YES. Because they've been "told & sold." But it's that central assumption: that they need drugs to solve their problems. When they COULD solve them themselves.

I can't help feeling that your friends on the drug have been trapped in an elaborate con game. Looking back, I see how "plant-based" has been pushed with careful advancement on various fronts: first the war on animal fat, which turned into the war on all fat when FAT FREE took over the supermarket, and the big switch to see oils, which has been going on since Crisco in 1911.

How Crisco toppled lard – and made Americans believers in industrial food

Like tightening a ratchet.

At least the whole Crisco thing only started as a way to do... something with all the cottonseeds left from all the cotton they were were growing and producing before there were any synthetic textiles.

Cottonseed oil has a much longer history than what was mentioned in that article - it was used as lamp oil (substitute for whale oil), soap making (produced in the US so far more readily available than coconut or palm oil), candle making (more abundant and readily available than beeswax, and burned much brighter and reliably than tallow candles), and machine lubricant.

I'm not defending Crisco being so evasive about what it was made from, but I can understand that it would have been quite difficult to promote a product that had been used to "cut" olive oil. And even though cottonseed oil had been used for things like lamp oil, soap making and candle making, it was a plant product - not saying they were thinking in terms of plant based diet, but I suspect they simply weren't seeing it as being any different from something like olive oil, which is also from a plant, and had been used for thousands of years as a food.

I don't imagine they were thinking at all about the fact that the cotton itself wasn't edible, whereas olives are edible.

Besides, cottonseed oil was already being used in products that combined it with beef fat or lard before Crisco was first invented. The advantage was that lard/beef fat substitute made from pure cottonseed oil didn't taste like meat, which made it much more desirable for desserts and other non-meat cooking purposes.

It had already been on the market for several decades before research determined that hydrogenation of any oil was not healthy.

Would that research have ever been done without Keyes attack on dietary fat?

If he hadn't done that study, we might never have had all this push for plat based diets - but we might still not recognize any problems with hydrogenated oils either.

That's a great point I hadn't considered. It turns out to be hubris on our part. Thinking we can go all Frankenstein on our FOOD.

Why does no one listen to Mary Shelley? I try to.

Better Living Through Chemistry drove our food system and is still driving it (fake and lab-grown meats).

There is also the improvement that at least you couldn't have a company coming up with a totally non-food product and selling it as a food now without listing the ingredients on the label.

Since food ingredient labeling regulations were adopted in the 70's, if Crisco had been newly invented, the couldn't have gotten away with just putting on the label that "there's nothing in crisco except pure crisco," or just saying that it's all vegetable - you need to list all ingredients in a product.

This is a good thing, because even though we have fake meats and other plant based foods that are invoking animal based food words in their names (beyond meat, Impossible burger, just eggs, daiya non-dairy cheese, etc), at least they need to list every ingredient on the label. If the ingredient labeling was not required now, all those fake foods could get away with just calling themselves meat, cheese, and eggs.

So it could be so much worse.

I recall the "thrifty burger" type blends that were so much cheaper than regular hamburger back in the 70's, but I don't recall any clear labeling when those were first available that explained exactly what the burger was blended with, which of course turned out that it was hamburger blended with soy protein.

At least now anyone who cares about what they're eating has a way to find out what exactly is in their food - including additives (all those "contains 2% or less of the following ingredients" in the list - a list which is often longer than the list of primary ingredients) That list also gives you a pretty clear idea of just how much processing the food has gone through.


(We seem to have gotten of the topic of Ozempic pushers... topic drift is real!)

Actually, if the topic is Wegovy, part of the pushing is causing criticism online. They are "partnering" with an Influencer called Glitter and Lazers, who is demonstrating a complete fitness program like the doctor urges.

Well, sort of. She's covering all her fitness efforts with great detail, but the only thing we know for certain about what she eats is all the snack items "with protein" which she does show off and gush about her favorite flavors. But we don't know what she eats.

And the exercising is problematic because she is too heavy to be trying to run anywhere for any purpose. She is going to injure herself by trying to exercise when she has trouble walking.

Here's a link for a little picture in her workout clothes.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/...78whCfWsKm7gQ&s

They are hiring someone to demonstrate how to do it right. But they don't seem to care that she's doing it wrong. It would be great if she had 50 pounds to lose, or if she started in a pool. Professionals who criticize insists it has to be about the food at this size, since they are so vulnerable to injury.

To me, this isn't good PR at all. They are encouraging people to push the exercise too hard, because I think the whole point is that you don't have to change the way you eat?

