This is a great read, and asks good questions. I hadn't found it already discussed. (Not that I'm good at that... she said to the moderators.) There was also a pro-vegan movie with the same name, which led to confusion. This one is about the GLP-1 drugs, and the author taking them. Published May 7, 2024.

The book is Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari, who has a background in science writing, and personal experience in overeating.

This makes him an excellent guide, always contrasting the promise of the drugs in the context of his lifelong struggle with food. His mother and grandmother were thrilled with American convenience food. That's what he grew up preferring, and eating, even though his father was a chef and was rather shouty about real food.

As he says, "We know better now." Yet, what to do with a Western world health crisis caused by Artificial Food? (My phrase.) Which is creating overwhelming numbers of people who can't stop eating this addictive substance. Like the friend he lost, too young, to the dangers of her weight problem.



One poignant chapter was about the usual struggles with poor dieting advice. To me, this also highlighted how pernicious and unceasing is the action of this fake food when it comes to addicting people. With the drug, he found that the food doesn't taste as good. While his "rather tepid" enjoyment of real food, as his father wanted, did not change. Which makes for an interesting chapter in how his body treats the difference. At this point it sounds like Antabuse, and even if the food did not change, the nausea afterwards would influence a person.

He's great at explaining how this also creates increasing ripples of side effects. Also, what this tells us about addiction, and how it makes us feel and behave. As these receptors are all over the body. Seems like they work together.

We've also discovered artificial sweeteners signal a sweet taste that arrives without anything for the body to process. We know that can throw a body off their stride. And it seems, in many people, it does.



I'm starting chapter eight, when he asks: What job was overeating doing for you? There's 14 chapters in all, so I'm about 50% done. He concludes with how Japan handled their overweight children, which he thinks shows a clear way forward.

He has an engaging style and is easy to read and understand, even the science parts. There's plenty of his own, and others', experiences with the drugs, and compare them to previous efforts.

Everyone talks about how it "turns off the food noise." The overactive appetite and the malnutrition alarms are probably combining for a truly horrible experience.

From what I've read so far, I think I was fortunate in the food timing. I ate in childhood with old school farm parents who believed "kids need good protein" and my mother tried to have meat and dairy in every meal. Unlike the author, I found something that worked, which led me to better maintenance, and an eventual goal weight that surprised me. (I think it was cotonpal who warned me that might happen )

I am sympathetic to the man's clear conveyance of his experience and why he decided to try it. He's younger, exposed to worse advice and food. While I wound up losing about 100 pounds, it took years to realize where my body wanted to be at, and how I should eat.

I've had a clue far longer. Also, I was fighting a foe that didn't have quite the expertise it has now. The deadly trifecta of meat in a bread wrapper, deep fried starch, and a sugary drink still rules too many lives.

All the more reason to take such a book seriously. It would be the one I'd give a friend if they were struggling with the same decision as the author.

He is taking the drug throughout what I've read of the book so far. There's notes and a reading list in the back.

Got to the end, with some mild exasperation with the author. No wonder they struggled. They were trying to eat Healthy Pyramid, the oxymoron.

I know he felt an obligation to extend the usual health advice about eating, but not a word about low carbing. That is not news, but discouraging. This is a celebrated science writer. He's getting the official word. He doesn't know it's wrong.

The book concludes with news of how Japan incorporated teaching and environmental support so their children learn how to eat healthfully. The supermarkets are 90% fresh food. The food carts in the streets follow the same precepts as the fine restaurants. There is no junk.

They created an environment which supports eating real food.

The author is persuaded that his two weeks in Japan showed the way, but he still cannot commit to a whole food 30. So he takes the drug. He's aware of muscle risks and trying to make this a transition period. And a lifetime drug? When the insurance company wants you off it as soon as possible? How is this going to be achieved, then?

The book does point out that the same struggle was waged over cigarettes and we're successfully transitioning to a smoke-free culture throughout the world.

Personally, I would come away with a sense of confusion. I'd likely feel the same way -- that I was helpless trying to lose weight in the conventional way. Yet I would say low carb/keto/carnivore has the lowest rate of dropouts. The highest rate of success.

But still, no one is talking about that. The author would do better to turn his sense of food inside out and upside down. And so should the overweight teen whose whole family turned vegan and are paying for the drugs out of pocket. The weight is coming off. The health benefits appear.

But vegan is not a long term solution, either.

In the end, I was more skeptical than ever. I wish them all the luck. Because these drugs are turning into just another addictive substance. Fear of that appetite roaring back makes them pay for the drug out of pocket.

But if you want to know why the typical person who does try to keep up and take care of themselves are getting a boulder to roll up that hill if they keep using the same wrong thesis - the 7 country's study -- when they won't admit that is what they are still doing.

The weight of jiggered evidence kills such nice, well-meaning, people. And I look like the nut. I'm used to it, but it's also ridiculous.

Just got this audiobook and I listen to it while out on my morning walk.

It's not just that they're encouraged to eat food pyramid - the GLP-1 drugs make it extremely difficult to digest more than minimal fats and proteins. So you're stuck with eating very high carb food pyramid if you want to avoid puking all the time.

They aren't learning how to eat in a way that allows them to sustain the weight loss - they're only learning how to eat in a way that helps them avoid being constantly sick to their stomach on the drugs.

