Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. All right, weight-loss drugs. I get so many questions every week about these weight-loss drugs, and in today's video I want to talk about why you should care about weight-loss drugs, even if you will never take them, even if you're super clear they are not for you. There are still a lot of reasons to learn about them, to tune into the movement of what's going on with them, to care, to learn more. I want to cover three of those reasons. In particular, in this vlog, I have been really not obsessed, but just really interested in these drugs. People send me links to podcast episodes. I listen to them, people send me links to articles. I read them. I just finished reading a great book about them. There's so much out there right now about these weight-loss drugs, and I wrote a blog, a guest blog for the Food Revolution Network, all about them. I included information about them in an article that I just published about the link between ultra-processed food addiction and weight loss. I've really kind of, I don’t know if I'm an expert, but I've definitely become someone who knows an awful lot about these drugs, and I think there are some really interesting trends here now and in the future that we want to keep our eye on.
The first one is just the magnitude of the impact. Barclays was commissioned to do an investigative report about the potential financial impact on industries and markets of these drugs. What they concluded was that these drugs will have as big an impact as the invention of the smartphone on industries and trends. Things like big food, the people who manufacture the food that we're all eating their profits are going to be down. Airlines are going to spend less on fuel as people lose weight and their profits are going to be up, jewelers are going to be in business because people are getting their rings, resized, just all sorts of things. By 5, 10, 20 years from now, we can likely expect a fair proportion of the population to be on these drugs. Now, some of the trends that are going to go into that are, first of all, the drugs are going to come down in cost and they're going to be available in pill form, and they're probably going to be manufactured with some sort of antinausea compound, which will start to hopefully mitigate some of the side effects.
The main side effects that lead people to stop taking these drugs is how they feel in terms of nausea and just their whole GI system just doesn't feel very good when they are on them. A large study that just got concluded following people for four years showed that only 17% of the population in the study dropped out because of the side effects, but those people were enrolled in a long-term study in the wild where people aren't as compelled to keep taking the drugs. Research shows that for diabetes purposes on average, people aren't on them longer than a year or two or three. People don't take them that long. Typically some people do, but whether it's because of the cost or the side effects, a lot of people end up getting off the drugs. It'll be interesting to see actually how many people, in terms of a percentage of our population end up being on them, but they're going to get cheaper, they're going to get more available, they're going to get easier to take. One person I've been following closely about this estimated that within relatively short order, and I don't know if that's five years or 10 years or 15 years from now or whatever, these drugs will be a pill every day for a dollar a day, roughly something very manageable for the majority of the population, which is really going to bring to the forefront the question of do you want to be on these drugs because they're going to be available and ever more effective versions of them keep being manufactured.
We've got now versions that have the one hormone GLP-1. It's actually an agonist that they put in there. Not the exact hormone, but a knockoff, like a lookalike of that hormone. We've got the compounds that have two hormones, and then now there's compounds that have three hormones, and each time they add another appetite suppressing peptide or neurotransmitter or hormone, each time they add another compound in there, the effectiveness goes up and people lose even more weight. Yeah, I think these drugs are here to stay. When you look at the safety profile, it's really kind of hard to say because people have been on them for diabetes for quite a long time, and there don't look to be any massively common, really problematic side effects. There are some problematic side effects that are not very common. When you pit the side effect of taking the drug against the side effect of living with obesity and not taking the drug or living with diabetes and not taking the drug, it looks like the health profile of taking the drug is way better, is way better.
It's interesting. Not to say that there aren't some gruesome side effects. There are potentially, and one of the ones I've been following really closely is the thyroid cancer debate. At first, it looked like thyroid tumors only came in animals, but the French minister who was in charge of deciding whether these drugs were safe for the entire French population looked into this question of thyroid cancer. France has a massive database. They've got centralized healthcare where they've got one of the biggest healthcare registries in the world. So, they had a lot of data because diabetics have been taking these drugs for a long time. They looked at the findings among a huge population of diabetics who'd taken the drugs for one to three years, and a huge population for the control condition of diabetics who had not taken the drug over this 10-year span of time. What they found was that the odds of getting thyroid cancer in humans from taking the drugs were significant up 50 to 75% over baseline. Now, not many people get thyroid cancer, so that's not to say that you got a 50 to 75% chance of getting thyroid cancer. It's a 50 to 75% greater chance of getting thyroid cancer greater than an already very, very, very tiny percent. It's still not a big risk, but this is why in the United States, there is a warning that if you have thyroid cancer in your family, you shouldn't take them. Pancreatitis, bowel obstruction, stomach paralysis. These are some of the other side effects that are not that common, but they're awful. They're severe. But the so-called side effect of living with diabetes or obesity, those implications are enormous, no pun intended. So, it'll be really interesting to see how the pros and cons shake out in the general population.
