Mounjaro and Wegovy

I've written about weight loss jabs for The Telegraph....

 

The arrival of a genuine solution to a significant health problem has caused some consternation among those who think that the way to tackle obesity is to fundamentally change society. A Guardian headline gave the game away in 2023 when it said that the emergence of effective weight-loss drugs was “no excuse to let junk food companies off the hook”. Dr Margaret McCartney, a broadcaster and GP, has said that her “big concern” about the drugs is that “the eye is taken off the ball with stopping people getting overweight in the first place” which, for her, means changing “the obesogenic environment”. 

The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley has called on the government to reject the “quick fix” of semaglutide and instead “redesign our towns to get people walking”. Another Guardian writer has complained that weight-loss drugs are “trying to solve the wrong problem” and that the real issue is “primacy of work, long hours, low pay, hustle culture, structural inequalities, poverty and precarity.” 

What all these solutions have in common is that they are wholly impractical. If it was so easy to eradicate “structural inequalities”, we would have done it by now. Towns cannot be suddenly redesigned and commuters are not going to suddenly start walking to work. Attempts to change “the obesogenic environment” by moving so-called junk food away from supermarket checkouts have failed to reduce obesity, and more extensive interventions, such as banning or taxing certain foods, are unlikely to the tolerated by voters. And, incidentally, weight loss drugs have not “let junk food companies off the hook”. On the contrary, they are a threat to their profits because they make people eat less.

Nesta, a large charity that describes itself as an “innovation agency for social good”, has expressed concern that the drugs “might well deepen the emphasis in the public discourse on a “personal responsibility narrative”’. The geneticist Giles Yeo has said that he is worried that the existence of GLP-1 agonists might be used by politicians “as a cop-out not to make the hard policy decisions.” Nesta would prefer the government to focus on “reformulating food, reducing junk food advertising and shifting price promotions towards healthier foods”. Yeo puts it more bluntly, saying that “we’re going to have to lose some liberties”. 

 

Read it all.