Tag Archives: Lose

You Can Lose Weight Without Regularly Using Medications Like Ozempic

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Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications might not need as frequent dosing as currently prescribed

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Individuals using GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic can still achieve weight loss despite facing difficulties in obtaining their prescriptions.

Medications like Semaglutide, marketed under the names Ozempic and Wegovy, have transformed obesity treatment, yet the increasing demand has led to significant supply shortages. In the U.S., changes in insurance coverage for these drugs can lead to confusion. For instance, CVS Caremark, which assists insurers in managing their prescription plans, recently discontinued coverage for Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, linked to the GLP-1 drug tilzepatide.

To investigate the impact of this confusion, Kaelen Medeiros and a colleague from a New York firm analyzed data from over 6,000 participants in the U.S. who enrolled in their program for a year between 2021 and 2024.

The program provided access to an app delivering bi-weekly lessons aimed at optimizing lifestyle choices such as nutrition and physical activity. Additionally, participants enjoyed regular one-on-one consultations with a health coach who assisted in applying these lessons. For an extra charge, all participants received GLP-1 medications, like Ozempic, mainly on a weekly basis.

By the program’s conclusion, 73% of participants experienced at least one disruption in GLP-1 access, defined as missing the medication for a minimum of 13 weeks. These participants received, on average, eight months’ supply of GLP-1 over the year-long trial. Participants lost an average of 14% of their body weight, compared to a 17% reduction among those who did not face such disruptions. The findings were shared at the Endocrinology Society’s annual general meeting in San Francisco on July 14th.

A similar rate of weight loss was observed in the program’s second year, regardless of the consistency of GLP-1 supply. “Although this confusion is concerning, it’s encouraging to see significant clinically relevant weight loss achieved despite it,” Medeiros remarks.

“This study is promising,” says Priya Jaisinghani from NYU Langone Health, New York. However, further research is needed to assess how the health coaching and lifestyle lessons provided to participants influenced weight loss, she notes. The researchers didn’t measure the engagement levels of participants in this segment of the program. Medeiros pointed out that variations in adherence might have impacted the outcomes.

Some participants also took metformin, a medication for type 2 diabetes that can aid in weight loss. Nevertheless, metformin is associated with only about a 2% reduction in body weight.

Topics:

  • Medical drugs /
  • Weight loss

Source: www.newscientist.com

Suppressing Appetite to Lose Weight: The Effects of Weight Loss Drugs on Eating and Exercising Desires

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Weight loss drugs may reduce people's desire to exercise

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Semaglutide, found in medicines such as Ozempic and Wigovy, reduces the amount of movement in mice. This finding suggests that these weight loss drugs may reduce people's motivation to exercise.

Semaglutide helps treat type 2 diabetes and obesity by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite. GLP-1 also suppresses activity in brain areas involved in reward processing and craving. This may explain why people taking semaglutide-based drugs no longer find eating as rewarding or pleasurable as they did before taking the drug. This is also probably why some studies show that semaglutide may also be helpful in treating substance use disorders.

ralph dileone Researchers at Yale University wanted to know whether semaglutide also affects other rewarding behaviors, such as exercise, which is known to improve mood and memory. So they gave seven mice semaglutide and an equal number a placebo and measured how far the mice ran on an exercise wheel each day.

On average, patients treated with semaglutide ran about half the distance as those given a placebo. This suggests that motivation for exercise may be low.

To further test this, the researchers administered semaglutide to another group of 15 mice and a placebo for 5 days to another group of similarly sized mice, and investigated their willingness to exercise on a wheel. did. But this time, the exercise wheel locked up periodically while the animal was running on it. To release the lock, the mouse had to press a lever with its nose. Each time the wheel locked, it became progressively more difficult to unlock, requiring the mouse to press the lever many more times. “Eventually they quit,” says DiLeone, who presented these findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago on October 7. “We call that their breakpoint. It's a proxy for how willing they are to access the wheel.”

The maximum number of lever presses in the semaglutide-treated mice was, on average, 25% lower than in the control animals. The researchers repeated the experiment in obese mice and found similar results.

Taken together, these findings suggest that semaglutide-based drugs, such as Ozempic and Wigovy, may reduce motivation to exercise, similar to reducing food and drug cravings. Masu. But DiLeone says there's still no evidence that this applies to humans. This could be because most of the data on Wegovy and Ozempic comes from people participating in weight-loss programs that include exercise, he says.

Still, these findings highlight that these drugs can interfere not only with negative behaviors but also with positive ones. ”[This] Data suggests there are still motivated behaviors that can be changed [with semaglutide] I haven't heard it yet.'' Karolina Skibicka at Penn State University.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

The Guaranteed Method to Lose Weight and Maintain it: The Power of Fasting

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In the past, intermittent fasting was not a choice due to scarcity of food. People would go hours or days without eating. Today, we have access to food whenever we want. This shift in eating habits has led to questions about the benefits of fasting and its potential reintroduction.

