Is Ozempic The Magic Pill? Weighing Up Society’s Dysfunctional Obsession with Weight, Food and Our Bodies - Uncut with Johann Hari - Life Uncut

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Lifeun Cut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands
were never seated. We pay our respects to their elders
past and present, Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.
This episode was recorded on gadigal Land.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hi, guys, and.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Welcome back to another episode of Life on Cut.

Speaker 4 (00:25):
I'm Laura and I'm Keisha, and we were so lucky
to record this episode while Brich was away in the jungle.
It is with one of my favorite guests who has
joined us on the podcast before, and quite weirdly, it
was actually you and I Laura back in twenty twenty
two who interviewed Yohan Hari that was about his work
on Stolen Focus and why we can't pay attention. But
today we are having a conversation that you and I

(00:47):
have wanted to have for a really long time. And
I know that you had a number of reasons as
to why you wanted to be so particular about who
we had this conversation with. Well, we have.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Spoken about doing an EP on Ozempok specifically, I mean
it's been in the news. People have spoken about it
for a very long time. This a list celebrity drug
that is either being used by people in secrecy, or
it's been almost like the magic fix around obesity and
around weight loss. But we've also done so much work
on this podcast talking about body inclusivity, so it felt

(01:19):
like it was a jarring thing to then go, Okay, well,
let's unpack this idea of ozepic, and so we wanted
to be very careful about how we approached this conversation
because on one hand, it's something that you cannot ignore exists,
and on the other hand, we don't know whether it
is contributing positively or negatively, And at the moment, a
lot of the conversation that's being had is how negative

(01:41):
it is, whether that is because it is taking medication
away from people who have diabetes and that's been one
of the big debates, or whether it's been a very
negative step back for this whole idea, as I said
about body inclusivity. But Johann Hari, now he has just
written a book and it's called Magic Pill. Extraordinary Benefits
and Disturbing Risks of New Weight loss Drugs. The reason

(02:04):
why Johannt is the perfect person to talk about this
is because he has been all ends of the spectrum
in terms of his weight and He approached this conversation
very much as though it was a research project, So
he traveled the world. He spoke to the people who
created the drugs, the people who have passed the testing
for the drugs. He did the research on himself, the benefits,

(02:25):
the risks that he's had on him, and he also
talks around the very real dangers of what these drugs
could have for people who already have disordered eating.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
I think something that I found very interesting about this
whole conversation with Johan and I really seesawed reading his
book on whether I was pro or against these drugs
and not for myself for a society. There were so
many factors that I thought, Wow, these have the ability
to really improve people's quality of life and reduce certain
health risks that are associated with obesity. Now the other hand,

(02:55):
there are unknown side effects of what these drugs could
potentially do. And also we just have no idea and
no way to measure how much this could really fuck
with our psyche and all of Like you said, the
work that we have done in the body inclusivity space
and really pushing that needle back to a place where
people are feeling less stigma about their body. It is

(03:15):
less kind of consuming in all of your thoughts, like
are we just going to send us right back to
where we started? And I really found myself flip flopping
of like I don't know whether I'm for or against
these drugs. And that's really what I enjoyed about this
conversation is that it's not in promotion of but it's
also not to take away from the benefits that they
could provide society. It's just to give you more information

(03:37):
so that you can make up your own mind about
how you feel about them, because, like you said, Laura,
it's happening.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, And I didn't even see this conversation as like
a question mark as to whether someone might want to
try it, like in no way, and I think it's
very important to reiterate, in no way is this the
promotion of a zepeg. But it's an understanding of something
that exists and something that there is so much conversation
around at the moment, but it is so shrouded in
secrecy because the people who were doing it and not
talking about it.

