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Preserving muscle with GLP-1 weight loss drugs: Big deal or nothing to worry about?

1 11
07.01.2025

On the surface, the formula for weight loss seems simple: eat less and move more.

But giving that advice to someone with obesity is like telling someone with depression to cheer up.

Weight loss isn’t easy, or we wouldn’t be facing a crisis in overweight and obesity.

Our biology drives us to eat more food when it’s available, and our bodies have helped prepare us for times when we can’t find food by storing excess energy as fat.

Today, inexpensive, calorie-rich food is more abundant than in our hunter-gatherer past, and many of us consume as many calories as we like.

As a result, the fat that may have once helped us to survive has now become a threat — one we are only beginning to manage.

This change in food abundance has all happened in the last 100 years or so — an evolutionary blink of an eye.

It is unlikely humans will ever adapt for us not to gain weight, so when a class of drugs makes it possible to lose weight and keep it off, it’s a welcome and helpful development.

Though we are now seeing several new iterations of the class of drugs known scientifically as Glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor (GLP-1R) agonists (you may know them under such names as Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda or Zepbound), these types of drugs have........

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