{"id":669,"date":"2026-06-25T07:08:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T07:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=669"},"modified":"2026-06-25T07:08:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T07:08:40","slug":"the-fat-of-the-land-weight-loss-drugs-have-their-uses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=669","title":{"rendered":"The Fat of the Land: Weight-Loss Drugs Have Their Uses"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I have grave reservations about weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Mounjaro, as you\u2019ll know if you follow my work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump Cancels Signing of Bipartisan Housing Bill, Demands Congress First Pass the SAVE Act<\/a><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s set aside the basic moral argument and my aversion to people being given things they haven\u2019t earned, which you may also share. Over time, I\u2019ve actually softened my stance on this. It simply isn\u2019t within everyone\u2019s power\u2014reasonable power\u2014to be in good shape. A child has no control over what its parents feed it. The decision to raise a child on a diet of ultra-processed food, starting with formula instead of breastmilk, can essentially set it up to fail for life. An overweight or obese child raised on ultra-processed food will continue eating ultra-processed food as an adult and face problems around eating that a child raised on proper home-cooked food will not.<\/p>\n

In the UK, the average two- to five-year-old now derives two-thirds of his or her daily calories from ultra-processed food. The U.S. isn\u2019t far behind that dismal figure.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019re still struggling to appreciate, food has been weaponized by modern corporations in a way that has no precedent in human history. Although some foods have always been designed to be delicious and make you want to eat more, their construction made use of none of the sophisticated techniques of modern science, neurobiology, and advertising that borders on psychological warfare. Huge food corporations now pay millions of dollars to armies of scientists to twiddle the knobs on the food dashboard, tweaking sensations like sweetness, saltiness, crunch, and chew until consumers reach the so-called \u201cbliss point\u201d and eat more, faster\u2014whether they consciously want to or not. A famous study showed we eat ultra-processed foods 30 percent faster than normal foods. This means the body\u2019s mechanisms to signal hunger and satiety, reliant mostly on hormonal signals, just can\u2019t keep up.<\/p>\n

Recent research has shown how tobacco companies were instrumental in creating the latest generation of \u201chyperpalatable\u201d foods, foods that were specifically designed to be as addictive as nicotine. Companies like Philip Morris, the conglomerate behind Marlboro, used decades of expertise in hooking consumers on cigarettes, especially teenagers, to create a whole new market of captive eaters for life.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you pop, you just can\u2019t stop\u201d was not just a slogan. It was a statement of intent for an entire industry.<\/p>\n

MRI scans reveal that a diet of ultra-processed food can literally rewire the brain in the manner of a heroin addict. This was the shocking revelation of a BBC documentary that aired during the pandemic. In \u201cWhat Are We Feeding Our Kids?\u201d a reasonably fit young doctor wrecked his health in just a month by eating a diet comprised of 80 percent ultra-processed food\u2014a typical diet in the UK. Weight gain, constipation, hemorrhoids, sleeplessness, loss of libido, anxiety, mood swings, uncontrollable midnight eating when he wasn\u2019t even hungry\u2014all these effects were reversed once the doctor went back to his old diet. But the changes to the pleasure and reward centers of his brain remained months after the experiment was over.<\/p>\n

No, my objections to weight-loss drugs focus more on the harms these drugs can do. First of all, there are the traditional side effects as we\u2019d understand them. Scarcely a week seems to pass without the arrival of some new \u201cunexpected\u201d side effect. There\u2019s \u201cOzempic face,\u201d diarrhea forever, pulmonary aspiration (breathing in your own vomit when lying down), emotional blunting . . . And there are also serious questions about whether long-term use of these drugs might cause cancer, especially thyroid cancer. GLP-1 drugs\u2014that\u2019s the technical name\u2014reliably cause thyroid tumors in rodents over a long enough period of time. It\u2019s already clear that the vast majority of users of GLP-1 drugs will have to remain on them if they want the weight to stay off. Multiple studies have shown savage rebounds when use of the drugs ends.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in absolutely no doubt that these drugs, like most others, have been released onto the market without adequate safety testing, and the enormous amount of profit involved makes it unlikely there will be any kind of correction, unless there are damaging lawsuits, which there probably will be. Novo Nordisk is the largest company in Europe, fueled by its Wegovy\/Ozempic profits, worth more than the entire economy of its native Denmark, and I believe the largest company in the world will soon be the company that perfects the weight-loss pill. Injections are a barrier to massive uptake, and there\u2019s a market of one billion obese people worldwide to be catered to. The FDA has already licensed a Wegovy pill, and competitor products are going through licensing as I type.<\/p>\n

