Research
Adherence
Lifestyle modifications (balanced diet and regular exercise) are the most reasonable and cost-effective therapy for obesity, whereas pharmaceutical interventions offer modest, transient effects with significant long-term costs and side-effect risks.
Focus on sustainable diet and exercise habits first. While new drugs like Semaglutid show impressive weight loss numbers, they come with high costs, side effects, and unknown long-term risks. Lifestyle changes are cheaper, safer, and address the root cause, even if the weight loss is slower.
ModerateQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
While lifestyle modifications represent the most reasonable therapy for obesity, existing data from respective programs show modest and transient effects. ... These theoretically simple and inexpensive measures could save us the considerable costs and potential long-term side effects associated with drug therapy.
Why this rating
This is an editorial opinion piece summarizing existing literature, not a primary clinical trial.
Source
New obesity drug therapies – what is the added value?
Ulrich Keller · 2022
DOI 10.36000/hbt.2022.07.002
narrative_review
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
Related findings · Adherence
- Regular physical activity (at least 150 minutes/week of moderate-intensity) reduces all-cause and cardiovascular mortality by 20-30% and lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes by 25-35%.Strong
- Increasing physical activity from a sedentary lifestyle to an active one in middle adulthood significantly reduces the risk of coronary events compared to remaining sedentary.Strong
- Resistance exercise is the only intervention capable of consistently restoring muscle function and strength in sarcopenia, partially overcoming age-related anabolic resistance.Strong
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