It seems to me that the driving factor of vanity is going to be the linchpin and a lot of people are going to end up on these drugs. Just looking at the impact to society as a whole, right? We have other drugs like Prozac that came on the scene started being taken by a lot of people. Viagra is another one. I think these drugs are going to be even bigger in their impact. Whether you plan to take them or not, right now, we just did a survey of our viewership readership list, email list here at Bright Line Eating. We got about 2,500 responses, and right now our population is split about 50-50 where about half of people have no experience with these drugs, not with themselves, not with someone they know. And about half of people have direct experience with these drugs either themselves or someone they personally know has taken them. In terms of themselves, it's 9% of people took them in the past but aren't on them anymore, and 6.6% are on them now. That's how the data showed. Now, it could be a biased sample because this was a survey about weight-loss drugs. It could be that people who have more experience with them or more interest in them, were more likely to fill out that survey. We've got a hundred thousand people on the email list, give or take more than that. But rough numbers, and only 2,500 filled out the survey. Not that many people open and click on any given email. So, the sample size is not that great, but that's what our data showed. And about a third of people said that they would never, ever, ever under any circumstances take one of these drugs, but that leaves two-thirds of people who didn't say that, right? Which is so interesting. It's so interesting. A lot of people wanted to know more. A lot of people were curious about them. A lot of people were concerned about the side effects, a lot of people were concerned about taking them. Then, what happens if I need to go off them? Will I just regain the weight? These are all really important questions.
I want to get back to the trends in society because I think another reason to really watch these weight-loss drugs closely and care and be tuned in and be invested is that research shows that changes in society's orientation toward thinness have a huge impact on especially young women and young girls as they're coming of age, as they start to think about how they feel about their bodies. In the 1960s, we have data showing that before Twiggy was a supermodel, rates of body dissatisfaction weren't that awful. But as soon as Twiggy became a supermodel, something like 90% of young women and girls were dissatisfied with their bodies. Twiggy's standard of ultra-thinness became the norm and an unattainable norm. It really took us decades, I think, to reverse that and to unpack that. We did a pretty good job actually of reversing that. I mean, data are mixed now about how many people have body dissatisfaction, but it actually still is a pretty sad statistic.
We seem to have gotten used to the notion of everyone should just be dissatisfied with their bodies as opposed to loving them and accepting them and seeing them as the miraculous vehicles for life that they are. This is the second reason I think you should care about these weight-loss drugs, is that as thinness becomes, again, prized publicly as the sort of veil comes away and off the cloak of sort of, oh, we all just love our bodies. The mannequins are getting bigger. We're healthy at every size, we're accepting ourselves as we pull the veil back and reveal what was underneath, which is, oh, really? Most people really want to be thin at not any cost, but they'll sacrifice hugely to do it. As that becomes clearer in people's minds, we potentially fall prey again to a world in which thinner is prized above most other things. And thinness is not health. When you're thin, you're not necessarily well. Bodies do come in a range of sizes and obesity is not healthy. The fat acceptance movement and the body positivity movement has often, in my opinion, gone too far in claiming that the research showing that obesity is not healthy is inaccurate somehow, and that really fatness and health frequently go hand-in-hand. While it's true that there are instances of people living with obesity who don't have markers for ill health at the moment, just like there are three pack a day smokers in their seventies who don't currently have lung cancer to claim that that token of an instance indicates that smoking isn't bad for you is ludicrous, right? The data that obesity is not good for us and not healthy is as strong, if not stronger than the data that show that smoking isn't healthy. While we hold this complexity together, it's really, really important that we don't go back and backslide even farther into our anti-fat bias because anti-fat bias is the number one raging prejudice and discrimination in our society today. Without a doubt, without a doubt, other forms of bias have been going down over the years. Anti-fat bias has been going up, and these drugs I think have the potential to make that worse. We need to be paying attention here to what happens to our young women and girls and their body concept and what happens as a society as we take a stand against obesity, but also a stand for thinness and see a lot of people taking these drugs who really are already at a healthy weight and they're just trying to be thinner. So, we need to keep our eyes and our ears out, and also for the eating disorder populations, because now we have a drug available that can just choke off your appetite. If you found starvation hard before it's now gotten easy in a pill or a shot form. That has huge implications for eating disorders. It's really important that we keep our eye on how these drugs are prescribed and make sure that they are prescribed as indicated for obesity and diabetes and not to people with eating disorders. This is often overlooked, but people living with obesity have eating disorders. That's not uncommon. You don't have to be thin or emaciated to have an eating disorder. We have to be really careful in that way as well.
