Collecting this in one place because it comes up every few weeks and the answer is always assembled from scratch. It is about oral semaglutide, and it is deliberately narrow — everything I am not confident about is marked as such.
What is actually established
The OASIS programme put 50mg oral in the same territory as 2.4mg injectable — around 15% mean weight loss — but it needed a dose 20 times larger to get there because almost none of the tablet is absorbed. The dose numbers are not comparable across routes and quoting them side by side confuses people.
The condition it depends on
Worth adding that the tablet is taken daily, so a missed dose costs far less than a missed weekly injection. That is a genuine advantage nobody lists.
The practical version
The practical numbers: about 1% oral bioavailability, 30 minutes fasted before food, no more than 120ml of plain water, and coffee counts as food for this purpose.
What I am not sure about
So the question, as narrowly as I can put it: whether the fasting requirement is as strict in practice as the label implies, and what people actually see when they get it wrong. Numbers rather than impressions, if you have them.
— DerekSJ_a1c · corrections welcome and will be edited into this post with credit