Making people fat is big business. Just ask the sugar industry.
Making people not fat is potentially even bigger.
Just ask Novo Nordisk the manufacturers of Ozempic and Wegovy, the new once-weekly semaglutide injectables prescribed for type 2 diabetes and weight loss. As of October last year, this pharmaceutical company has quadrupled its share cap, making it currently the biggest company in Europe, on track to become the biggest company in the world.
Big sugar makes us fat and sick and then big pharma makes us thin and well again. Does anyone else find this troubling? Wouldn’t the perfect solution be to get rid of big sugar? That would be degrowth and let’s face it we’re addicted. It’s the ultimate sticky corporate web, spun by capitalist spiders. It’s overconsumption in overdrive. We pay to eat. We pay to not eat. Brilliant!
Obesity has become recognised as a chronic illness and the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes. More than 95% of people in the world with diabetes have type 2 – what was previously called ‘adult onset’ or non-insulin-dependent. The body becomes resistant to insulin or doesn’t make enough, causing elevated levels of blood glucose (or blood sugar), which leads over time to serious damage to the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys and nerves. Over 422 million people worldwide have diabetes. To halt the rise of diabetes, you need to address obesity. And that’s where Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs turned up. And for people with type 2 diabetes or in stages of onset, they have potentially been a lifesaver, although this is a long-term, possibly lifelong, medication.
So how does it work? Semaglutide makes you feel full. It does this by mimicking GLP-1, a natural hormone that tells your body you have eaten. It basically gives you disordered eating. And thanks to mismanagement of prescribing and the availability on the internet through illegal dispensers, eating disorders are on the rise. A psychiatrist who specialises in eating disorders told me recently that weight-loss drugs were causing an increase in morbidity with patients of his who were 45 kilos obtaining the drugs and dropping to 35 kilos. That’s when you die.
If you need to lose large amounts of weight and nothing else has worked, then maybe it is the answer. But its worldwide shortages indicate that it is being wildly overprescribed. Some people may just need a lifestyle change to manage their weight. Not a pill that can cause nausea and vomiting, this weird thing from fat loss called ‘Ozempic Face’, and the fact that if you don’t stay on it, the fat comes back on. Oh, and it’s not proven in humans, but apparently Ozempic and medicines that work like Ozempic, caused thyroid tumours in rodents. Not all, some. Maybe those rats had other underlying conditions. Maybe they also smoked.
Ozempic is a bit like vaping. It was introduced as a medical intervention for smoking cessation and then it leapt into the broader market and went gangbusters. It’s clear the demand for weight-loss drugs that mimic GLP-1 is off the charts. A recent shortage here in Australia saw some compounding pharmacists having a crack and making their own. This caused some of their patients to vomit blood. Frankly, I’d rather be a bit fat.
A friend of mine went to the doctor the other day for a consult unrelated to weight. She’s within a healthy weight range. Like most women I know she’d love to lose five kilos. The doctor asked her if she’d considered losing weight and then offered her a weight-loss drug. She was offended and surprised that a health professional would jump straight to a lifelong drug designed for people with type 2 diabetes. She had just been considering cutting back on her calories and upping her exercise. How quaint!
Maybe before we jump to medicating the world for obesity, we should address the underlying causes that make us obese?
Sugar. Poverty. Sugar. Unhappiness. Sugar. Addiction. Sugar.
Overconsumption.
Ironically, to stop our obesity from overconsumption we are overconsuming weight-loss drugs.
It’s the ultimate wicked problem for humanity.
When we solve the riddle of how to manage overconsumption, we solve obesity. But we also solve climate change.
Imagine if we could inject some sort of planetary peptide into our equator?
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