The final reason I think that you should care and really be tuning in is that while we know these drugs work on the gut, they slow gut motility, they slow down gastric emptying, and so they keep you full longer and kind of give a stuffed feeling in the stomach and the esophagus where food is kind of aversive all of a sudden you just can't even imagine eating. We also are coming to an awareness that these drugs affect the brain. If you look at the brain GLP-1, this hormone that is the primary hormone of these drug GLP-1 is all through the brain. It's in the reward centers, it's in the appetite centers, and it's pretty much everywhere else also. Normally, without these drugs, GLP-1 levels spike when you eat to shut off your appetite to signal the end of the meal, and then the levels go low again. Now with these drugs, GLP-1 levels are high all the time, and we don't know what that's going to do in the brain. Some of the questions include, what's that going to do to the reward centers? It's modulating dopamine activity in the reward centers. Is that going to give people anhedonia, the sort of feeling of not caring much about life, not feeling excited about things. It doesn't seem to be doing that in the people with diabetes who've been taking it for years. Is it going to kind of reset the reward system so that you're just not interested in the bad things anymore? The excessive gambling, the pornography? We do see some evidence of that people seeming to fall away from their vices. All of a sudden it's possible that these drugs do such beneficial things overall that they'll start to be seen as something that lots of people should be on. I mean, this isn't unheard of. Metformin, which is interestingly a diabetes drug as well, is now seen as so potentially healthy for its longevity benefits that a lot of big podcaster biohacker types who are completely healthy and just looking to optimize their longevity, volunteer to take metformin because it's got longevity benefits, but that's a drug. Lots of things that we think of as not pharmaceuticals per se, like Prozac or Viagra, or these weight-loss drugs are things that people take. I take hormones, I'm about to turn 50. I take a little bit of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone every day in bioidentical form, and I rave about it. It has made such a difference to my quality of life. I mean, unbelievable. I also take my thyroid hormone. So, these GLP-1s are not that different from that, right? We're talking about hormones, we're talking about things that are present in the body anyway. Now, these are agonists. They're not bioidentical, but that's kind of like taking the pill when you take forms of estrogen that aren't the same as the ones that your body makes, but your body treats them as estrogen, right? There're potential issues there because when agonists break breakdown, they're going to have some floating compounds that are not what your body would be used to. I think these drugs might start to get more and more normalized where people think it's really not that big of a deal to be on them. In this grotesque food culture that we live in, they're going to make life a lot easier for a lot of people where it just kind of shuts off the excessive appetite.
Anyway, if you can't tell, I'm pretty excited about these. Just as a topic, I think it's fascinating. I have a very nuanced perspective on these drugs. I think that it's really important that we get ever clear on how to get weight-loss drug results without the drugs. Because of that, I've created a new video series and we're having a whole event. So, I need to announce we've got a new event for you. This is like one of the few times in the year where we do all kinds of stuff for fun and for free. A lot of stuff live, a recorded video series that you can watch, and it's only available for a limited time. It's available right now. This vlog comes out on the first Wednesday in June, and as of the first Wednesday in June, I believe the first two videos are available today. It's a four-part video series called How to Get Weight-Loss Drug Results Without the Drugs. I really dive into the neurobiology of what these drugs are doing and all the ways to actually get those same effects through changing in particular how you eat, but also other things, other habits of yours can create a synergistic effect that mimics what these weight-loss drugs are doing. I'm also, next weekend, going to have a fireside chat that's three hours long. It's going to have several guests, including people who've had amazing results on the weight-loss drugs, terrible results on the weight-loss drugs, and a physician who really knows and understands Bright Line eating and also these weight-loss drugs, obesity, board certified obesity medicine Doctor, Dr. Mark Goetting. I can't wait to have him on. We're going to have this fireside chat, and I'm going to have two social lives as well. I used to do Facebook Lives, now I do them on YouTube so that everyone can access them, and the link to participate is available in advance, so you can put it into your calendar, know exactly where to go right on time.
All of this is available to you for free. It's just super exciting. I've just been really into this. I think that we should all be paying attention here. So if you want to partake, just click on the link below this video and it will take you to what we call the event page, which has got the link to each of those videos, the link to register for the fireside chat, the links for where to go when I do those social lives where you can ask me any question you want to ask me. I'm happy to share what I've learned about these drugs with you. Happy to talk with you, happy to answer your questions.
This event is also going to kick off our next Boot Camp launch. Registration will be open in just a few days for the next launch of the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp 2.0 for those who really want to get those weight-loss drug results without the drugs, the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp is the way to do that. Click below. Check out the event page. Just join with me in really understanding that these drugs are here to stay. They look to be safe enough. I would be very surprised at this point if a big gotcha major side effect came to light that took these drugs off the market. I don't think that's happening. I don't think this is another Fen-Phen. I think these drugs are here to stay, and I think that over the next several years, a bigger and bigger percentage of the population is going to be on them, and you might want to be on them, and you might want to have tools up your sleeve for your friends who are on them, who decide they want to go off them, so that they can know how to not regain all their weight. They can learn how to get those same results naturally. So, click below, join me for the event. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
