The specialty ingredient company surveyed more than 550 people taking these medications and discovered a troubling pattern: Yes, the appetite control works, but users are losing something else along the way—themselves.
“We said, OK, why don’t we go out into the community and ask some of these people who are using GLP-1 therapies and see if our hunch relative to the kinds of reactions that are happening outside weight loss are true,” said Mike Petteruti, president & general manager at Chemi Nutra.
“We know, for instance, that our ingredients have an impact on other body transformations like pregnancy, postpartum, injury recovery. We know that our ingredients can have a role there, so we were looking at GLP-1 patients as going through a life transition, a bodily transition. So we asked questions about what other things are you feeling? Are there any other unexpected…reactions? Or are there any other psychological or physiological things that might be going on outside your desired outcome?”
Petteruti revealed that over 70% of GLP-1 users experienced mood and cognitive changes, indicating that something larger than weight loss is happening. While GLP-1 drugs modulate dopamine and serotonin to control hunger, they’re also creating unexpected mental health side effects that leave people feeling emotionally displaced. Through its research, Chemi Nutra identified what it calls “emotional anchoring”—a way to help people maintain the benefits of medication while feeling balanced again.
The company developed supplements targeting three pillars: mind, mood and movement.
“We’re trying to provide some emotional stability with ingredients that have an impact on… mood, stress and anxiety,” Petterutti said.
“Emotional anchoring is trying to bring that patient or consumer on GLP-1 therapies back to a place that helps them cope with some of these other changes that we’ve talked about that our ingredients can address in a more comfortable way and hopefully an easier way for brands to communicate softly to the consumer, but with a real performance-oriented ingredient.”
To find out what happens when your body changes faster than your mind can adjust and how science-backed supplements might bridge that gap, listen to the NutraCast above or on your preferred podcast platform.
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