Berberine is sold online as a natural alternative to prescription weight-loss drugs, usually on evidence far thinner than the marketing. A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in Nutrients tested a fixed combination of berberine, white mulberry leaf extract and chromium picolinate in 93 Greek adults with obesity over 12 weeks, and found real differences against … Read more
Eli Lilly posted the full results of ACHIEVE-3 to ClinicalTrials.gov on 15 September 2026, and they are the first detailed head-to-head numbers between the two oral GLP-1 drugs. Over 52 weeks in 1,698 adults with type 2 diabetes, the higher dose of orforglipron lowered blood sugar further than the higher dose of oral semaglutide and … Read more
A meta-analysis of 32 randomised trials covering 40,408 people puts the average weight loss on GLP-1 and dual-agonist drugs at 9.36%. Most of the paper is about why that average hides so much. Trials enrolling people who also had type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnoea or fatty liver disease reported systematically smaller losses. Trials that … Read more
A network meta-analysis of 378 randomised trials covering 113,122 adults with prediabetes has ranked what actually prevents type 2 diabetes, and incretin drugs finished first: dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonists cut the risk of developing diabetes by around 90% against control, and single GLP-1 receptor agonists by around 74%. Metformin plus intensive lifestyle change came third. … Read more
Novo Nordisk reported on 7 September that 40.4% of children aged 6 to under 12 who took once-weekly semaglutide in its STEP Young trial were no longer classified as having obesity after 68 weeks, compared with none of the children given placebo. Every child in both arms also followed a reduced-calorie diet and an exercise … Read more
A meta-analysis of 19 randomised trials behind semaglutide, tirzepatide and liraglutide reports a gap between what those trials recorded and what their own bloodwork showed. Investigators logged malnutrition as an adverse event in 0.12% of participants. Laboratory screening in the same trials found abnormally low lymphocyte counts in 2.90% of people taking active drug, against … Read more
A review in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery has pulled together what is known about GLP-1 drugs and obstructive sleep apnea, and its bottom line is a qualified one: the drugs work, and they work less well than CPAP. Across six meta-analyses the reduction in the apnea-hypopnea index ran from 5.7 to 21.9 events per … Read more
Eli Lilly announced 52-week results on 31 August 2026 from two Phase 3b trials testing whether adding tirzepatide (Zepbound) to the psoriasis biologic ixekizumab (Taltz) works better than the biologic alone in adults who have psoriatic disease and obesity. It did, on both trials’ primary outcomes and by wide margins. But the primary outcomes were … Read more