Risker med viktminskningsläkemedel | NTD NYHETER

Welcome back to NTD. I'm joined in studio now by NTD Health correspondent and host of Vital Signs, Brandon Falun. Vital Signs offers natural and nutritional ways of optimizing our health. Brandon, as always, it's great to see you. What are we talking about today? Well, for people like you and I, Don, greyhounds, this isn't such a big issue, but obviously there's a lot of people out there struggling with trying to lose weight. And Ozempic, everyone's heard about this. It's all over. It's being advertised everywhere. It was the number two highest selling drug in 2024. So a lot of people are turning to this as a way to lose weight. The question is, is it always the best option? Is it safe for everyone? And I was fortunate to speak to a real expert, a world expert on this topic, Dr. Jason Fung. He's a nephrologist, so he's a kidney health specialist looking at weight loss a lot. And I got his opinion. I asked him first, in what cases would you prescribe Ozempic? And this is what he had to say on that. Well, I mean, not everybody is going to do well with just dietary approaches. And some people sometimes need help. So I'm not against medications. And certainly they have their role. So Ozempic certainly has a role. And a lot of the data that's coming out says that, hey, it can protect people against heart disease and kidney disease and fatty liver disease and perhaps Alzheimer's disease. So all of those things that are mediated by excess insulin, hey, if you take it, you're going to reduce your insulin and then probably reduce your risk of all these diseases. So I'm not against the use of Ozempic. The problem is that everything in medicine comes down to a risk versus benefits. So if you have somebody who's very sick, very high insulin levels, very overweight, type 2 diabetes, well, that person might need more help. If they've tried the diet and they need help, then sure, give them some help with Ozempic. There's nothing wrong with that. It's like taking an antibiotic, right? It's like, well, you have an immune system. It doesn't mean that I'll never give you an antibiotic. There's a time and a place for that. In that time and place, the benefits outweigh the risks. The problem is that because of the weight loss, and it's been obviously quite successful at weight loss, people without all these risk factors who just want to lose a couple of pounds to go to their high school reunion, they now go to the medical spa, not even seeing a doctor. They go to some online site, and in five minutes, they get a prescription for Ozempic. Nobody's made any assessment of their risks and their benefits. So what would be the medical benefit of losing five pounds temporarily to go to your high school reunion? Well, very little. That's a very important distinction that Dr. Fung is making, that Ozempic has its place for some people with very serious metabolic issues. Perhaps it has a role in reducing weight for those people. But on the other hand, you need very close medical oversight for use of this drug too. Certainly. I think that's the main point there. He goes on to talk about the different risks associated with this medication, like macular degeneration, the loss of vision, pancreatitis, inflammation of the pancreas. There's very serious side effects that people can experience just taking this drug without the proper oversight, as you say, Don. On a more aesthetic note, there's this widespread phenomenon that everyone's hearing about, particularly in Hollywood, Ozempic face, where you're seeing these people with very gaunt features, the sunken eyes, the protruding cheekbones. And often, this is being caused by Ozempic. They're, I guess, taking it without the proper advice and dropping weight very quickly. And this signals where Ozempic really isn't always the best choice, because there are other ways to lose weight, like fasting, that will handle this problem of losing the wrong kind of fat in the face, or losing fat where the fat isn't processed properly. You might get a lot of sagging skin. There are other ways to lose weight where you won't have these kinds of effects. And this is what Dr. Fang talks about as well. Okay. And I understand you have another clip for us, right? Yeah. So here he's talking about this phenomenon associated with fasting. It is a process called autophagy, where the unwanted cell matter will actually be renewed, will be taken out of the body. You don't actually get that to the same degree if you take a drug like Ozempic. So when you talk about fat, the fat cells, there's two types of fat cells. There's subcutaneous fat, which is the fat underneath the skin. And that's not that dangerous. So if you have subcutaneous fat, fat is contained within the fat cell where it's supposed to be. There's also visceral fat, which is the belly fat. So the fat which is contained within the liver and the organs is not supposed to be there. The liver is not supposed to hold fat. So that fat is actually very dangerous fat. Whereas the subcutaneous fat is not really particularly dangerous. You could hold a lot of subcutaneous fat and it won't make much difference from a health standpoint. Ozempic face is the loss of the subcutaneous fat, which is the sort of not dangerous fat, which is because you're losing a lot of the fat, you're getting these sort of like sunken cheeks, your eyes, you know, are all sunken because you've lost all the sort of fat that's normally supposed to be in the face. And you've got this really, you know, hollow look, your eyes look terrible, the cheekbones are very prominent, you've got the sunken cheeks, and people look like, you know, talking skeletons, basically. And it's, you can see it, and it takes barely two seconds to find it on Google. And I imagine this is where it's being used to excess, where ozempic is being used to excess. Yeah, it's not just excess. It's the fact that the way that you lose the weight in the ozempic is not necessarily just from the visceral fat. So when you do the fasting, what you're doing is you're creating a cascade of hormones, which is the severe reduction in insulin, and then the rise in some of these other counter-regulatory hormones, which helps prevent that when you do fasting. In fact, you primarily hit the visceral fat, which is the fat you're supposed to. Sagging skin is a different problem where you have excess protein, so you're not, you know, breaking down the protein. So if you just lose fat, you're not breaking down the skin. And skin is not fat, skin is protein. And the connective tissue, which is all that tissue that holds it together, that's not fat, that's protein, and you need to break it down. That's very fascinating. I would have never known that taking ozempic could actually affect your face as well, getting rid of the essential fats in your face and making you sort of, as the doctor described, looking like a skeleton, I guess. It just reiterates that you need the proper advice before taking this medication. Yes, certainly, I think so. And as Dr. Fung describes, the situation where people can just go online, they fill out a form in five minutes, they talk to a bot, the next thing they've got a prescription for ozempic, it's really creating a lot of risks, you know, for people. Well, fascinating topic. Again, as always, Brandon, thank you very much. Thank you, Don. And to hear more from Dr. Fung about an effective and relatively easy way to fast, just go to your web browser and enter ept.ms slash kidney detox.