Pushback against GLP-1 agonists

Millions of people have been persuaded that the GLP-1 agonist drugs are the answer to their weight loss prayers. While they do work well in the near-term for weight loss, the long-term health price you pay is substantial with a future of increased risk for frailty, loss of independence, and premature death. 

A better way is to manage the amount and location of muscle and fat, i.e., shape and body composition. And you can do so easily, naturally, and inexpensively. 

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Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health; revised & expanded ed

Episode Transcript

William Davis, MD (00:00):
If you've been watching the news or just
talking to your friends andneighbors, you know that the
whole world of GLP1 agonistpharmaceuticals, drugs, are
taking the world by storm.
Already 15 million Americanshave taken these drugs often at
great expense, often not coveredby insurance nor Medicare, and
doctors gush with all kinds ofexcitement at dispensing these

(00:23):
things.
Often they don't tell you thatthey're also profiting in a big
way, whether it comes from thedoctor or the doctor that owns a
pharmacy, which is very common,by the way, group practices
that own pharmacies.
Or telehealth companies orpharmacy management programs,
and of course the pharmaceuticalmanufacturers themselves are
all making a huge amount ofmoney from this phenomenon.

(00:45):
And I'm going to tell you why Ithink it's wrong.
Yeah, I'm not talking about thenear-term side effects like
nausea and vomiting and thyroidcancer and bowel obstruction.
Those are issues, no question.
What I'm talking about are thelong-term consequences of this
very perverted practice.
So the GLP1 agonists, whetherinjectable or whether taken

(01:09):
orally or even taken at lowdoses, there seems to be
excitement that if it's a lowdose, it must somehow be better
or safer.
Well, these drugs lead to areduction in calorie intake
because they make youindifferent to food.
They take away your interest infood.
They also slow gastricemptying, that is the passage of

(01:29):
food and digestion in thestomach.
So a little bit of food staysin your stomach for a long time,
inducing long-term or uhlasting satiety.
And they work.
That's not in question.
We know with abundant evidencethat these drugs work.
For instance, if you took,let's say, a year's worth of one
of these drugs at a greatexpense usually, and lost 40

(01:52):
pounds, what's in that 40 poundsthat you lost?
Well, at first people are soexcited, and doctors are
excited, patients are excitedbecause it's been so hard to
lose that weight for many peoplefor so long that here's an easy
way to lose weight, almostwithout effort.
Well, in that, let's say, firstyear of weight loss, where 40

(02:12):
pounds are lost, what is thatwhat is in that 40 pounds of
weight loss?
Well, it varies, of course,from individual to individual,
but more or less.
30 pounds is fat, 10 pounds ismuscle.
It could be more, it could beless.
Sometimes it's as much as halfthe weight lost is muscle.
But on average, 10 pounds ofthe weight lost is muscle.

(02:35):
Now think about 10 pounds ofmuscle.
It's a huge amount of muscle.
Think about 10 pounds of groundbeef on your kitchen counter.
It's a lot of muscle.
Well, if you stop that drug,since most people can't afford
it forever, you will regain theweight almost all as fat, and
typically 32 to 34 pounds offat, a lot of it in the abdomen.

(02:59):
You have more fat now after thedrug than before, and that
means phenomena like insulinresistance, high blood glucose,
high blood pressure, yourtendency to develop type 2
diabetes, prediabetes,hypertension, coronary disease,
dementia, breast cancer, andother cancers is now greater now

(03:20):
after the weight loss, afterstopping the drug, weight regain
as fat.
You're now at greater risk forall those diseases than you were
at the start.
So you regain that fat morethan you had at the beginning,
and you regain almost no muscle.
So you have less muscle thanyou had at the start.

(03:41):
Now that loss of muscle iscritical because it has several
very important implications.
When you lose muscle, yourbasal metabolic rate, we say
BMR, drops, drops significantly,typically about 25 or more
percent.
That is the rate at which yourbody burns energy has gone way

(04:03):
down.
Because by cutting calorieintake, your body is told
essentially you're starving.
Your body doesn't know that youlive a modern life with a
smartphone and a nice car and anice house.
They think you're living in thewild.
And the reduction in calorieintake means you failed in your
hunt or your gathering of food.

(04:24):
And so your body responds insurvival mode to turn down basal
metabolic rate to keep youalive.
It's a survival mechanism.
It's a natural survivalmechanism shared by all
creatures on this planet.
Problem, it's essentiallypermanent, or at least lasts for
many, many years.
So that if your basal metabolicrate drops, your body needs

(04:47):
fewer calories.
So a typical value would be1,200 or 1400 calories is all
your body needs to stay alive.
So you lost that weight, youreturn to your diet, and you
regain all the weight and more.
But what if you maintained alow calorie intake, let's say
1200 calories per day, andcombined it with an intensive

(05:09):
exercise program, bothresistance training and aerobic?
So I know lots of people, andin the clinical trials, people
have in have continued atwo-hour or more per day, six
days a week program ofresistance exercise, aerobic
exercise, so a very intensiveeffort, coupled with a

