What will the Ozempic World Look Like? Part 2

The recent posts in this blog hypothesize about changes in our relationship with food and our bodies after the advent and proliferation of GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Mounjaro. To be clear, many beneficial purposes for these drugs exist: diabetes and metabolic issues, to name two important ones.

But this new class of drugs also lands squarely in the camp of life enhancers, not just medications to treat illness. What I mean by this term is drugs with benefits people deem attractive but not necessarily therapeutic. Stimulants like Adderall are a good example of a drug people use for extended hours of focus or appetite suppression and not always for the medical indication, ADHD.

Right now the craze for these drugs is largely based on how new they are and how inaccessible they can be. Over time, they’ll become cheaper and more available. Doctors will prescribe them even more freely. Like it or not, GLP-1 agonists are going to be part of our culture.

We need to expect and accept that people won’t have clear hunger cues, will lose and gain weight easily and repeatedly and will raise children who, in a post-GLP-1 agonist world, believe hunger and weight are malleable and controllable factors of life.

Granted, we all have been living in a world trending in this direction for years. There used to be room for changing norms of body shape and size. Industry and capitalism have hardened the glorification of thinness in ways that are going to be next to impossible to undo. With these new drugs and doctors’ obsession with weight loss, the pharmaceutical and medical industries mean these norms are here to stay.

A concomitant result is the permanence of eating disorders. The nature of these disorders will continue to grow and change in cultural ways as they have in recent decades. Eating disorders caused by GLP-1 agonists are the new frontier.

Since dieting and food restriction are the primary risk factors for eating disorders, we collectively have decided to allow the overvaluation of thinness to continue to condemn people to develop eating disorders.

Going forward, the goal is to catch and treat eating disorders early and aggressively. The clinicians who treat these illnesses can’t contain external factors but can increase education and awareness.