And you thought it was those butter cookies

Those shifty Danes have a lot of eggs in the Novo Nordisk basket. Macroeconomics blogger Joseph Politano explains how “Weight Loss Drugs Continue to Power Denmark’s Economy”. The boom “has been so strong that it has almost singlehandedly made Denmark one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union.”

Better dieting through chemistry

People may want to believe otherwise because it just feels more … natural? But one doctor looked at the studies and delivers the verdict, “No, Diet and Exercise Are Not Better Than Drugs for Obesity”.

The only reason that the world isn’t comfortable with the eminently provable truth that diet and exercise are inferior to obesity medications for weight management is weight bias. The message is that people simply aren’t trying hard enough.

Kill the pain, leave the treatment

Opioids are often part of cancer treatment to help patients deal with pain. But they can also interfere with the immune system — something you don’t want when you’re giving immunotherapy.

(Science: “[M]orphine binds to an opioid receptor called OPRM1 on CD8 T cells, suppressing their activity and canceling out the invigorating effects of anti-PD1 therapy.”)

Good news out of the University of Pittsburgh, where researchers found a potential work-around. They found that peripherally restricted OPRM1 antagonists (PAMORAs) — methylnaltrexone is one — “blocked opioid-induced immunosuppression and improved response rates to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy.”

Big ol’ caveat: This was only in mouse models, and specifically head and neck cancers, but it certainly feels like a breakthrough.

ICYMI

Vicious crime, vicious reaction

The healthcare industry may be expressing sympathy for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but patients? Not so much. One social post that got the most traction read, “When you shoot one man in the street it’s murder. When you kill thousands of people in hospitals by taking away their ability to get treatment you’re an entrepreneur.”

Side note: UnitedHealthcare denies more claims than any other health insurer — we’re talking a third of them. And the company has been facing protests, lawsuits, and even a Senate investigation for its practices.

Side side note: The vitriol on Twitter/X got so bad that the company — which allows Nazi sympathizers, Russian trolls, conspiracy theorists, and hate speech without blinking an eye — took some of them down.

Should we worry yet?

At least 79 people in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo have died — and almost 400 sickened — from “a mystery flu-like disease” that health authorities there are still trying to identify. They know it’s respiratory and likely airborne, but that’s about it.

Of course, how important can a mysterious flu-like disease be when it’s in a country on the other side of the world?

Embrace the dark side

Yet another study — this one using health data from about 192,000 people over 30 years — has shown that eating dark chocolate, but not milk chocolate, can reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes.

[T]he researchers found that people who ate at least five ounces of dark chocolate per week — equivalent to five servings — had a 21 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes compared with people who rarely or never ate dark chocolate.

Moving ahead, falling behind

The US already has one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations. It’s getting better, but a new report finds that it’s slowing compared to the rest of the world. That means we’ll drop even further in the rankings by 2050 thanks to “drug use disorders^*, high body mass index, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure” combined with our well-below-average healthcare access.

Despite the progress the U.S. has made over the last three decades, the country is forecasted to rank progressively lower than other nations globally in the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health. Known as healthy life expectancy or health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), its global ranking is forecasted to drop from 80th in 2022 to 108th by 2050.

^* “That’s the highest drug use–related mortality rate in the world and more than twice as high as the second-highest country, which is Canada.”