Intermittent fasting usually involves limiting food intake to specific times or days, like eating only for eight hours out of 24 (16:8 diet) or restricting calories for two days out of seven (5:2 diet).

Strong Points

Intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, particularly fat loss, as it reduces overall caloric intake. It also provides structure to eating days and can be flexible and intuitive. Some benefits include decreased hunger, lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin, reduced appetite, and improved fat burning.

Fasting may also lower the risk of type 2 diabetes and improve vascular health. Research shows that intermittent fasting is beneficial for cardiometabolic health and may have positive effects on long-term cardiovascular health.

There is evidence to suggest that fasting can protect against issues related to aging, improve autophagy, and potentially benefit brain health and cancer risk, but more research is needed to support these claims.

Cons

Concerns about fasting include potential muscle loss and the lack of long-term studies to support its safety. Some studies suggest that restricting eating to less than eight hours a day could increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but data collection methods and sample sizes in these studies may be flawed.

There is also a risk of reduced protein intake with intermittent fasting, which could be problematic for some individuals, especially those with a history of eating disorders or health conditions that require regular meals.

Experts recommend ensuring adequate protein intake and incorporating strength training if trying intermittent fasting. It’s important to approach fasting like any other diet, not as a permanent solution, and to pay attention to food choices when breaking the fast.

About our experts

Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Darryl Gioffre, Brady Holmer, and Drew Price are experts in their fields and have published work related to intermittent fasting, nutrition, and health.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

AI Fraud is a Growing Issue in Education, But Teachers Shouldn’t Lose Hope | Opinion Piece by John Norton

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IThe start of term is fast approaching. Parents are starting to worry about packed lunches, uniforms, and textbooks. School leavers heading to university are wondering what welcome week will be like for new students. And some professors, especially in the humanities, are anxiously wondering how to handle students who are already more adept at Large Language Models (LLMs) than they are.

They have good reason to be worried. Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media, said: and He studied Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. it is“If the first year of AI College ended with a sense of disappointment, the situation has now descended into absurdity. Teachers struggle to continue teaching while wondering whether they are grading students or computers. Meanwhile, the arms race in AI cheating and detection continues unabated.”

As expected, the arms race is already intensifying. The Wall Street Journal Recently reported “OpenAI has a way to reliably detect if someone is using ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper, but the company has not disclosed it, despite widespread concerns that students are using artificial intelligence to cheat.” This refusal has infuriated a sector of academia that imagining admirably that there must be a technological solution to this “cheating” problem. Apparently they have not read the Association for Computing Machinery's report on “cheating”. Statement of principles for developing generative AI content detection systemsstates that “reliably detecting the output of a generative AI system without an embedded watermark is beyond the current state of the art and is unlikely to change within any foreseeable timeframe.” Digital watermarks are useful, but they can also cause problems.

The LLM is a particularly pressing problem for the humanities because the essay is a critical pedagogical tool in teaching students how to research, think, and write. Perhaps more importantly, the essay also plays a central role in grading. Unfortunately, the LLM threatens to make this venerable pedagogy unviable. And there is no technological solution in sight.

The good news is that the problem is not insurmountable if educators in these fields are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching methods to fit new realities. Alternative pedagogies are available. But it will require two changes of thinking, if not a change of heart.

First, law graduates, like the well-known psychologist from Berkeley, Alison Gopnik says They are “cultural technologies”, just like writing, printing, libraries, internet searches, etc. In other words, they are tools used by humans. AugmentIt's not an exchange.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the importance of writing needs to be reinstated in students' minds. processI think E.M. Forster once said that there are two kinds of writers: those who know their ideas and write them, and those who find their ideas by trying to write. The majority of humanity belongs to the latter. That's why the process of writing is so good for the intellect. Writing teaches you the skills to come up with a coherent line of argument, select relevant evidence, find useful sources and inspiration, and most importantly, express yourself in readable, clear prose. For many, that's not easy or natural. That's why students turn to ChatGPT even when they're asked to write 500 words to introduce themselves to their classmates.

Josh Blake, an American scholar, Writes intelligently about our relationship with AI Rather than trying to “integrate” writing into the classroom, I believe it is worth making the value of writing as an intellectual activity fully clear to students. you If you think about it, naturally they would be interested in outsourcing the labor to law students. And if writing (or any other job) is really just about the deliverables, why not? If the means to an end aren't important, why not outsource it?

Ultimately, the problems that LLMs pose to academia can be solved, but it will require new thinking and different approaches to teaching and learning in some areas. The bigger problem is the slow pace at which universities move. I know this from experience. In October 1995, the American scholar Eli Noam published a very insightful article: “The bleak future of electronics and universities” – in ScienceBetween 1998 and 2001, I asked every vice-chancellor and senior university leader I met in the UK what they thought about this.