Speaker 4 (04:02):
And it's really interesting.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Johann was like, oh, I thought when I wrote this book,
I would be in so much competition because it's such
a hot topic at the moment, but nobody else has
written a book on an ezempic because no one else
wants to admit to the fact that you're taking it.
And I think one of the things that he spoke about,
which I think was so interesting, it was around the
types of weight loss that we're okay with. How we
expect people who are overweight to suffer for their weight loss,

(04:23):
to almost like redeem themselves, to like torture themselves through
working out and through fitness in order to get to
a place where they've earned the fact that they've lost weight,
and how that just once again reiterates the negative culture
around weight and around fat phobia. He has such an
interesting insight into it, and at the moment, Johann is

(04:44):
still on ozembic, still taking ozempic, but talks about how
whether you approve of it or don't approve of it,
how this the drug is going to revolutionize society in
so many different ways, and maybe some of those ways
will be good, but there will also be a dark
side of this that we need to be talking about. Johanna,
welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Whoo. I'm so happy to you with you who. I'm
gutted we're not doing this in your house like we
did last time.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
I know, well, I mean even so, it's so good
to have you back.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Last time you were on here, you shared that's an
accidental unfiltered story about the Dali Wilma calling you fat
not anymore, that's for sure going.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
To send him and where are you now, your holiness?

Speaker 4 (05:24):
Just send him your book.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
I'd love to know if you have a number accidentally
unfiltered to share with us.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, this one that's been really haunting me. Actually, I
remember the exact moment it happened. It was Christmas Eve
two thousand and nine at one pm and I went
to my local branch of kfcas to live in East London,
and I went in and I said my standard order
at the time, which is so disgusting I won't repeat it,
and the guy behind the counter said to me, oh, Yahana,
I'm really glad you're here. And he went off behind

(05:52):
where they thry the chicken and everything, and he came
back with every member of staff who was working that
day and a fucking sive Christmas card in which they'd
written to our best customer and everyone who worked there
had written like little personal messages for me. And one
of the reasons my heart sank is I thought, this

(06:13):
isn't the fried chicken shop. I come to the most
like how can this be happening to me? And I
didn't go back there for about three months because I
was so freaked out. And then I bumped into that
guy in the street and he said, oh, you didn't
come back. We assumed you must have had a heart
attack on.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
Clu It's a character assassination. Okay, you're just come here
to get a chicken exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
It was brutal. It was brutal.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
What I want to know, though, is what did you
get from the chicken shop that you frequented the most?
Often what they do for it?

Speaker 2 (06:40):
So I could literally write a whole book about the
fried chicken shops of East London. There's Chicken, Chicken, Chicken,
Hellal Fried Chicken, KFC, Tennessee Fried Chicken, which I always
thought was the freakis because Tennessee Fried Chicken its logo
is a chicken beaming and eating a chicken drumstick. And
I was thought, I'm not sure cannibalism is really the
like brand you want for this. I am quite disturbing

(07:01):
is basically the harrible lecter of the chicken world will
law you in?

Speaker 4 (07:05):
It was fu chickens will eat this chicken.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
That's how go what it is exactly, that's the message exactly.

Speaker 4 (07:11):
Oh well, I mean, gone are the days of you
indulging in fried chicken as a part of your most
recent work, which is such a phenomenal read. One thing
I really wanted to start the conversation with was this
discussion and kind of this deliberation that you had over
using the words obese and overweight in your book. Can
you kind of elaborate on that for us?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, I'm really passionately opposed to stigma. I spent a
lot of time in the book talking about the scientific
evidence that stigmatizing overweight and OBEs people or something that
obviously happened to me. I was obese a lot of
my adult life. Is really really well, firstly, it's just
a form of bullying and cruelty, and we should oppose
it just for that reason alone. But also it is
completely counterproductive. In fact, overweight and obese people are more

(07:53):
likely to gain more weight if you stigmatize them. And
there's a whole range of reasons I go through five
of them in the book. One of them is just simple.
It makes you feel like shit and you want to
comfort eat more. Actually, there's a really deep reason why
I think stigma is so counterproductive, and it was actually
articulated really well by Lindy West, a really thoughtful body
positivity advocate. She said, you don't take good care of

