askchapo

To be honest, the average layperson's understanding of biology unfortunately becomes entirely useless and often counterproductive to having a useful understanding of pharmacology. You start talking about agonists and inhibitors and half the time common sense becomes actively detrimental to understanding and the peak of scientific knowledge is "we have no idea why or how this shit works, only that it does. Check back in with us in 10-30 years and maybe we'll know like 20% more of an answer."

You find a binding site that does some shit and you slap an inhibitor on that bad boy and suddenly all your lab rats are jacked. Then like 15 years later someone else accidentally finds a single antibody doing some weird shit and you start cloning it, and hey what the fuck jacked rats again? What if we make this into a muscular dystrophy gene therapy drug?

Then like another 10 years later somebody connects a couple dots between that old abandoned muscular dystrophy gene therapy drug and a weight loss drug and here we go!

Pharmacology aside, there's so much wrong with the way we handle obesity, which should be treated as a structural, societal disorder rather than an individual issue. Why does almost everyone relapse? Well, it's not like the carbohydrate snack hell at the grocery store got any better, and the advertising hell just keeps worsening apace. Protein is expensive, carbs are cheap. You can't walk anywhere and everything is built around cars and jobs where you sit around for 9+ hours and come home too exhausted to do any exercise. You try to create positive lifestyle changes, but everything around you is trying to push you into doing the exact opposite of that. Trying to push individualistic management rather than overall societal change is wholly ineffective as we've seen.

Obesity is absolutely a disease that dramatically worsens a person's quality of life and health in basically every way. The impact of body mass on joints and of bodyfat percentage on cardiovascular health are undeniable and there is simply no truth to the concept of "fat but fit." It's better to think of obesity as a progressive degenerative disorder, in that it takes a toll over time and its effects are more dramatic the longer a person is affected and the older they get.

While hopefully these therapies will help people, ultimately it's basically a problem of slapping a bandage over the actual problem: highly processed diets with little nutritional value and sedentary lifestyles made more or less mandatory by industrial capital.