May 14, 2026 · 45 min · 23 segments
GLP-1 medications are transforming weight loss — but what do they mean for healthy aging? In this episode of Aging Forward, Dr. Andres Acosta breaks down the difference between a “hungry gut” and a…
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To start, can you just break it down for us in simple terms, what are GLP-1 medications, and how do they work in the body?
So one of the signals that we send is a hormone called glucagon-like peptide, as you said, GLP-1.
We have other hormones, and what these hormones are doing are telling us, "Hey, slow down.
I need time to digest." And by doing that, it give us time to digest the food and absorb those nutrients, but at the same time makes us feel full, so we don't go and find another meal, and it slow down our gastric emptying.
So we know this role of GLP-1 and many other hormones for many years, decades.
But what's clever and was recently identified is that these GLP-1 hormones will also go to our pancreas and regulate our insulin secretion.
So 20 years ago, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, or the first medication for GLP-1, called exenatide, the brand name is Byetta, was approved in 2006 for the treatment of diabetes.
And what we saw with that first generation medication was that a few patients would actually feel very full and lose weight.
So subsequently, we had multiple GLP-1s, first generation, on the market for type 2 diabetes.
And then it was Novo Nordisk, the Danish company, who saw that with liraglutide, also known as Victoza for type 2 diabetes, they realized that patients were losing more weight.
So they decided to push to higher doses to really push that phenomenon of feeling you full and then showing that these medications will also affect, at the higher doses, our weight and make us feel full.
So how exactly they work? They go to different areas of our brain and affect what is called postprandial satiety.
We feel very full, and then with time, we'll start feeling less full, and then we start feeling hungry again.
What this medication does is just continue to make you full, so you don't have that return of hunger.
A lot of people now are talking that when you feel full all the time, you're not thinking about food.
And even when you come to your next meal, you're gonna eat less because you haven't been thinking that much about food.
To start, can you just break it down for us in simple terms, what are GLP-1 medications, and how do they work in the body?
So one of the signals that we send is a hormone called glucagon-like peptide, as you said, GLP-1.
We have other hormones, and what these hormones are doing are telling us, "Hey, slow down.
I need time to digest." And by doing that, it give us time to digest the food and absorb those nutrients, but at the same time makes us feel full, so we don't go and find another meal, and it slow down our gastric emptying.
So we know this role of GLP-1 and many other hormones for many years, decades.
But what's clever and was recently identified is that these GLP-1 hormones will also go to our pancreas and regulate our insulin secretion.
So 20 years ago, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, or the first medication for GLP-1, called exenatide, the brand name is Byetta, was approved in 2006 for the treatment of diabetes.
And what we saw with that first generation medication was that a few patients would actually feel very full and lose weight.
So subsequently, we had multiple GLP-1s, first generation, on the market for type 2 diabetes.
And then it was Novo Nordisk, the Danish company, who saw that with liraglutide, also known as Victoza for type 2 diabetes, they realized that patients were losing more weight.
So they decided to push to higher doses to really push that phenomenon of feeling you full and then showing that these medications will also affect, at the higher doses, our weight and make us feel full.
So how exactly they work? They go to different areas of our brain and affect what is called postprandial satiety.
We feel very full, and then with time, we'll start feeling less full, and then we start feeling hungry again.
What this medication does is just continue to make you full, so you don't have that return of hunger.
A lot of people now are talking that when you feel full all the time, you're not thinking about food.
And even when you come to your next meal, you're gonna eat less because you haven't been thinking that much about food.
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