Pop til you drop… weight?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Medicines like Ozempic melt the pounds away! But here’s the catch: almost HALF of what’s lost could be muscle. That’s an ancient survival trick — our bodies shed muscle when food is scarce. Can we trick our brawn into staying?
Mark Sleeman and the team at Regeneron studied mice and monkeys on these weight-loss drugs. Then, they added a treatment that blocks the body’s “muscle-eating” signals.
What happened? The animals kept their muscle. They also lost almost twice as much fat compared to those just taking Ozempic! Their blood sugar and cholesterol improved, too.
Looks like we can stop weight loss from going to our muss-culls… but not from going to our heads!
Reference: Mastaitis, J. W., Gomez, D., Raya, J. G., Li, D., Min, S., Stec, M., … & Sleeman, M. W. (2025). GDF8 and activin A blockade protects against GLP-1–induced muscle loss while enhancing fat loss in obese male mice and non-human primates. Nature Communications, 16(1), 1-8.