Pushback against GLP-1 agonists

Millions of people have been persuaded that the GLP-1 agonist drugs are the answer to their weight loss prayers. While they do work well in the near-term for weight loss, the long-term health price you pay is substantial with a future of increased risk for frailty, loss of independence, and premature death. 

A better way is to manage the amount and location of muscle and fat, i.e., shape and body composition. And you can do so easily, naturally, and inexpensively. 

Chapters

• 0:00 The GLP-1 Gold Rush
• 0:45 How These Drugs Work
• 2:45 What’s In The Weight You Lose
• 4:15 Regain As Fat, Lose As Muscle
• 6:00 BMR Drop And Survival Mode
• 8:21 Exercise And Low Calories Still Fail
• 9:46 Long-Term Risks And Mortality Data

Transcript

William Davis, MD: 0:00

If you've been watching the news or just talking to your friends and neighbors, you know that the whole world of GLP1 agonist pharmaceuticals, drugs, are taking the world by storm. Already 15 million Americans have taken these drugs often at great expense, often not covered by insurance nor Medicare, and doctors gush with all kinds of excitement at dispensing these things. Often they don't tell you that they're also profiting in a big way, whether it comes from the doctor or the doctor that owns a pharmacy, which is very common, by the way, group practices that own pharmacies. Or telehealth companies or pharmacy management programs, and of course the pharmaceutical manufacturers themselves are all making a huge amount of money from this phenomenon. And I'm going to tell you why I think it's wrong. Yeah, I'm not talking about the near-term side effects like nausea and vomiting and thyroid cancer and bowel obstruction. Those are issues, no question. What I'm talking about are the long-term consequences of this very perverted practice. So the GLP1 agonists, whether injectable or whether taken orally or even taken at low doses, there seems to be excitement that if it's a low dose, it must somehow be better or safer. Well, these drugs lead to a reduction in calorie intake because they make you indifferent to food. They take away your interest in food. They also slow gastric emptying, that is the passage of food and digestion in the stomach. So a little bit of food stays in your stomach for a long time, inducing long-term or uh lasting satiety. And they work. That's not in question. We know with abundant evidence that these drugs work. For instance, if you took, let's say, a year's worth of one of these drugs at a great expense usually, and lost 40 pounds, what's in that 40 pounds that you lost? Well, at first people are so excited, and doctors are excited, patients are excited because it's been so hard to lose that weight for many people for so long that here's an easy way to lose weight, almost without effort. Well, in that, let's say, first year of weight loss, where 40 pounds are lost, what is that what is in that 40 pounds of weight loss? Well, it varies, of course, from individual to individual, but more or less. 30 pounds is fat, 10 pounds is muscle. It could be more, it could be less. Sometimes it's as much as half the weight lost is muscle. But on average, 10 pounds of the weight lost is muscle. Now think about 10 pounds of muscle. It's a huge amount of muscle. Think about 10 pounds of ground beef on your kitchen counter. It's a lot of muscle. Well, if you stop that drug, since most people can't afford it forever, you will regain the weight almost all as fat, and typically 32 to 34 pounds of fat, a lot of it in the abdomen. You have more fat now after the drug than before, and that means phenomena like insulin resistance, high blood glucose, high blood pressure, your tendency to develop type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, hypertension, coronary disease, dementia, breast cancer, and other cancers is now greater now after the weight loss, after stopping the drug, weight regain as fat. You're now at greater risk for all those diseases than you were at the start. So you regain that fat more than you had at the beginning, and you regain almost no muscle. So you have less muscle than you had at the start. Now that loss of muscle is critical because it has several very important implications. When you lose muscle, your basal metabolic rate, we say BMR, drops, drops significantly, typically about 25 or more percent. That is the rate at which your body burns energy has gone way down. Because by cutting calorie intake, your body is told essentially you're starving. Your body doesn't know that you live a modern life with a smartphone and a nice car and a nice house. They think you're living in the wild. And the reduction in calorie intake means you failed in your hunt or your gathering of food. And so your body responds in survival mode to turn down basal metabolic rate to keep you alive. It's a survival mechanism. It's a natural survival mechanism shared by all creatures on this planet. Problem, it's essentially permanent, or at least lasts for many, many years. So that if your basal metabolic rate drops, your body needs fewer calories. So a typical value would be 1,200 or 1400 calories is all your body needs to stay alive. So you lost that weight, you return to your diet, and you regain all the weight and more. But what if you maintained a low calorie intake, let's say 1200 calories per day, and combined it with an intensive exercise program, both resistance training and aerobic? So I know lots of people, and in the clinical