(08:15):
a thing you hate, and stigma makes people hate their bodies, right,
It makes them think their bodies are bad, they're broken,
they're disgusting. And the more you make people hate their bodies,
they don't want to take better care of them. They
just want to kind of not be present with the
pain and shame that you're made to feel. So I
thought a lot about do I use these words overweight

(08:35):
and obese. And there's a person who really helped me
to think this through an amazing woman you called Shelly Bovy.
So when I was a kid, it was just taken
for granted on TV that fat people were like the
butt of the joke, particularly fat women. You think about
the carry on films, for example, like Matron. You know
this is always much worse women. I know you know
that much better than I do. So, particularly fat women
were just presented as ridiculous. The joke people say the

(08:57):
most hateful things about them. Person I ever heard challenge
this was an amazing woman named Shelley Bovy. So. Shelley
grew up in a Welsh town called Poor Talbot, and
she was, as she puts it, the only fat girl
in her school at the time in the sixties. And
one day when she was eleven, after class, her teacher said,
you are much too fat. It's disgusting how you look.
You're a greedy pig and just berates her and so

(09:20):
stop eating so much, and of course she leaves in
this kind of shamed state. And Shelley really spent her
whole life, for her first thirty forty years of it,
just soaking up this abuse. She was constantly being told
by the other girls in the school, you're so disgusting.
When she got pregnant, the first thing the doctor said
to her was, well, you shouldn't be pregnant when you're
as fat as you are. When she gave birth, she
had a very difficult birth for various reasons, and she

(09:42):
was lying there just covered in blood, and the midwife
said to her, you know, you really need to lose
some weight. When her baby couldn't feed, probably what he
wasn't attaching, she took him to the doctor and the
first thing the doctor said was, well, what are you
trying to do? Make the baby as fat as you are?
So this is really horrifyingly common, right, Forty two percent
of women have a BMI higher than thirty five get

(10:02):
insulted every single day. And so Shelley soaking this up
and soaking this up, and like a lot of people
like me at one point in my life, she just thinks, well,
I just deserve this, right, I am greedy, I am
a pig. And one day she learned that there was
this movement in the United States at the time, it
called itself the fat Pride movement. We would probably talk
more about body positivity now. And Shelley kind of began

(10:23):
to think about this horrendous prejudice that had been directed
at her. It's really just a form of hateful bigotry
like sexism or racism. So she wrote this brilliant book
called The Forbidden Body. It came out in nineteen eighty nine.
That was the first book ever in Britain to kind
of challenge this prejudice. And that's when I saw her
on the TV, and of course she was treated like
a mad woman, like a joke, you know, but it

(10:43):
actually played a really important role in giving birth to
the body positivity movement. And I went to meet Shelley
when I was researching my book. But something happened after
she wrote that book. Shelley was at the time nineteen
and a half stone. I can never do the conversion
to Kilo's you barbaric colonials, whatever it is. And she
was losing her ability to walk. She was only fifty,
but she was actually being pushed in a wheelchair a lot.

(11:05):
Had doctor told her he was really worried about her heart.
She was in problems with her heart, and Shelley wanted
to write about this dilemma. At the time, there was
a kind of newsletter for the body positivity movement called
fat News, and they said, oh, no, we don't want
you to write about that. We're here to write about
the positive things about this. And she's like, right, but
a lot of people who have the kind of way
I have do face health problems. That is just a fact, right,

(11:26):
we have to live in reality. We should be able
to talk about both. And that she's kind of kind
of shut down a bit, but she really began to
kind of try to pick through this and kind of go.
The way she explained it to me when when we
met up is you know, it's not either aw it's
not either you're again stigma or you're in favor of
telling the truth about the physical harms caused by obesity.

(11:47):
Obesity makes over two hundred known diseases and complications more likely,
many of them hugely more likely. It's not either all.
If you love yourself or if you love someone who's obese,
you want to protect them from two things. If you
possibly can, you want to protect them from stigma and bullying,
and if possible, you want to protect them from you know,
the harms caused to their body. And Shelley looked at

(12:08):
the scientific evidence around this and just saw that it
is just really overwhelming. As the World Health Organization says,
you know, they define obesity as carrying excess weight that
can harm your health. You know, I'm very open to
criticizing medical consensuses. I've done it in the past, but
I looked at the evidence for this, and the evidence
I'm afraid and I desperately wish this wasn't the case.

