Editor’s note: Season 9 of the podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the intersection between body weight and health. We’ll delve into a wide range of topics, including how to talk to kids about weight and the myths surrounding menopause and weight gain. You can listen to the season here.
Story highlights
These new drugs often quiet the ‘food noise,’ or brain chatter about food
Wegovy and Zepbound are approved to treat people with obesity
Ozempic and Mounjaro are for people with type 2 diabetes
(CNN) — Being on a diet sometimes feels like an American pastime: If you haven’t experienced the “pleasure” of it, then it’s almost certain that your BFF, baby brother, aunt or someone else in your close circle of family and friends has.
It’s probably no coincidence that government statistics show that more than 30% of Americans are overweight and more than 42% have obesity. A related government survey found that almost half of US adults said they have tried to lose weight in the last 12-month period. The top two methods were exercising and eating less food, followed by consuming more fruits, vegetables and salads.
People want to lose weight to look a certain way “now,” and they also want to live longer and healthier lives, with a lower risk of developing serious health conditions in the future.
But anyone who has ever dieted can tell you that losing weight is hard and that long-term weight loss requires sustained effort, which can sometimes feel Herculean, even impossible.
A new class of medications — called glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1s — has taken the country by storm because these drugs seem to make weight loss more effortless. They often quiet the “food noise,” or brain chatter about food, that makes it so hard to stick to those all-important lifestyle changes.
Their brand names have become household words, seemingly overnight. Ozempic and Wegovy have semaglutide as the active ingredient, while Mounjaro and Zepbound contain tirzepatide.
The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta unpacks the ins and the outs of these new medications to give listeners a crash course on what they are all about. You can listen below.
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Originally developed for type 2 diabetes, medications such as semaglutide and tirzepatide work by mimicking the hormone glucagon-like peptide 1, which is released in our gut when we eat.
From LinkedIn
Dr. Jorge Moreno, assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine
“It’s a peptide that is secreted by our intestine, and it’s normally very short-acting, and it’s degraded by other enzymes in the body really quickly,” obesity specialist Dr. Jorge Moreno told CNN Chief Medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Chasing Life podcast recently. Moreno, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, treats patients looking to manage their weight.
He explained that GLP-1 is a nutrient-stimulated hormone that activates when you eat, telling your body you just had food. “(It goes) into the area of the brain that is the hypothalamus … and (it tells) your brain, ‘You’ve had food, stop eating,’” he said.
The medications attach to the same…
Read More: What to know about medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound for