addiction

America’s Next Epidemic is Happening in Canada

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Sports betting is being marketed to young Americans as an investment. Social media has perpetuated the idea that betting on sports is a profitable venture, leading to the normalization of unsafe and risky behavior. The legalization of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have only reinforced that messaging. America’s next epidemic – https://www.bettoroff.org/about-6-1

Nearly one in four (23.5%) young adults, aged 18 to 29, who reported gambling online in the past year experienced high levels of gambling-related harms, including financial, emotional, psychological and relationship harms. Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action – https://www.ccsa.ca/en

Yikes.

GLP-1s (it’s kind of a mess)

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“But the real question is what is the quality of the weight regain and what is the shift in people’s metabolism, and it seems to be very bad,” she said. “Ongoing studies that haven’t been published yet suggest that hypertension comes back. All the inflammatory markers come back, and lipids go up. And if you have diabetes, it gets worse. Overall, it’s kind of a mess…As these studies and others showed, most people regain the weight. Whether or not they regain all the weight depends in part on diabetes and insulin and many other factors, but people will likely regain most of their weight.”

“But the message isn’t that you regain the weight. The message is that you may be less healthy when you regain the weight. That’s why we need to couple the drugs with lifestyle interventions. And it’s why people who just want to lose 5 or 10 pounds really need to consider that lifestyle change, hard as it is, is the better way to do it.”

Anne Peters, MD, professor Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California

Less Weight Regain, More Health Loss after Stopping GLP-1s? – Medscape – March 05, 2026 – https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/less-weight-regain-more-health-loss-after-stopping-glp-1s-2026a10006rv?

I never envisioned developing an obsession with pharmaceuticals. And after many years of endless blogging into the void I learned I could link to previous posts like this: https://lifeunderwriter.net/tag/glp-1-receptor-agonist/

The learning never stops.

GLP-1s and the Risk for Malnutrition

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“We see cases where people take a GLP-1 medication and become so severely malnourished that they need to be hospitalized,” said Rebecca Boswell, PhD, director of Penn Medicine Princeton Center for Eating Disorders, in Philadelphia. “It’s not uncommon.” The Scary Health Risk That Can Sneak Up on GLP-1 Users – Medscape – January 19, 2026. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/scary-health-risk-can-sneak-glp-1-users-2026a10001pi

Yikes.

People return to their baseline weight and lose all cardiometabolic benefits in less than 2 years after stopping semaglutide or tirzepatide, a new meta-analysis found. Weight Regain, Health Benefit Loss Rapid When GLP-1s Stopped – Medscape – January 08, 2026. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/weight-regain-health-benefit-loss-rapid-when-glp-1s-stopped-2026a10000kr?

YIKES.

You see, cures are passée. Cures kill markets. Getting the population properly hooked on a pharmaceutical treatment for a ‘chronic’ condition is where the serious money is. “Our core insight was simple and grim: it’s far easier—and infinitely more profitable—to convince healthy people that they’re sick than to develop genuine cures for the truly ill.“

Twenty years later, the hustle is bigger, slicker, and more dangerous than ever. Watching that hustle unfold with weight loss drugs feels weirdly ominous, like watching a slow-moving train wreck you can’t peel your eyes off of. You know there’ll be carnage and bodies, vast fortunes won and lost, and humanity left just a little bit poorer. We have often documented the pharmaceutical industry’s proven ability to create enormously lucrative markets overnight, by inventing and selling diseases. Now watch as all that ingenuity and energy gets pointed at one of the biggest problems bewitching humanity: human fatness. The Seven Deadly Sins of Weight Loss Drugs – https://brownstone.org/articles/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-weight-loss-drugs/

YIKES!

This will not end well.

Complications? What Complications? (just another GLP-1 receptor agonist post)

Think Again About Outsourcing Your Thinking 2.0 (if you can)

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Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School, began studying the impact of generative AI on critical thinking because he noticed the quality of classroom discussions decline. Sometimes he’d set his students a group exercise, and rather than talk to one another they continued to sit in silence, consulting their laptops. He spoke to other lecturers, who had noticed something similar. Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.) Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative – but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology

Yikes.

Vapes Clouds Contain Absolutely Horrifying Chemicals

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“When I first saw the lead concentrations, they were so high I thought our instrument was broken…” Salazar and his colleagues discovered concentrations of toxic forms of metals like nickel, chromium, and antimony in most of the tested vapes. To quickly sum up what makes these metals bad: the type of nickel the researchers detected can cause lung and nasal cancer; chromium is also considered a carcinogen; and antimony can lead to heart and lung problems when inhaled as a dust and cause vomiting when swallowed.

Yikes. https://futurism.com/neoscope/vape-clouds-horrifying-chemicals

I Bet This Is a Big Problem

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Is sports wagering a public health crisis?

“Folks might be familiar with this group at Northeastern, the Public Health Advocacy Institute. It is treating gambling as a public health issue and has deemed it a crisis…

“First of all, lots of people, predominantly young men, are losing more money than they can afford gambling on sports, or are developing either full-blown or sort of borderline gambling addictions. To me, that makes it a public health issue.”

Jonathan D. Cohen on how sports gambling became a public health crisis – https://awfulannouncing.com/gambling/author-jonathan-d-cohen-perils-sports-betting.html

The next major health epidemic in the U.S. will not come from a pathogen. This plague has a potential patient population in the tens of millions, limited effective treatments, and is not widely studied in the medical community. I’m referring to sports gambling, an activity that deeply alarms me as a physician who specializes in addiction. Problem gambling can increase the incidence of depression and anxiety and can lead to bankruptcy, homelessness, or suicide. Why gambling addiction is America’s next health crisis – https://kevinmd.com/2025/06/why-gambling-addiction-is-americas-next-health-crisis.html

Yikes.

I’m Taking Your Phone Away (and you didn’t do anything wrong)

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The study found that those who had high and increasing addiction to mobile phones and social media platforms were at a higher risk of suicidal behaviors and thoughts. At year four, almost 18% of kids reported having suicidal thoughts, and 5% said they had suicidal behaviors. Teens with ‘addictive’ phone use more likely to be suicidal: Study – https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5360042-teens-addiction-social-media-phones-suicidal-thoughts/

Here’s the link to the JAMA article https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2835481/

Yikes!