Maybe that explains this bizarre promotion, and their choice of Influencers. I guess they want to represent all sizes but then acknowledge the risks. Have we learned NOTHING from The Biggest Loser?

Yikes!

Yeah, she's going to hurt herself. Her knees, hips, and ankles can't be happy about her running while carrying around that amount of weight. For that matter, her back is probably screaming too.

This:



Yes, the whole point of the semaglutide drugs is that you don't need to change WHAT you eat. The drug itself will change HOW MUCH you eat, and that will result in weight loss. And because as far as they're concerned it has been and always will be about calories in/calories out, you gotta exercise, even if it destroys your joints.

I'm sure they chose her as an influencer because her weight is extreme enough that her fans can say "if she can do it, surely I can do it too!"


And no, I don't believe they learned a thing from Biggest Loser - other than the fact that you can't keep the weight off after a strict diet unless you stick to the super strict diet and exercise like a fiend forever.

I feel certain that as far as the Biggest Loser contestants regaining weight - the pharmaceutical attitude is that they couldn't keep the weight off because they didn't have a $1,000/month drug that (with increasing dosages) would keep their appetite snack sized. So there ya go, problem solved - just keep forking over that money for your weekly injection and you too can keep the weight off for a lifetime.*

*lifetime: results may vary. "lifetime" may be limited by side effects from the drug.

I laughed and laughed. Because it's true.

They crafted a drug to control their appetite for them. Forget Biggest Loser. Now the media it reminds me of are those giant bug movies from my childhood.

Law of unexpected consequences. I also have a very bad feeling about this.

And, just this morning, Dr. Boz dropped a video comparing two friends who both needed to lose 80 pounds. One did keto, one did a drug.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OJl2Y0G...mpSWP_RJQDcwKG0

The one who did keto became a size 4. But despite losing a similar amount of weight, the one who used the drug still had clothes issues.

The difference is autophagy. (Autophagy is a highly conserved eukaryotic cellular recycling process. Through the degradation of cytoplasmic organelles, proteins, and macromolecules, and the recycling of the breakdown products, autophagy plays important roles in cell survival and maintenance.)

That's how I lost -- eventually -- one hundred pounds, and yet I have no loose skin. There was some wrinkling, which has since gone away.

And one of the comments:



And the animal rescuer part of me thinks: "This will create more demand for humanely raised meat. Yay!"

The bolded part is the only part of that I understood - which is fine. I don't necessarily need to understand all the technical jargon involved in how such LC plans maintain overall health, only that it does.

Interesting video. While I don't disagree with what she said, I read down through a bunch of the comments on it - this one caught my attention:



I was going to say that the first question about beginning weight didn't need the 2nd part about ending weights, but even if they started out wearing the same size pants, if you've got someone who is 200 lbs and loses 80 lbs, chances are that 120 lbs is probably about as much weight as that person can possibly lose and still be healthy. But if you have someone who is 270 lbs and loses 80 lbs, they're still 190 lbs - so unless that person is a LOT taller than the one who started out at 200 lbs, with a lot heavier bone structure, the one who started at 270 probalby still has a good bit more weight they should lose.

Oh I would also ask whether they started out the same shape (pear shaped, apple shaped, rectangle, inverted triangle) because that can also be a factor in how many pant sizes each one dropped.

I think the other questions are also pertinent - exercise has minimal effect on weight loss unless you're exercising at high intensity for hours every day, but it's still a factor, even if only for muscle maintenance.

I think he should have asked about lean body mass at the end of the weight loss in addition to the beginning lean body mass. We know that those who use semaglutide drugs tend to lose more muscle than fat, but if that person didn't have as much muscle as the keto woman to begin with - that would definitely affect the ending size difference with an 80 lb loss.

She said that both women were in their 40's - but the way a 41 year old body responds can be very different from how a 49 year old body responds to the same thing - especially when it comes to females - since a 41 year old is probalby still in peri-menopause, but the 49 year old could already be through menopause.

I'm not actually complaining - the video would have been quite a bit longer if she'd included all those little details. But still, even if only a few of those factors between the two women were different, losing the exact same amount of weight using the exact same method can still produce very different pant size results (and also affect the loose skin problem, since that tends to only tighten up after you lose ALL the excess fat). If all those factors were exactly the same for both women using the two different weight loss methods - perhaps the pant size difference wouldn't be nearly as striking.

Maybe they did start out at equal weights, equal lean mass, and the same body shape, etc - she didn't say though, so we don't know.