8 November

These are of course known as miracle weight loss drugs. The GLP-1 drugs. But they’re showing signs of doing far more, in areas that medicine has been historically powerless. Chronic disease, like ME/CFS, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), POTS, IBS, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis etc. And Long Covid. People on these drugs have suddenly found themselves going into remission with some of these other conditions. One current hypothesis is that the drugs target inflammation. Inflammation can prevent your immune system clearing infections (most disease is caused by infection), because the immune cells are too busy fighting the inflammation to fight the pathogens. These drugs may be suppressing the inflammation so well that the immune system can finally start to win the fight against the pathogens. This also may help confirm that obesity never was about diet and exercise, as generations of people have been told. It was about inflammation, caused by particular combinations of gut microbes. You may literally have been able to ‘catch’ obesity all this time, by inheriting or acquiring certain gut microbes. Microbes the overweight then haven’t been able to clear from their systems, because of inflammation.