Julia Belluz
speaker
540 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 8 May
Julia Belluz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you so much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yes, it was surprising to me, too.
So one of the ways we can understand this is there's this very long history of people seeking out basically the magical elixir for weight loss, right?
So I think that's one piece of it.
And now we finally have something that rivals the only other effective medical intervention we've had to help people lose weight, which is bariatric surgery.
On the other hand, there's a lot of people who are living with diabetes.
And I think that's another reason that we see so many people who are on these drugs.
In addition, I think these drugs have really met a particular moment, which is this algorithmic social media age.
They're everywhere in the U.S.
We already had this relatively unrestricted approach to marketing pharmaceuticals.
We see them advertised everywhere.
We've seen this telemedicine industry flourish since COVID, but also around these drugs.
And I think that's why we're seeing these shocking numbers everywhere.
Yeah, so our bodies produce GLP-1 naturally.
So we have this hormone that's produced in our gut, in our brains, and to a lesser extent in the pancreas.
Basically, they're this synthetic version of a hormone we produce naturally.
And the big breakthrough for diabetes was that they're stimulating the pancreas to release insulin only in the context of high blood sugar.
So it's not like when you take insulin and you need to be careful about what you're eating and you're at risk of really low blood sugar levels and the dangers that come with that.
These are only stimulating insulin secretion when your blood sugar is running high.
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