Then without the drugs in their system, the low nutrient, high carb way of eating means the appetite comes roaring back as soon as he drug wears off.

It comes back to what I've seen as a sig line on some posts on here (is it JEY's? I think it might be):

Do not 'go on a diet.' Start eating now, the way you are going to eat forever.

They can only eat such minimal amounts of food forever, if they take the drugs forever, and since insurance is in the business of paying for as little medical intervention as possible, they're going to cut you off at some point: either when you reach goal weight, or when you stop losing enough to warrant the expense.
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If the patient on those drugs can't self-pay then they'll continue eating the way they lost the weight - only the brakes are off (no more GLP-1 being pumped into your system) and the appetite will be out of control.

We already have a problem with frail old people. I don't see the drugs solving THAT problem when they are more likely to increase it.

More and more, I'm convinced it's because so many eat terribly their whole lives. My turnaround in health wasn't drugs at all. It was nutrition from real food, with supplemental neurotransmitters and minerals, which has settled in for over a year now. Focusing on animal fat and protein, because I don't get much from plants.

All that plant eating just made me hungrier. I wasn't getting nutrition from it. Now, any food that makes me hungry to eat more of it? Not food.

But without some effort, or even an understanding of what we are getting from the foods we choose, it's doomed to failure as long as it's allowed.

One of the scientists in this book, referring to the junk food he studied, said:

Really understanding that being "addicted to junk food" is not a joke, after all. It might be enough to help the author, and people like him, but as previously discussed, people with enough money for a home gym and personal chef aren't likely to be plowing through a pile of snack cakes like a shift worker, but they manage to eat too much of the wrong foods anyway. A giant portion of gourmet mac n cheese will still give us problems.

Grains are addictive, for instance. Even whole grains. That's not common knowledge. We aren't set up to eat nuts and seeds on a regular basis. We'd have to eat too much and this is bird food.

But we can't resist plants. That's what it seems like.

Part of the problem with foods made from plants (particularly grains) is that you need to eat soooo much more of them to absorb the same amount of protein and micro-nutrients you'd get from almost any kind of animal food - and that's just the nutrients that happen to be available from plant foods.

Back when I was subsisting on huge quantities of junk (even if most of it was homemade junk), I often had cravings for certain foods. One of the weirdest cravings was black olives, and it took me a while to figure out why I was craving black olives: turned out that it was the ferrous gluconate added to the liquid in the canned olives to help maintain the dark color of the olives. Ferrous gluconate is a form of iron. Was there a significant amount of iron in those black olives? Absolutely not - the brand I was buying specifically said that they were not a significant source of iron. (This was before nutrition labels had to provide percentages of iron - nevertheless, if they'd had even 5% RDA, I feel certain the label would have mentioned even that tiny amount) But even being such an insignificant amount that the olives I was buying didn't feel it was worth even mentioning, apparently my brain/body knew it was getting at least a little bit of iron from them, because I craved them.

And yet... that junk that I was making at home? There was a lot of bread and soft pretzels. In other words, lots of flour. One of the nutrients that is added to flour is... you guessed it: Iron. For most flour, they add enough iron that a 1/4 cup serving is supposed to have approximately 10% of your RDA. (I assure you I was eating at least 12 servings worth of flour daily, because not only were the wheat products quite addictive, I was always ravenous)

And yet with all my flour consumption, I still needed iron. I needed iron so desperately that my body was trying to get it from black olives that had so little iron that it was declared on the label to be insignificant.



So I don't doubt one bit that wheat is doing something to block the absorption of iron (and quite likely other nutrients as well), something that the canned black olives was not doing - that the canned black olives somehow helped me absorb the insignificant amount of iron in the olives so much better.

That is an absolutely fascinating story. My first exposure to this phenomenon was when DH had the MFTHR gene, which favors the absorption of natural Bs, not the kind that "enriches" our baked goods. He's added more meat daily, and that's one of the ways it has helped.

As I explain to all the pasta lovers I know, whole grain is hard to digest so what is left has to have vitamins added. So why are we eating it?

I don't know how far my recovery will go but it wouldn't even have gotten started without careful attention to food. Funnily enough, the book on diabetes history, by Gary Taubes, had a fascinating chapter on how they treated diabetes before insulin. It was the Animal Diet. Very restricted carbs, vegetables boiled to death (and now I know that's an old Midwestern technique to get the oxalate out of the vegetables!) but the rest meat and cheese and all the low carb treats we know so well.

Mine is not carnivore, because I do meat, dairy, fish/seafood as the base layers of my food pyramid. I use coconut wraps, and now some gf rolls, lots of fat like avocado oil mayo and cream cheese, and at the tippy top is the sugar in the jam I use to flavor my usual smoothie, since it's cheaper, more reliable, and has more flavor than actual fruit, most of the time. Even at the tablespoon level, it's less sugar.

An indulgent day I'm under 100, and usually, easily, under 50. But I've never had this kind of carb flexibility before, without problems handling cravings or hunger.

Then again, I haven't had this healthy a weight, consistently and without struggle, ever. So it's new territory.

I think it's all due to the protein and fat I make a priority. Then seek workable ways to make it all more tempting when need be, since I still have appetite problems. Ha! Talk about be careful what you wish for