(12:28):
Is absolutely overwhelming. It's one of the most proven things
in the whole of science that obesity on average, of
course there are exceptions, but on average, obesity makes you
much more likely to develop all sorts of serious health problems,
as Shelley source. So it really helped me the way
Shelley talked about it. That is a real phenomenon. Right.
We don't remove stigma by not talking about the truth.

(12:50):
We challenge the disgusting bits, the cruel bits, the bits
that are not true, that it's a moral failing, that
it's your fault, that there's something you know wrong with
you as a person. We challenge them, but we also
have to hold onto reality and to the truth about
the biology. So that's why I think we had to
find our way through with all of the stuff in
relation to these drugs and the obesta debate, which always

(13:12):
proceed with love and compassion, and we always need to
be truthful to the complexity, and I think that's where
the complexity lies there.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
Yeah, it's so interesting that you speak about this, and
I'm so grateful for you to kind of preface this
conversation with that as well, because we did an interview
only last year. All around fat phobia, And my biggest
question was is can these two things exist at the
same time. Can we have the body positivity space and
also have room to talk about things like a quote

(13:40):
unquote magic pill, like ozenpic? Can those two things coexist
at the same time. And I appreciate the way in
which you describe how they almost have to exist at
the same time. Can you talk us through a little
bit around what it was that led you to want
to do this yourself? Where were you at in your
not just your weight loss, but in your mindset around

(14:01):
your weight and what was it that made you go, Okay, well,
the Zempics, I think that I'm going to try.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
I'll never forget the moment I learned about the existence
of a zen pic. It was the winter of twenty
twenty two, and it was that moment when the world
was opening up again after you know, we'd all been
locked away for so long, and I got invited to
a party that was thrown by an Oscar winning actor.
I'm not saying that just to name drop. I'm slightly
saying it's a name drop, and I'm also it's relevant
to the story. And I remember I was in the
uber on the way there, and I suddenly felt like

(14:27):
really self conscious because I was quite fat at the
start of the Lockdown, and I gained quite a lot
of weight during Lockdown, and so I felt a little
bit schlubby, you know. And then I suddenly thought, but
everyone I know gained weight during Lockdown, so this party
is going to be really interesting. It's going to be
fascinating to see all these Hollywood stars with a bit
of light podge on them, right, And I arrived at

(14:47):
the party and I went in and it was really weird.
It's not just that they hadn't gained weight. Everyone was
markedly thinner. They were gaunt. And it wasn't just the actors,
it was their kid, the agents, the writers, everyone that
I'd known before COVID was just much thinner. I remember

(15:08):
walking around the party and I bumped into a friend
of mine on the dance floor at the edge of it,
and I said to her, Wow, it looks like everyone
really did take up pilatas during Lockdown and she and
she laughed at me, just like you guys did. I
must have done a kind of puzzle facial expression and
she said, right, well, you know, it's not pialatas right,
and I had no idea what she was talking about,

(15:28):
and she pulled up on her phone an image of
an ozm pic pen. She actually wasn't on it, And
that's when I learned. I guess I must have learned
a little bit that night, but I learned over the
next few days that then is a new form, a
new kind of weight loss drug that works in a
completely new way that really does deliver radical weight loss.
The average person who takes ozen pic loses fifteen percent
of their body weight in a year. For Munjaro, which

(15:49):
is the next in this class of drugs, it's twenty
one percent of their body weight in a year. After
the next, the next kind, which is called Triple G,
which will come on stream probably next year, the average
person loses twenty four percent of their body weight, which
is only a little bit below baroatric surgery. And it
was the weirdest thing I don't remember with any topic
in my life, I think, where I've ever felt so

