New Year, New Health Habits?

It’s that time of the year, and many of us hope to make this our healthiest year yet—or at least significantly improve it in some particular area that’s important to us! So, what news from the health world?

The rise of GLP-1 agonists continues

GLP-1 agonists have surged in popularity in the past year, and it looks like that trend is set to continue in the new one. The title of the below-linked pop-science article is slightly misleading, it’s not “almost three quarters of UK women”, but rather, “72% of the women using the digital weight loss platform Juniper”, which means the sample is confined to people interested in weight loss. Still, of those interested in weight loss, 72% is a lot, and the sample size was over 1000:

Read in full: New Year, new approach to weight loss: Almost three quarters of UK women are considering using GLP-1s in 2025

Related: 5 ways to naturally boost the “Ozempic Effect” ← these natural methods “hack” the same metabolic pathways as GLP-1 agonists do (it has to do with incretin levels), causing similar results

The lesser of two evils

Smoking is terrible, for everything. Vaping is… Not great, honestly, but as the below-discussed study shows, at the very least it results in much less severe respiratory symptoms than actual smoking. For many, vaping is a halfway-house to actually quitting; for some, it’s just harm reduction, and that too can be worthwhile.

We imagine that probably very few 10almonds readers smoke cigarettes, but we know quite a few use cannabis, which is discussed also:

Read in full: Switching to e-cigarettes may ease respiratory symptoms, offering hope for smokers

Related: Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air? ← we look at the pros, cons, and popular beliefs that were true a little while ago but now they’re largely not (because of regulatory changes re what’s allowed in vapes)

Sometimes, more is more

The below-linked pop-science article has a potentially confusingly-worded title that makes it sound like increased exercise duration results in decreasing marginal returns (i.e., after a certain point, you’re getting very limited extra benefits), but in fact the study says the opposite.

Rather, increased moderate exercise (so, walking etc) results in a commensurately decreasing weight and a decreasing waistline.

In short: walk more, lose more (pounds and inches). The study examined those who moved their bodies for 150–300 minutes per week:

Read in full: Increased exercise duration linked to decreasing results in weight and waistline

Related: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More

Take care!