Still, things have improved since then: at least now everyone knows about ChatGPT.

What I'm Reading

Online Crime
Ed West has an interesting blog post Man found guilty of online posts made during unrest following Southport stabbingIt highlights the contradictions in the British judicial system.

Ruth Bannon
Here is an interesting interview Boston Review Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris Discusses Steve Bannon's Dangerous 'Dharma' his consciousness of being part of the inevitable unfolding of history;

Online forgetting
A sobering article by Neil Firth MIT Technology Review On Efforts to preserve digital history for future generations In an ever-growing universe of data.

Source: www.theguardian.com

New Luddite movement protests AI as robots lose jobs and films are scrapped – Ed Newton Rex

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pictureEarlier this month, the popular lifestyle magazine introduced its new “Fashion and Lifestyle Editor” to its massive social media following. “Ream”At first glance, Reem appeared to be a woman in her twenties who understood both fashion and lifestyle, and was proudly announced as an “AI-enhanced team member” — that is, a fake persona generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be recommending products to SheerLuxe's ​​followers — in other words, doing the job that SheerLuxe would normally pay a human to do. The reaction was entirely predictable. Indignation“The editorial team hastily issued an apology, saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what to do.'”

This is just the latest in a long line of withdrawals of “inspiring AI projects” that have drawn outrage from those they were meant to inspire. The Prince Charles Cinema in London's Soho cancel In June, it canceled a screening of a film written by AI after patrons loudly protested. Lego was under pressure The company demanded that it remove a series of AI-generated images it had published on its website. Doctor Who had begun experimenting with generative AI, It stopped immediately After a wave of complaints, companies have bought into the AI ​​hype, thinking that adopting AI will help them promote themselves as innovative, completely failing to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment among many customers.

Behind the backlash are a number of concerns about AI. The most fundamental is its impact on human labor. The main impact of using AI in many situations is that it will deprive humans of the opportunity to do the same work. And AI systems will: Exploitation of works Artificial intelligence is training the people it is meant to replace in creative output without paying them. The technology has a tendency to sexualize women, is used to create deep fakes, and is causing tech companies to miss their climate targets, without understanding many of its risks well enough to mitigate them. Naturally, this has not met with universal praise. Hayao Miyazaki, director of world-famous animation studio Studio Ghibli, said: “I’m completely disgusted…” [AI] It is an affront to life itself.”


Members of the activist group Safe Streets Level place cones around a self-driving taxi in San Francisco, California, in July 2023. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Some members of the anti-AI movement Reclaiming the name “Luddite”I come from a tech community where Luddite is considered an insult, but this new movement is proud of the moniker. As Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, points out, the first Luddites didn't rebel immediately. They called for dialogue and compromise. The new Luddites also want dialogue and compromise. Most recognize that AI is here to stay, and they want a more rational and fair approach to its adoption, not reversal. And it's easy to imagine that they might be more successful than their predecessors. 19th century counterpartThe legendary Ned Ludd had no social media. Downtrodden workers used to be easily ignored. The internet is the greatest organizing tool in history.


Anger toward AI companies is forging unlikely allies. When the Recording Industry Association of America recently sued two AI music-generation companies for “unimaginable copyright infringement,” musicians and fans took to the internet to show their support. “Wow, these AI companies make me want to root for the record companies,” one person wrote. One composer said:To address the new threat of AI, old arguments are being pushed aside: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes.

Some will believe that AI is all about opportunity, all about good, and that it is the next great technological revolution that will free humanity from the dark ages we live in. A speaker at the Tony Blair Institute's Britain's Future Summit a few weeks ago said: Overview Why empowering AI is “the only option for a forward-thinking UK government.” There is some truth to this. Of course, AI has a promise. That promise is largely a creed for now, with AI leaders promising technologies that are at best years away and at worst unrealistic. But there is reason to think that the more optimistic predictions about AI have some real potential. AI may truly change the world, as AI visionaries would have you believe.

But the backlash points out that we can’t ignore real harms today in order to make technological bets on the future. Nintendo They won’t use generative AI. A user on Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for software engineers, wrote: A group revolted After the platform struck a deal to allow OpenAI to remove content to train its models, users began deleting posts or editing them to make them nonsensical. Attacks on driverless taxis They shouted in the streets of San Francisco that they were putting people out of work.

Outside the OpenAI offices in San Francisco, there are frequent groups of protesters holding banners reading “Pause AI.” If AI is left unregulated, this sentiment will only grow. Countries may be tempted to treat AI development as an arms race and forge ahead regardless of the costs. But According to opinion polls, the public We think this is a bad idea, and AI developers and those regulating the emerging AI industry need to listen to the growing backlash against AI.

  • Ed Newton-Rex is the founder of Fairy Training, a nonprofit that certifies generative AI companies that respect the rights of creators, and co-founder of JukeDeck, an AI company that can compose and arrange music.

Source: www.theguardian.com