up with five other really important questions and strong concerns. And they would be valid. And we should not forget about those anytime soon. And we should continue to ask questions and continue to ask for transparency and accountability and all those things.

4:52And we will for sure find more things that are a problem. I think the first point you brought up is another one of like the biggest ones. We're not actually helping this person learn anything. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.