Themes
Rewired metabolisms - Food, weightloss, metabolic health
What not to eat
Humans are getting fatter and unhealthier. Everywhere. Whether in Britain, Brazil, America or even in Japan, humans are bigger than they were in the 1970s and 1980s,.
The $6 revolution. How generic weight loss drugs could save millions of lives.
This article was jointly written and jointly published on Global Health Insights, a Substack by the professor and commentator Peter Singer. Thanks for reading Overmatter. Sign up here for new posts.
The moral panic about GLP-1 rebound
The language of the current news cycle on weight loss drugs reeks of moral panic. The talk of a rebound in weight after coming off these drugs uses language like “weight recidivism” and “addiction”. Fingers are being wagged. The drugs are only a “quick fix” they say, implying that patients who have bypassed the proper path of diet and exerc…
Everday enhancement - Sports, longevity, social enhancement & psychedelics
High hopes: The American right is hallucinating over ibogaine
“I am 100% persuaded that these substances are divine medications that are engineered from on high,” declared Bryan Hubbard, head of Americans for Ibogaine, on The Joe Rogan Experience last January. He went further, describing ibogaine and psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT as gifts so “we can heal… and be affirmed by the love of our …
Boosted to win - What the First Enhanced Athletes Learned About Performance Enhancing Drugs
Las Vegas — Greetings from the launch event for the first Enhanced Games in a noisy night club in Las Vegas. The news has just broken that a proposed event dubbed the “doping Olympics” will run almost a year from now in this very spot — at the Resorts World venue in Las Vegas. I’ve had an early look at the plans and The Economist ha…
Creating superhumans
The air in the lecture hall of Balliol College buzzed with quiet chatter on a cold December day in Oxford last year. Delegates at the Second Conference on Human Enhancement, a curated mix of scientists, ethicists and investors, were on the cusp of ratifying the first draft of a declaration of human enhancement. This foundational document, in…
Doing drugs at Davos
Every year in the tiny Swiss mountain town of Davos, presidents, prime ministers, billionaires and a hefty chunk of the global elite gather to hobnob and push their agendas. The main event in town is the World Economic Forum. It is coming again soon. Don’t hurry over. For lesser mortals like you and I, it is an e…
Made to measure - Bespoke medicines
Bespoke Medicines
Stories about how medicines get made might seem a little wonkish. But the rules around what doctors are allowed to do when they create a new medicine can mean the difference between life and death for patients.
Divergent - neurodiversity, mental health & SEN
Imagination as intervention
It is hard to miss the game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) these days. The role-playing game is a prominent feature in the Netflix series Stranger Things—with the storyline picking up on the fact that the game was once at the centre of a moral panic in America. A
Chatbots behaving badly
Earlier this week, at the Leaders in Health meeting in London, one of the participants shared a troubling story about chatbot therapy. Their autistic former partner had developed a frightening relationship with ChatGPT after becoming deeply enmeshed in correspondence with the chatbot. “I came to despise ChatGPT”, he said, “it offered no answers, no solu…
Of microbes and mental health
One sunny afternoon last month I was sitting in a local park chatting with a friend who told me her daughter had a condition called PANDAS (which stands for Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus).
Does drinking tea reduce senior moments?
On December 16th, 1773 American colonists threw hundreds of crates of British tea into the Boston Harbour. Besides helping kick off the war of independence, it also triggered a trend for drinking coffee. And while Americans can console themselves with the birth of the largest and most dynamic economies in the world, they may have made one error that day…