Our story begins with a monster: the Gila monster, to be specific. Back in the 1980s, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health noticed this lizard eats only once or twice a year, a fact highly interesting to science. In 1992, another group of researchers isolated a substance from the Gila monster’s venom known as exendin-4, which they noted was very similar to GLP-1, a substance that had proved helpful to diabetic mice. Exendin-4’s half-life was longer than the original GLP-1, and thus the future of diabetic medication was lizard venom. By the 2010s, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (hereafter simply GLP-1s) were proving highly effective with diabetic humans, but they had an odd side effect: they were causing people to lose weight.
Fast forward to today. After decades of stories about the obesity epidemic in America, Gallup polling has revealed something astounding: the obesity rate peaked in 2022 and is now declining. All those stories about…