Is Ozempic Worth the Weight?

Oh, oh, oh it’s magic
Never believe it’s not so...
- Lyrics from a seventies song about a sunrise in Scotland that has become an ode to weight loss 

It’s a pharmaceutical company’s wet dream: a drug that solves a problem that afflicts millions, then ropes them in for life. Born as Ozempic, a drug that treats diabetes, the side effect of dramatic weight loss has become its feature attraction.

When Novo Nordisk realized that it had accidentally turned leaden weight into golden profits, Ozempic was reimagined at a higher dose as the Elon Musk-endorsed weight-loss drug Wegovy. With a potential market of 70 percent of the American population that is currently overweight or obese, plus a desperate cohort who can never be too rich or too thin, you can expect a buffet of weight-loss drugs to hit the market in the coming years.

It’s a godsend for MBAs. I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself as I worked on version 14 of the strategic plan, the one revised to promise world domination, “If only I didn’t have to eat, I could be so much more productive!”

Ozempic and its semaglutide cousins work in two ways. They block the brain’s hunger signals and cause the stomach to empty more slowly. Foods high in sugar and fat, the kind of food formulated to seduce us, lose their appeal under semaglutide’s satiating spell. Some people worry about the long-term effects. If you stop taking it, the weight will immediately begin to pile back on, so you’re on semaglutides for life. Thyroid cancer has been flagged as a potential risk that some in Hollywood downplay as a minor cancer and nothing to worry about.

Even WW (the company that used to be Weight Watchers before it lost 12 letters) has gotten in on the act. It has purchased Sequence, a company that deals in weight-loss drugs, but insists that lifestyle changes are still the way to go. In other words, you can decide to lose weight the old-fashioned way, using the Weight Watchers’ pizza cheat sheet to determine that one deep dish pizza slice is half your daily points allotment, or you can freebase semaglutides and delete the desire to consume pizza points altogether.

There has to be a downside with semaglutides, but where could it be? The sulfurous burps that afflict some patients are appropriately Faustian, but too fleeting to count as the price to be paid for effortless weight loss. Perhaps the downside is in the upside. Imagine living in a world with no appetite, a dinner party at which nobody dines. Eating becomes a chore your body needs, but your brain no longer wants to do.

The $7 trillion food and beverage industry will fight over the few remaining vitamin-enhanced scraps that people reluctantly eat for sustenance. Gyms will cater to the oddballs who genuinely enjoy sweating. Muscles will atrophy, bodies will become malnourished. Stanley Tucci will abandon his search for Italy.

Patrons of upscale restaurants will try to amuse their bouches with tiny meals served on communion spoons. With no food to linger over, they will wander around Michelin food museums staring at the meals people used to enjoy, preserved in glass cases like artifacts from a long-lost gluttonous civilization.

If hunger was such a vexing distraction, they will wonder, why are we so sad?

Just picture a great big steak --
Fried, roasted or stewed.
Oh, food,
Wonderful food,
Marvellous food,
Glorious food. 

"Food, Glorious Food", written by Lionel Bart, from the musical Oliver!