The United States ranks number 1 of all non-island nations in obesity rate with about 42%. Even more troubling, that percentage is growing quickly, having been 30% in 2000. While this is certainly a global phenomenon, it is important to stress that we are at the extreme edge of this problem, with many other western countries dealing with it much more successfully. Much of Western Europe is in the 10-30% range, showing that the path we are on is not inevitable. We have options at our disposal to lower the obesity rate such as eating healthier foods and exercising more, but adopting those solutions are difficult, especially at a society wide level.
Instead, many Americans have found a new solution for weight loss: Semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and other similar products. While these drugs were made to help treat diabetes, they have been shown to be one of the most effective weight loss drugs in the market. The average obese person can expect a 15 to 20% overall reduction in weight through the use of semaglutide. These products, also including Wegovy and Mounjaro have seen remarkable success with 1 in 8 Americans having taken a semaglutide at some point in their life. Of course only a minority of this use is for weight loss, but there has also been substantial growth in the use of these treatments in the last year. For example, Wegovy is FDA approved for weight loss and it has seen a tremendous increase in usage, they are seeing 25,000 new users each month, which is five times higher than December.
It is not surprising to see how fast these products are growing, after all they are solving an important societal problem and in some instances legitimately saving lives. However, as I will make the case, there are serious reasons to be concerned about the rise of Semaglutide, a drug also distracting us from the root causes of our obesity problem: the American food industry.
To start with, Ozempic has a number of harmful and common side effects, including vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea. There is also the worrying outcome of loss in muscle mass common to most types of rapid weight loss. However muscle loss from semaglutide is particularly concerning because many people who take the drug but fail to make any lasting lifestyle changes gain a lot of the weight back after they stop taking the treatment. Therefore, many people who take semaglutide can be left worse off after the fact with all of the further complications that can exist from muscle loss. For this reason, the companies that produce these drugs are beginning to say that certain people will have to stay on semaglutide permanently, and that poses real problems.
Many insurance companies will only cover one year of treatment and the sticker price of these drugs like Wegovy can be as high as $1,430 a month without insurance, meaning that continued use cannot be sustainable for most people. Of course the technology is improving, and with the growing market for semaglutide will give drug developers the necessary incentives to try and solve these shortcomings. However, it seems clear that weight loss drugs will not be the silver bullet that so many people are looking for, and the bigger problem is why so many people are obese in the first place.
While it is true that many Americans choose to eat an abundance of unhealthy foods, that is not the only difference between the U.S. and many healthier countries. One important difference between the US and the EU is their regulatory philosophy around what is safe for consumption. In America, the new ingredients are assumed safe until proven to be harmful. Yet in the EU, they are assumed harmful and the food companies must prove their safety before entering the market. This difference in approach has led to the EU banning many additives and animal growth hormones that are legal in America. There is evidence that this difference has had real impacts on the health of American foods. For example, a study from 2009 indicates that over the past half-century, the vitamin content of many fruits and vegetables grown in America has dropped significantly. This not only effects the taste, but also leaves people less satisfied with the food they are consuming, encouraging them to switch to more unhealthy foods. If America really wants to begin to fix the obesity crisis, reforming the way the FDA regulates the food industry is essential in making healthier food choices the standard in the supermarket today. This can be achieved with a variety of reforms, such as limiting the amounts of added sugar and sodium that can be present in servings of food. This could help prevent the race to the bottom, where food companies need to make their products as sugary sweet as possible to compete with the next brand. It is also important to make the most critical information on the nutrition label clearer, and increase the level of food health education present in schools. For many people, evaluating the nutritional value of food beyond the most broad of categories is extremely challenging and a lot can be done to fix this issue.
Defenders of the status quo may say that the responsibility to eat healthily is on individual consumers. While it is certainly true it is possible for people to keep a healthy lifestyle with a balanced diet, it must be stated that it is much harder to do so successfully in this country because of policy choices which have been made. So while it is not inevitable, we have allowed a certain percentage of Americans to slip into an unhealthy, obese lifestyle which may have been avoidable if we regulated food processing a different way. Another point that could be made is that understanding the complexities of what types of food should be avoided or not is something that most people simply do not have the time for and would rather just eat what is cheap and easy. These are people we should be thinking about when making important decisions for how food is produced in this country.
It is clear that Ozempic and its many similar competitors will not be enough to stop America’s obesity epidemic, for they impose large costs on people in the form of side effects and the difficulty of maintaining weight after ending use. Thankfully, it is also clear that many other countries have found how to keep people healthy in the modern age. We must begin to adopt these policies in order to have a healthier population, hopefully one where people are not forced to try weight loss treatments which pose many risks themselves.
This is a problem we caused. We do not need some purported miracle drugs to solve our problems. The solution is already out there, we just need to be bold enough to make the change we need.