(16:12):
divided so quickly, so I immediately could see the benefits. Right,
I'm older now than my granddad ever got to be,
because he died when he was forty four of a
heart attack. I've always been worried that I was fat
because obesity makes heart attacks much more likely, along with
lots of other problems. So I could see, Wow, if
there's a drug that massively reduces or even reverses obesity,

(16:33):
that's going to have health benefits, right. But I also
immediately thought, wit a minute, Wait a minute, I've heard
this story before. Every twenty years, go right back to
the First World War, a new miracle diet drug is announced,
people stampede to take it, loads of people take it,
and then we always discover it how some horrendous side
effect gets yanked from the market and you know, leaves

(16:54):
a trail of broken people in its wake. I also
was really worried about body positivity. What would it mean
for the progress we've made there? What would it mean
for people with eating disorders? Just straight away I could
think of so many issues and it was weird. I
just thought, well, I need to understand this. So I
started to taking it, but mostly for the research, but
also that's a a question. If I would have taken

(17:15):
out i've not been writing the book, I might have.
And I went on this big journey all over the world,
from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo to interview over one
hundred of the leading experts and people affected by this.
You know, the biggest defenders of these drugs, the people
who created key parts of them, their biggest critics. And
it's the weirdest thing. I know so much more than
I knew at the start, about the benefits of these drugs,

(17:36):
about the twelve big risks associated with these drugs, about
what they're going to do to the culture, how they're
going to change women's lives in particular, I think. But weirdly,
after all this journey, it's never happened to me with
the book before, After all this journey and learning all
this stuff, I'm still really conflicted about it. Right, I
don't have a kind of neat little and now, dear reader,

(17:57):
here's the three things you should do. Right. It's weird.
I feel better equipped to understand it, but I feel
very conflicted.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
You touched on something, and I think it's really important
for us to not skim over it. And that is
how this could affect people who have disordered eating, people
who are already slim, who are so deeply affected by
the culture that we have to be the skinniest that
you possibly can be, because I think we can all
understand the benefits for what this could do for someone
who is at the health risk of being overweight. But

(18:27):
what about for those people who see this, Oh well,
maybe I could take it and it would be a
one drug for me to get even skinnier.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
I've got a lot of worries about these drugs, but
this is the biggest, right. The worst moment for me
by far in working on the book was to forget
how long in it must have been four or five
months to me taking the drug. I was facetiming with
my niece Erin. She's the baby of my family. She's
the only girl in that my brother or sister had
and in my head she's sort of fixed as a

(18:53):
six year old. She's actually nineteen years old now, but
whenever she gets a boyfriend, always want to go get
away from your pedophile. Actually she's an adult woman, right,
and her boyfriend's always very nice. But one day we
were face tired. So no one makes me more protective
than a'rein, right, And one day we were facetiming. She
was in a pub in Liverpool where she's a student.
She was like teasing me a little bit, and I go, oh,
I never knew you had a neck before, I never

(19:14):
knew how a jaw and saying, oh, you look good,
and I was sort of preening, and then suddenly she
looked down and she said, will you buy me SOMEI
Zen pic? And I laughed because thought she was kidding.
She's a perfectly healthy weight, and I suddenly realized it
was actually a sincere question, and I was like, what
the fuck am I doing? All her life, I've been

(19:35):
trying to give her this message, you know, don't be
judged by being skinny, you know, be yourself, you know,
occupy space. And I thought what am I doing? And
I had to really think this through and think about well,
I think there's two very different categories here. There's people
who were overweight or obese who were taking these drugs
to get down to a healthy weight. And then there

(19:55):
are people who are already a healthy weight or was
gonna and by the way, Erin didn't start taking it obviously,
but people already a healthy weight or actually skinny who
are taking it to be super skinny. And I don't
judge any of those people. That enormous pressures on women,
you know, and you don't need me to man explain
this to you. But there's nothing women can do with
their bodies that doesn't get them shit. You know, it's funny,