(05:31):
low-calorie diet.
What happens?
They still regain the weight.
Almost every last one of themregains all the weight as fat.
Now they're more likely to bepre-diabetic, diabetic, and have
all those health consequences.
So when you lose muscle, yourBMR drops, you regain weight

(05:52):
almost all as fat.
Another important and criticalconsequence of losing muscle is
that long term you're morelikely to succumb to falls,
fractures, frailty, and loss ofindependence.
And most concerningly of all,we now have several very large

(06:13):
databases, like the NHANGS,that's the NIH's database, or
the Epic Norfolk, that's a largeWestern European database, or
the Asprey database, and manyothers, that have tracked tens
of thousands of people inaggregate over 60,000 people
over 10 years or more in somecases, and asked, what happens

(06:37):
to people who've lost weight?
Now, most of the people who'velost weight have done so by some
version of reducing calories.
We could call it a dietprogram, a smartphone app that
tells you, hey, don't eat,you're being stressed, find
something to distract yourself.
So a diet program.
It could be a bariatricprocedure that shrinks stomach

(06:58):
volume, like lap band or gastricbypass.
Or of course, it could be apharmaceutical, such as the
popular GLP1 agonist drugs, thatreduce your calorie intake
because of the indifference tofood that they generate.
So reduce calorie intake, loseweight, and it's become clear
the people who lose 10% or moreof their body weight, that is,

(07:21):
let's say a 180-pound woman wholoses 18 pounds, not that much,
right, is likely to die, verylikely to die several years
earlier.
Think about that.
People have paid oftenthousands of dollars for the
privilege of becoming lesshealthy and dying younger.

(07:42):
This is what has been approved.
This is what's been beingdispensed by doctors.
Now, do you throw your hands upand say, well, I lose no matter
what?
I can't lose weight by othermethods.
I take the doctor'sprescription, and that leads to
long-term health problems, maybeeven dying earlier.
Well, that the thing is, thereare ways around this.

(08:03):
Well, first of all, accept thatconventional advice.
Cut your fat, cut yourcholesterol, eat more healthy
whole grains, move more, eatless, everything in moderation,
all those familiar mantras ofweight loss do not work.
We know this with 40 or moreyears of experience telling us,

(08:25):
in fact, the opposite happens.
That advice, coupled withexploitative food company
practices, food industrypractices, has led to the worst
epidemics of obesity, type 2diabetes, Alzheimer's dementia,
and other conditions everwitnessed in the history of our
species on this planet.

(08:46):
And so doing more of the same,you know this, doing more of the
same is likely not to lead tosuccess.
We've got to do thingsdifferently.
So we start by rejecting allthe conventional advice.
Don't cut your calories, don'tcut your fat.
Don't eat healthy whole grains,don't submit to extreme

(09:08):
exercise or cutting calories.
Instead, we're gonna followideas that humans have followed
for 99.99% of our time on thisplanet, times in which there was
no obesity.
There was no virtually no type2 diabetes and all those other,
what anthropologists continue tocall to this day diseases of

(09:29):
civilization.
So we're gonna revert back tothe diet that mimics that
lifestyle that's associated withno obesity.
We're going to introducenutrients that should have been
part of your life, but we'reabsent because of the way we
live.
You don't get vitamin D,because you live indoors, you
wear clothes, you don't getmagnesium because we have to
filter our drinking waterbecause it's got contaminants.

(09:50):
But water filtration removesmagnesium, iodine, omega-3 fatty
acids, because we don't eat alifestyle, eat a diet or a
lifestyle that includes thosenutrients, because we don't eat
brain anymore for omega-3 fattyacids, for instance, and we
can't eat all the fish we wantbecause it's contamined by
mercury and cadmium.
And we also replace othernutrients absent from modern

(10:13):
life, such as collagen orhyaluronic acid, because most of
us have failed to consume organmeats rich in collagen and
hyaluronic acid, two factorsthat play major roles in your
shape, body composition, thelocation of fat and muscle.
Now I want to cultivate thisconversation to bring you up to
date on all the wonderfulstrategies that you have

(10:35):
available to you to lose weight,but not just lose weight like
they do with the drugs, but losefat weight specifically, but
even more so abdominal visceralfat, the most problematic form
of fat, while maintaining oreven increasing lean muscle
mass, not experiencing reductionin BMR, not exposing yourself

(10:56):
to a future of faults,fractures, frailty, loss of
independence, and early death.
That is the focus of my newbook, Superbody.
Um that's what I have righthere.
Superbody, uh three-weekprogram to harness the new
science of body composition andrestore your youthful contours.
Uh, see my blog for links.

(11:17):
I'll be doing a live uh YouTubetransmission November, Monday,
November 10th.
So sign up.
And if you sign up, I'll sendyou an excerpt of a new book to
give you an idea what's in thisbook and see whether this is
something that you want to knowabout, something that you might
profit, something you mightbenefit from.