Obesity has a known, well established, multi-modal cancer risk, and then on top add metabolic syndrome (T2, heart disease, etc).
So, you're weighing a hypothetical risk against and establish risk, and concluding that the unknown risk is scarier than the known risk. Which is irrational.
Imagine if someone asks you if you want to take the "obesity pill," and you looked at the side effects objectively. But instead you weight obesity as "normal" and this as "new and scary."
To be completely honest I don't 100% trust the medical industry whenever there's so much money behind marketing something. There's a very real vested interest in trying to downplay the risk factors because let's just say tomorrow they found out this stuff makes all your teeth fall out.
A whole lot of folks would lose billions of dollars. My first instinct is to think I need to go and take another Europe. The food is better there and I lost a good amount of weight the first time.
Understood. You may be interested to learn that Liraglutide, a GLP-1 Agonist, has been commercially available and commonly used since 2010 (15-years+) without any unknown/unexpected additional side-effects appearing. It was developed in 1998.
The main reason GLP-1 Agonists are suddenly more popular is two things:
- Liraglutide had to be taken daily, instead of weekly.
- Nobody every paid for Liraglutide to be clinically approved for weight-loss. It was an anti-diabetic medication; but the mechanism of action is the same.
Compared with liraglutide, semaglutide was engineered mainly with a longer, differently attached fatty-acid side chain that increases albumin binding and slows clearance, so it lasts longer; both drugs activate the GLP-1 receptor.
So, you're weighing a hypothetical risk against and establish risk, and concluding that the unknown risk is scarier than the known risk. Which is irrational.
Imagine if someone asks you if you want to take the "obesity pill," and you looked at the side effects objectively. But instead you weight obesity as "normal" and this as "new and scary."