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But there\u2019s also a much broader argument to be made about medical harm, or what the philosopher Ivan Illich called \u201ciatrogenesis.\u201d Illich distinguished between a traditional, common-sense understanding of medical harm\u2014drug side effects, unnecessary procedures, malpractice, and incompetence\u2014and a more insidious phenomenon he called \u201csocial and cultural iatrogenesis.\u201d What this amounts to, in basic terms, is the surrendering of freedom to the medical industry.<\/p>\n

For example, in recent decades, we\u2019ve already given control of our moods to the medical industry. Instead of going for a walk when we feel low, or toughing it out, or distracting ourselves, or simply being philosophical about the mountains and the valleys of human experience\u2014we take a pill. In Scotland, a full 25 percent of the adult population\u2014a million people\u2014take antidepressants, and the same number also take one or more of a variety of other psychoactive drugs (Z-drugs, gabapentinoids, benzodiazepines, etc.).<\/p>\n

And now we\u2019re giving control of weight management to Big Pharma, too.<\/p>\n

These individual losses add up to a loss of freedom far greater than the sum of its parts. I think it\u2019s reasonable to say the tyranny of COVID-19 would have been impossible if we had not already surrendered so much freedom to the medical industry and its practitioners, if we hadn\u2019t looked the other way as the lines between medicine and government became ever more blurred, and the prevention of pain and suffering\u2014or certain kinds\u2014became an absolute end in itself that could outweigh any other. In the name of preventing loss of life, we made it impossible to live.<\/p>\n

But still, it\u2019s not all bad. GLP-1 drugs are allowing us to run some interesting social experiments on the effects of widespread rapid weight loss. For example, a new study shows that the use of GLP-1 drugs by overweight women leads to a significant rise in marriage, cohabitation, and employment. The average American woman is now close to 170 pounds, up from 140 pounds in the 1960s. Simply making American women slimmer could have transformative effects on society, not least of all by increasing the birth rate, which has decreased 22 percent since 2007. A recent study on the effects of smartphones on fertility noted that this decrease is \u201cnot readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Very few people outside the \u201cmanosphere\u201d and \u201cred pill\u201d communities are talking about the disastrous effects of women becoming rounder and less attractive with each passing year.<\/p>\n

The new study shows that after just 18 months on weight-loss drugs, marriage and cohabitation rates for overweight women rise by as much as 29 percent. The paper\u2019s author, Rebecca Diamond, notes that \u201cevaluating these drugs only through clinical endpoints or medical spending omits margins that are central to economic well-being: employment entry, hours, household resources, and family formation.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, the real question isn\u2019t whether making society slimmer would make it better. Of course it would. Give me a break. The real question is how we do it? Do we address the underlying causes of obesity\u2014the weaponized food, the sedentary lifestyles, the toxic chemicals\u2014or do we allow Big Pharma to sell us yet another new Band-Aid solution? That\u2019s what I\u2019m interested in.<\/p>\n

Read more DOJ Finds USDA Preferences for \u2018Socially Disadvantaged\u2019 Farmers Are Discriminatory<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have grave reservations about weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Mounjaro, as you\u2019ll know if you follow my work. Let\u2019s set aside the basic moral argument and\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Fat of the Land: Weight-Loss Drugs Have Their Uses - Urban Economy news<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=669\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Fat of the Land: Weight-Loss Drugs Have Their Uses - Urban Economy news\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I have grave reservations about weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Mounjaro, as you\u2019ll know if you follow my work. 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