Why I’m so excited about the weight loss drugs I’ll never take
Last year, for the first time, food consumption went down, reported the Financial Times, making 2025 “the first year on record where the volume of food consumed in America has decreased.” The weight loss drugs are taking their pound of flesh: not just from their own delighted customers, but from the food industry too.
Meanwhile, this week I have a story in the New York Times about the way intermittent fasting has been oversold the past decade. One researcher reckons that part of the reason people are finally starting to acknowledge the gap between the big claims for it and the meagre scientific evidence is because of the staggering success of those GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Against their blindingly undeniable successes, all diets pale.
Most diets don’t work for most people long-term, but there’s a good reason they have been particularly ineffective the past three decades. When you’re up against a food environment that has been engineered to make you helpless to resist, diets don’t stand a chance. Unless they have help, which they now do.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the benefits of Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, and the rest won’t just accrue to the people who take them. If the drugs cause major changes to the food landscape, even those of us who don’t take them will probably become healthier.
Fen-phen
I’m excited about that possibility, because I just don’t think I’m going to want to take these drugs. The reason I’m leery of the new drugs is because of the old drugs. Half my formative years were steeped in nonstop news coverage about the weight loss miracle drugs of the 90s, fen-phen and Redux (“The new miracle drug?“). The other half were steeped in nonstop news coverage about the legacy of the weight loss miracle drugs of the 90s (“Unheeded Warnings on Lethal Diet Pill“).
From the start, it was fairly clear these drugs were basically speed. But resorting to them to lose weight was hardly the worst choice on the table at the time. It was the 90s. For food and fashion models alike, this was the low fat decade. To look like the women on the cover of Vogue, the only choice was to stop eating, and for some people the only way to stop eating was fen-phen.
But even when you skip lunch, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The drugs that were supposed to give people willpower instead gave them lifelong heart or lung damage. The “new miracle drug” killed one 20-something woman ten months after she took her first dose. Others spent the rest of their lives very slowly suffocating to death.
Stories like this contribute to my general wariness of today’s appetite suppressants. I’m going to wait until the long term side effects have been hashed out. Maybe there won’t be any! But nobody knows yet.
Despite all reservations, I am delighted that these drugs are here.
Our chemical romance
The food industry’s turn to engineering intensified around the same time fen-phen emerged. The strategy was to exploit certain reward pathways in the human corpus that, if properly unlocked, bulldoze any obstacle that keeps people from eating. Feel full? Let’s make it tastier so you keep going anyway. Oh you want to eat healthier? Too bad those chips are so more-ish.
The food industry has now fundamentally reshaped itself around these “keep ‘em eating” products. Today some companies derive 70 to 80 percent of their profits from engineered snacks. (This number seems to have risen in lock step with obesity rates. According to one widely cited analysis, by 2021, nearly three-quarters of US adults were overweight or obese: prevalence of the latter, the authors write, “rose especially rapidly, doubling in the past three decades”.) We have literally been cash cows.
Reconfiguring the entire manufacturing apparatus around this business model was lucrative. But as with all monocultures, this overreliance left the food industry vulnerable to predators.
The end of the affair
The GLP-1 drugs came in like a wrecking ball. Unlike fen-phen, which made people feel too amped up to eat anything at all, the new class of drugs interferes with the very same reward pathways the food industry had so effectively targeted. Henry Dimbleby writes in the Financial Times that people who take these appetite suppressants “typically reduce their calorie intake by 15 to 35 per cent.” However!
Crucially, they don’t just eat less of everything; they specifically cut back on the high-margin, hyper-palatable snacks that drive industry profits.
This is an asteroid event for any company that has grown fat off pressing the brain’s snack button. “You cannot simply slow down the conveyor belt,” Dimbleby explains. You are left with vast production lines with no one to want what’s coming off them.
The most recent casualty in the UK is the bakery Greggs, reports the BBC:
The company’s CEO said there was “no doubt” hugely popular appetite suppressing drugs have led to people looking for “smaller portions”, affecting the company’s bottom line.
To try to keep up, Greggs is now introducing smaller portions and pivoting to protein, including a pot of eggs (a whole food, not an engineered one). At the same time, Leon – a niche, healthy fast-food place that focuses on whole foods like brown rice and chicken and veggies – finds its own prospects buoyed. After struggling through some post-COVID financial tumult, its CEO told the BBC that the GLP-1 effect is now opening a new opportunity for the store: “The dishes the brand is serving are the sort of food people on weight loss jabs want to eat”.
The weight loss drugs are poised to set off the same big game of musical chairs among the food industry apex predators. Dimbleby writes:
“The companies that survive will not be the ones fighting to keep the old addiction economy alive. They will be the ones that accept the new physiology of their customers and help them eat better, not just less.”
Night of a thousand nudges
The nudge economists meant well. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg tried banning extra-large portions and putting calorie counts on everything; Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein told us grocery stores should put apples on the shelves by the till instead of Haribo. But these attempted “nudges” to help people make better choices didn’t go well. Among other reasons, they came across as patronising.
But now, by a completely different mechanism, we all might be on the cusp of living their dream. Food manufacturers are rushing to meet the new market for foods that are nutrient dense and good for you and good for people not trained on enormity. One British supermarket has now started offering a 100g steak, reports the BBC, “which it said was in response to the growing number of customers seeking smaller portions.”
And this trend is not going anywhere soon. The drugs are getting cheaper. There is a pill version of Wegovy. Not everyone is convinced that the new foods to emerge from this industry shakeup are guaranteed to be healthier, but they almost certainly will be different. And after these last three decades, I feel like any change is better than no change.
I leave you with a timeless poem about food from Katherine Mansfield.
Tea, the chemist & marmalade
Far indeed today I’ve strayed
Through paths untrodden, shops unbeaten
And now the bloody stuff is eaten
The chemist the marmalade & tea
Lord how nice & cheap they be!
Image credits:
All images sourced from Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield by Aimée Gasston at Public Domain Review:
The Confectionary: Chromolithograph advertisement for Aulsebrook’s Confectionery, Christchurch, N.Z., ca. 1920s Aulsebrooks & Company: Aulsebrook’s confectionery, Christchurch, N.Z. O’ my, how nice!!! Printed by Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd [1920s?]. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/37775276
Sanatorium Sweets: Photograph of a shopfront for Sanitarium Health Food Company, Auckland, ca. 1920 — Auckland Libraries Collection, Kura Heritage Collections Online. Sanitarium’s display at the Dominion Industrial Exhibition held in Auckland, June 1 – June 28, 1924. The company have their factory at Papanui, Christchurch. There are branches comprising health food shops and vegetarian cafes, at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. Manufacturers of ‘Granose Biscuits’ and choice nut and cereal preparations. Sole agents for ‘Marmite.’
The fruit Thomas Horton Ltd :Thos. Horton Pahiatua. Prince of Wales peach. C M Banks Ltd, Wellington [ca 1905].. [Ephemera and horticulture sales catalogues issued by New Zealand plant nurseries, 1900-1909].. Ref: Eph-A-HORTICULTURE-Horton-1905-01-16. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22867038
Katherine Mansfield poem — courtesy of Aimée Gasston, a PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities, whose research focuses on modernist short fiction, the everyday and the act of reading.
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