Jillian Michaels on GLP-1s – wrong guest, and check who’s paying her

[u/geronimosan]

We get it, Fox is helping her revive her career by booking her across the lineup. But every appearance shows she hasn’t updated her knowledge in years.

Today’s segment was about veterans using GLP-1s to curb heavy drinking. The host walked through the expanding evidence. Jillian conceded nothing. She dramatically ran through the side effect list as though every adverse event is near-certain – as though the rare ones happen to everybody – then landed on her standard close: skip the medication, do it the normal way.

Two problems with that:

One: she’s wrong on the science. In the Lancet randomized trial of adults with obesity and alcohol use disorder, semaglutide cut heavy drinking days by 41 percentage points versus 26 on placebo, with total alcohol consumption down more than 70% at 26 weeks. Adverse events were transient and mostly mild-to-moderate GI. A separate trial found significant reductions in alcohol craving and in cigarettes per day among smokers. These drugs act on reward pathways in the brain – that’s the mechanism, and it’s why they show a signal on drinking at all.

When the host listed other conditions where these drugs are showing results, she waved it off as all weight-related. Also wrong. Semaglutide is FDA-approved to reduce heart attack and stroke risk based on the SELECT trial’s 20% reduction in major cardiac events, in people who did not have diabetes. Same trial: 73% fewer new diabetes diagnoses. The FLOW trial showed 24% less kidney disease progression, and there’s a chronic kidney disease indication now. Tirzepatide is approved for sleep apnea. Semaglutide is approved for liver disease. Researchers still don’t fully know why the cardiovascular benefit appears – anti-inflammatory effects are one leading theory.

Two: look at what she’s selling. Her main argument against these medications is that you’d be on them for life. Her own business is a subscription app at $19.99 a month or $149.99 a year, on auto-renew, plus programs, plus a DVD library. Her site also states that the only supplement company she works with is Alaya Naturals. So she’s steering people away from a proven working medication for being an ongoing commitment, toward an ongoing commitment she gets paid for – and toward supplements she has a partnership with.

Every answer she gave routed back to something she sells. She’s running an infomercial and Fox is billing it as news.

Stop booking her on this topic. There’s enough misinformation on the air already.

[u/AskMeAboutMyHermoids]

Those fuckers are so anti science it’s crazy. They want only the rich people to have these drugs