Ozempic

Ms. Belluz is a health journalist. She is writing a book about nutrition and metabolism. Sign up for the Opinion Today ...

This “isn’t a free pass, either to individuals who do have the capacity to choose better, nor does it take the heat off of food industries,” said a University of Sydney nutritional biologist, Stephen Simpson, but it’s “evidence that obesity isn’t a personal lifestyle choice.” Meanwhile, the energy balance model of appetite regulation is being complicated by evidence that we have other kinds of nutrient appetites — for protein, for example — and there’s very little understanding of how the medicines will affect these. This manifests in a range of experiences, from people with Prader-Willi to that annoying friend who forgets to eat and is effortlessly skinny all his life (and therefore, perhaps can’t understand why anybody struggles with weight). My brain was telling my body to get more energy to support the growing fetus. When leptin levels drop, or people have genetic abnormalities that don’t allow them to produce leptin or register leptin’s signal, the brain reads that there’s not enough fat on the body; people get hungry and eat more. The advent of new and effective obesity drugs offers a stark illustration of this little-appreciated fact of physiology. There it sends a message about how much energy is stored on the body in the form of fat. Just as in mice, leptin is produced by body fat and transported into the bloodstream, where it circulates to the brain. The Hertfordshire child with Prader-Willi “has an abnormality in the energy balance thermostat in her brain and she’s not responding,” Dr. After talking to hundreds of patients with obesity over the years and to clinicians and researchers who study the disease, let me assure you: Reality looks a lot less like free will. But it also exists on the far end of a spectrum of eating behavior common to us all, as I was told recently by Tony Goldstone, an Imperial College London endocrinology researcher and physician who works with patients with Prader-Willi. The disorder is a rare and devastating genetic cause of obesity.