It's apparently not really all that new of a tactic - to change the effect of the food on the patient, rather than changing the patient's diet.
This article referencing a few moments on Oprah's special is from the Atlantic.
Quote:
A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
New obesity drugs are remarkable. But few people realize how useful the old ones can be.
“In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me,” Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: “Ozempic and Wegovy,” she says. “Mounjaro and Zepbound.” The class of drugs to which these four belong, called GLP-1 receptor agonists, is the reason for the special.
For a brief and telling moment, though, Oprah’s story of the revolution falters. It happens midway through the program, when she’s just brought on two obesity doctors, W. Scott Butsch and Amanda Velazquez, to talk about the GLP-1 wonder drugs. “Were you all surprised in your practices when people started losing weight?” she asks. Butsch gets a little tongue-tied: “Yeah, I mean, I think we have—we’ve already been using other medications for the last 10, 20 years,” he says. “But these were just a little bit more effective.”
Oprah is nonplussed. She didn’t know about these other drugs, before Ozempic, that were already helping people with obesity.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...natives/677884/
Right after the part quoted above, it said that nothing more was mentioned on Oprah's special about the drugs that have been around for 10-20 years - because of course it was a show about the GLP-1 drugs, not older (cheaper) drugs that worked for weight loss.
I was able to read a good bit more on my phone earlier. The article went on to name those drugs and each one's effectiveness rate, the best of which was about half of ozempic's 20% of body weight loss results. Now it's thrown up a paywall on desktop as well as on my phone, so I can't get to the part in the article where it named those drugs and their specific effectiveness rates.
But the gist of it was that those drugs apparently have been around for quite a while and they're not totally ineffective. I didn't read far enough to determine if they worked similarly to the GLP-1 drugs, or if they listed side effects, and what happens when the patient stops taking the drugs before bookmarking it and ending up locked out. However, I find it hard to imagine that Oprah didn't know about those drugs - the queen of public diets not knowing about every weight loss option available? Well, maybe they were mostly available during the height of her reign on WW, so she was turning a blind eye to any other way to lose weight. Or maybe she tried them and since the weight loss wasn't dramatic enough for her, she gave up on them.
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But getting back to the topic of changing the effect of the food on the patient rather than changing the patient's diet - they've tried to change the patient's diet for decades. They've been using the wrong tactics of course - low fat, low calorie, which naturally results in feeling like you're starving so you end up eating more and more carbs, making those diets unsustainable.
Even the few Dr's who would dare go against the grain (literally) and tell their patients to go LC - they're not getting a great result, because so many people are so addicted to carbs that they can't give them up, at least not long term, and not when faced with a weekly or monthly barrage of carbage at special events and holiday related celebrations, which puts them right back at square one trying to go back to LC again.
But then people went on and off diets long before the low fat craze started. The "diet plate" was a staple at many restaurants, with a hamburger patty and cottage cheese, arranged with lettuce, tomato slices and maybe a dill pickle or a peach half - a decidedly LC meal compared to a typical 3 slices of bread club sandwich with fries. But as soon as they lost the weight, they'd go back to their regular diet, and start regaining the weight - so there was no long term diet change.
So if you can't get people in general to change their diet permanently, what's left to try?
It looks like about the only option left was to change the way the body reacts to food, and how much food a person is even capable of consuming, even if it does result in a bunch of side effects (some of which can land a person in the hospital for days or weeks) - at least they'll have lost weight.
Somewhere it's been mentioned that the GLP-1 drugs have the same effect as WLS without the surgery - and that's essentially what it does.