Research
Hormonal
Endogenous gut hormone concentrations achieved through dietary changes are orders of magnitude lower than pharmacological doses, explaining why diet fails to suppress appetite while drugs succeed.
You cannot replicate the effects of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) through diet alone because the hormonal concentrations achieved by eating are too low. Diet changes affect hormones, but not enough to significantly reduce appetite or energy intake.
GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
the estimated active GLP-1 steady state average exposure concentration, Cavg... for the present study had mean (95% CI) values of 0.034 (0.029, 0.043) nmol⋅L-1 for LF and 0.086 (0.071, 0.113) nmol⋅L-1 for LC, which are orders of magnitude lower than the Cavg of both oral and subcutaneous semaglutide ranging from ~3 nmol⋅L-1 up to ~30 nmol⋅L-1
Why this rating
Direct comparison of pharmacokinetic data from the study vs. published drug trials.
Source
Discordance between gut-derived appetite hormones and energy intake in humans
Aaron Hengist et al. · medRxiv · 2023
DOI 10.1101/2023.05.10.23289718
preprint · n=20Cited 4×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Diet-induced changes in endogenous gut-derived appetite hormones (GLP-1, GIP, PYY, ghrelin) do not reliably predict or control ad libitum energy intake in humans.Good
- Dietary energy density and the proportion of hyper-palatable foods are stronger predictors of ad libitum energy intake than macronutrient composition or gut hormone levels.Good
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