trials, people have in have continued a two-hour or more per day, six days a week program of resistance exercise, aerobic exercise, so a very intensive effort, coupled with a low-calorie diet. What happens? They still regain the weight. Almost every last one of them regains all the weight as fat. Now they're more likely to be pre-diabetic, diabetic, and have all those health consequences. So when you lose muscle, your BMR drops, you regain weight almost all as fat. Another important and critical consequence of losing muscle is that long term you're more likely to succumb to falls, fractures, frailty, and loss of independence. And most concerningly of all, we now have several very large databases, like the NHANGS, that's the NIH's database, or the Epic Norfolk, that's a large Western European database, or the Asprey database, and many others, that have tracked tens of thousands of people in aggregate over 60,000 people over 10 years or more in some cases, and asked, what happens to people who've lost weight? Now, most of the people who've lost weight have done so by some version of reducing calories. We could call it a diet program, a smartphone app that tells you, hey, don't eat, you're being stressed, find something to distract yourself. So a diet program. It could be a bariatric procedure that shrinks stomach volume, like lap band or gastric bypass. Or of course, it could be a pharmaceutical, such as the popular GLP1 agonist drugs, that reduce your calorie intake because of the indifference to food that they generate. So reduce calorie intake, lose weight, and it's become clear the people who lose 10% or more of their body weight, that is, let's say a 180-pound woman who loses 18 pounds, not that much, right, is likely to die, very likely to die several years earlier. Think about that. People have paid often thousands of dollars for the privilege of becoming less healthy and dying younger. This is what has been approved. This is what's been being dispensed by doctors. Now, do you throw your hands up and say, well, I lose no matter what? I can't lose weight by other methods. I take the doctor's prescription, and that leads to long-term health problems, maybe even dying earlier. Well, that the thing is, there are ways around this. Well, first of all, accept that conventional advice. Cut your fat, cut your cholesterol, eat more healthy whole grains, move more, eat less, everything in moderation, all those familiar mantras of weight loss do not work. We know this with 40 or more years of experience telling us, in fact, the opposite happens. That advice, coupled with exploitative food company practices, food industry practices, has led to the worst epidemics of obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's dementia, and other conditions ever witnessed in the history of our species on this planet. And so doing more of the same, you know this, doing more of the same is likely not to lead to success. We've got to do things differently. So we start by rejecting all the conventional advice. Don't cut your calories, don't cut your fat. Don't eat healthy whole grains, don't submit to extreme exercise or cutting calories. Instead, we're gonna follow ideas that humans have followed for 99.99% of our time on this planet, times in which there was no obesity. There was no virtually no type 2 diabetes and all those other, what anthropologists continue to call to this day diseases of civilization. So we're gonna revert back to the diet that mimics that lifestyle that's associated with no obesity. We're going to introduce nutrients that should have been part of your life, but we're absent because of the way we live. You don't get vitamin D, because you live indoors, you wear clothes, you don't get magnesium because we have to filter our drinking water because it's got contaminants. But water filtration removes magnesium, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids, because we don't eat a lifestyle, eat a diet or a lifestyle that includes those nutrients, because we don't eat brain anymore for omega-3 fatty acids, for instance, and we can't eat all the fish we want because it's contamined by mercury and cadmium. And we also replace other nutrients absent from modern life, such as collagen or hyaluronic acid, because most of us have failed to consume organ meats rich in collagen and hyaluronic acid, two factors that play major roles in your shape, body composition, the location of fat and muscle. Now I want to cultivate this conversation to bring you up to date on all the wonderful strategies that you have available to you to lose weight, but not just lose weight like they do with the drugs, but lose fat weight specifically, but even more so abdominal visceral fat, the most problematic form of fat, while maintaining or even increasing lean muscle mass, not experiencing reduction in BMR, not exposing yourself to a future of faults, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, and early death. That is the focus of my new book, Superbody. Um that's what I have right here. Superbody, uh three-week program to harness the new science of body composition and restore your youthful contours. Uh, see my blog for links. I'll be doing a live uh YouTube transmission November, Monday, November 10th. So sign up. And if you sign up, I'll send you an excerpt of a new book to give you an idea what's in this book and see whether this is something that you want to know about, something that you might profit, something you might benefit from.