Pandora or panacea: Should we all be taking Ozempic?
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Pandora or panacea: Should we all be taking Ozempic?<br>The potential dark side of GLP-1 drugs that very few people are talking about
Juliette Ryan<br>Jul 10, 2026
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GLP-1s are everywhere.<br>Full-strength doses for diabetes and weight loss… Micro-doses, off-label, for fat loss and longevity…<br>People with almost nothing in common are all taking the same drug — bodybuilders, diabetics, the obese, the barely-overweight, the anti-agers — which raises an obvious question:<br>Should we all be taking some form of this miracle drug?<br>When I research a new topic, I usually start out with a really broad, ‘Why’ or ‘How.’ As I learn more, my questions become more targeted until I start making inferences and validating them against real-world results and data. In the early phase of learning, a lot of those inferences lead to dead ends, and I change mental directions many times, pruning and building out a network of understanding within my mind.1<br>When I reach a point where the inferences start to be consistently validated, my understanding starts to feel more solid — less like quicksand constantly shifting beneath me. At this point, I usually feel in a position to begin writing about the topic.<br>In all my research — both in engineering and neuroscience — I have never come across a topic more perplexing than GLP-1 and its impact on the brain’s motivation and reward systems. Every time I think I have nailed a facet of how it impacts these systems, I’ll find a recent study that refutes my understanding. The ground moves every time I try to put weight on it.<br>In fact, in some recent cases, it even made the solid bedrock that is my understanding of dopamine quake a little!<br>And it’s not just me. One paper perplexed even its own researchers who stated that they expected “decreased rather than increased dopamine levels” and that “this contrasts with a previous study” which, in the world of dry research papers is tantamount to a big fat ‘WTF?’2<br>I’ve now hit the ceiling on GLP-1 research. There are no studies left that will pull me out of this quagmire. I’m at the frontier, scratching my head alongside all the other similarly itchy researchers, with only white expanse before us as we wait for new results to come in.<br>So dear reader, instead of eliciting lightbulb moments like I usually try to do, this essay will leave you with great big cartoon question marks above your head. But I’m going to arm you with enough information along the way so that you at least won’t get swept up in the popular narrative.<br>Let’s dive in.<br>Miracle drug?
“I have a friend who has lost over 30kg on Wegovy.”<br>I can actually make that statement about a few friends, as I’m sure many readers can as well. GLP-1 is a wonder drug, seemingly curing the obesity epidemic that was sweeping our modern world.<br>But at what cost?<br>The first GLP-1 drugs were approved for diabetes around twenty years ago. The FDA knew they worked, but not exactly how. Our knowledge was still woefully incomplete when, barely a few years ago, the weight-loss approvals turned a diabetes drug into the fastest-adopted medication of the decade — prescribed, and micro-dosed off-label, by millions.<br>We know that ingested or injected GLP-13 hits the blood stream and acts on receptors that live directly on the vagus nerve, signalling to the gut to slow down emptying. At the same, it lands on receptors in the brainstem and hypothalamus, signalling to the brain that satiety is the new norm. This has a two-pronged effect on caloric consumption — it reduces the amount of food you can physically consume, and makes you less hungry for it in the first place.<br>Less calories in, same calories expended equals net weight loss.<br>That seems to be the extent of the knowledge that was deemed good enough to disseminate the drug across the globe. But lurking behind it was a third prong that is turning out to be rather pointy.<br>In a very broad sense, GLP-1 doesn’t just make you less hungry for food. It seems to reduce the will to eat. Or the will to gamble. Or drink.4 Or have sex. Or possibly even feel joy.<br>In fact, in some people, it seems to reduce ‘will’ across the board.<br>Take a sampling of comments by people taking GLP-1 and you’ll see many astounding ones like, “The relief from food noise is overwhelming, it feels like I'm finally free.”5 But at the same time, you’ll find other sorts of comments scattered throughout, like dark lines of grout amidst gleaming tiles, “I went from running six times a week to nothing and not caring about it at all. There was no motivation.”6<br>Motivation is dopamine’s domain.<br>Clearly, GLP-1 is impacting the brain’s dopamine system in some way. Yet these drugs were on the market for the better part of a decade before a single study even confirmed that link.7 It took until 2024, nearly twenty years after approval, for anyone to directly measure real-time dopamine in the brain of an animal on GLP-1.<br>And it was the ‘WTF’ paper...