By Alliance for Natural Health International - January 9, 2026

By the year 2030, more than 40% of adults in the U.K. are predicted to be obese, with the figure in the U.S. rising to nearly 50%

While these numbers are startling, projections also show that by this same time, the global population of obese adults will exceed one billion.

As the single biggest risk factor for Type 2 diabetes — and a major contributor to heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, as well as digestive, liver and kidney conditions — addressing obesity is critical for optimal health.

It was against this backdrop that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of liraglutide (Saxenda) in December 2014 as a weight-loss treatment was celebrated as a major milestone.

Other drugs soon followed, including semaglutide (Wegovy) in 2021 and tirzepatide (Mounjaro) in 2023, both approved for long-term weight management.

Today in the U.K., more than 1.5 million people are accessing GLP-1 medications, with NHS England alone reporting a 900% increase in prescriptions for these injections since 2020.

In response to this growing demand, governments have moved to expand access. The U.K.’s phased rollout and funding of Mounjaro, alongside President Donald Trump’s recent deal with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, are framed as efforts to improve affordability and accessibility.

Yet this rapid expansion has gone hand in hand with mounting concern about the safety and risks of these drugs. It is important to acknowledge that obesity is a deeply sensitive issue for many people, due to the societal stigma, expectations and the very real difficulty of losing weight.

However, the risks of the GLP-1s are also real and all too often downplayed by the media, softened by regulators, and covered up by benefit-centred ads from Big Pharma. It is for this reason that we’ve written a fourth article on this subject (article 1, article 2, article 3).

Such is our concern; this article examines GLP-1 drugs, how they work in the body, the health risks that are frequently undercommunicated, the deeper problem of treating symptoms rather than causes and the path toward a healthier and more sustainable approach to weight loss.

What Is GLP-1 Medication And How Does It Work?

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist medications are drugs designed to mimic the action of natural GLP-1, a hormone released by the gut after eating. Receptor agonists turn something on in the body. In this instance, GLP-1 receptor agonists mimic the natural hormone GLP-1 and activate GLP-1 receptors throughout the body.

Under normal physiological conditions, GLP-1 helps regulate blood sugar by stimulating insulin release from pancreatic beta cells when glucose levels rise, while simultaneously suppressing glucagon secretion, thereby reducing glucose production by the liver.

Because of these glucose-dependent effects, GLP-1 receptor agonists were originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes, where they have been shown to lower levels of glucose attached to haemoglobin (HbA1c) — a marker of blood sugar levels over the past 12 weeks.

Beyond glucose control, GLP-1 also acts on the brain, where it plays a central role in appetite regulation and satiety.

However, please be aware that, naturally, the body only releases very small, short-lived amounts of GLP-1, mainly after eating. In comparison, GLP-1 medications like semaglutide (Wegovy) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro) create much higher and longer-lasting levels in the blood.

These drug levels are hundreds to thousands of times higher than what the body normally produces, and instead of brief spikes after meals, they keep the GLP-1 signal switched on continuously.

This is why these medicines have much stronger effects on appetite, weight loss and blood sugar control than the body’s own GLP-1 — but also why they also create so much damage.

In simplistic terms, GLP-1 drugs work by making people feel fuller for longer. They slow gastric emptying, reduce the hunger signal and thereby food intake, which together drive weight loss.

There’s no denying the results have been striking. Clinical trials show that people using Wegovy lose an average of around 15 percent of their body weight over 68 weeks, while those on Mounjaro can lose up to 21 percent over 72 weeks.

As prices fall and access expands, these outcomes are increasingly framed as a breakthrough for obesity treatment. Yet, amidst all these, a critical question remains: success at this scale may be undeniable, but at what cost to long-term health?

We are concerned that sustained exposure to synthetic GLP-1 receptor agonists may occupy and desensitise the body’s GLP-1 receptors, potentially reducing the ability of the body’s own gut-, brain stem- and pancreas-derived GLP-1 to bind and signal through those same receptors.

The resulting dysfunction could well be why the conventional medical narrative insists that obesity is an incurable, life-long disease requiring lifetime use of GLP-1 drugs.

The Underreported Risks Of GLP-1 Medication

One of the most common, yet least discussed realities of GLP-1 drug use is how quickly side effects accumulate.

Gastrointestinal problems are the most frequently reported adverse effect, with studies showing that up to 50% of users experience nausea, often alongside vomiting, diarrhoea, bloating and persistent acid reflux.

For many, persistent reflux leads to long-term use of proton pump inhibitors, introducing a second medication and a whole new set of risks. These effects are not merely uncomfortable.

A growing body of research (here and here) links GLP-1 drug use to increased rates of GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), gastritis (stomach inflammation), gastroparesis (dysfunction of the stomach muscles leading to slow emptying) and non-infectious gastroenteritis (non-pathogen-related inflammation and irritation of the gut), with evidence suggesting that delayed gastric emptying — the very mechanism through which GLP-1s suppress appetite — can persist even after stopping the drug.

A landmark 2025 population study involving over two million patients also found that GLP-1 drug users had more than double the risk of acute pancreatitis, alongside higher rates of gallbladder and biliary disease, kidney stones, arthritis and sleep disturbances, showing how a “simple jab” can quickly evolve into a myriad of medical complications.

Less visible, but increasingly documented in the literature, is the scale of muscle loss that accompanies rapid GLP-1 drug-induced weight loss. Studies (here and here) report that between 25 and 40 percent of total weight lost on GLP-1 drugs over 36-72 weeks comes from lean muscle mass.

This loss of fat-free muscle mass massively impairs metabolic health through . . .

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