(20:16):
I said to a female friend of mine the other day.
I feel a bit funny going into interviews about this book,
because for the first time in my life, I feel
like people are going to sort of be scrutinizing my
body and looking at me going oh wow, he says,
you know, there's benefits. Let's see him And she said,
welcome to the life of all women all the time everywhere,
and I was like, oh yeah, you know, like yeah,

(20:37):
it was one of those moments where you kind of
really become aware of your male privilege. So there's a
concern for people who were already thin. I would urge
them not to do it for several reasons. One is
about risking their own health. So whenever you lose weight
a lot of weight, you lose muscle mass, which is
the total amount of soft tissue in your body. It's
really important for you to just like be able to
climb the stairs or get out of a chair or

(20:59):
move right, and you naturally lose muscle mass. From when
you're thirty onwards. You shed quite a lot every year.
So if you're going into the aging process with already
a low level of muscle mass, you'll probably be okay
when you're in your forties and fifties, but you're really
building up a time bomb for as you age. So
if you have low muscle mass when you're older, you're
much less likely to be able to just do anything,

(21:20):
to be able to get out of a chair, climb
the stairs. You're a great risk of a condition called sarcopenia,
which means poverty of the flesh. You're much more at
risk of falling over, which is the single biggest accidental
cause of death in older people. You're just really building
up a potential nightmare for yourself. And we don't have
to speculate about what happens when people with eating disorders
get hold of diet drugs because we've been here before.

(21:42):
So in the early nineteen nineties there was a popular
diet drug in the United States, and then fetamine based
diet drugs, so it work differently to these ones. But
huge numbers of young women with eating disorders is overwhelming,
and young women, not young men, were getting hold of
these these drugs and just starving themselves with them. There
was a congressional in the US, this really heartrending congressional

(22:02):
hearing that this young woman called Jessica McDonald testified she
wanted to be a ballet dancer, and she described just
taking so many of these un fetaments that she would
just pass out from the hunger. But the most moving
testimony for me was a man named Tony Smith who
grew up He was from State Center in Iowa, and
his daughter Noel, from when she was a little girl,
had been obsessed with the idea that she was fat.

(22:23):
She was constantly saying, Daddy, am I fat? Am I fat?
Why am I so fat? When he would take her
to the supermarket, she would run to the fashion magazines
and she'd just say, Daddy, why do I look like
these women? What's wrong with me? And she started taking
these fetamine based diet drugs, and when she was twenty one,
she died of a heart attack because she starved herself.
And he read out this poem she'd written about how
she would think about food and so I want to eat.

(22:44):
I want to eat, but not yet, not yet. And
I spoke to experts on eating disorders like Dr Kimberly
Dennis in Chicago is one of the leading experts in
the United States on ewteen disorders who's already seeing patients
coming to her with this. So I'm really worried about this.
This is something where we can can do a lot
to prevent this harm. And I really urge people, because
it hasn't arrived really in Australia yet. Urge your senators

(23:06):
on this. There's a very simple thing you can do
that could forestall quite a lot of this harm. So
in the US and Britain, you can get these drugs
over zoom right. Your doctor is meant to check that
you're not already thin, but it's pretty hard to do
on zoom right. How can they measure you on zoom
It's not easy. So what Dr Dennis says, I think
she's absolutely right. These drugs should only be prescribed in

(23:29):
person by doctors who see you and doctors who are
trained in spotting eating disorders. And obviously, if you're not overweight,
they absolutely shouldn't give the drug to you. But also
if they think you might, you've got history of eating
disorders or you're at risk of eating disorders, you should
be given alternative forms of help not ones with these risks.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Johan, I think it might be important for us at
this point because we've been talking about previous weight loss drugs,
ones that were somewhat in fatamine based. There are a
variety of these types of things. Can you explain for
us how zipic actually works and why it's so different
to the ones that we've seen in the past.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
It's a totally new kind of mechanism. I interviewed the
scientist who actually discovered this mechanism. It's really fascinating. So basically,
if you ate something now, if you eat enough, your
gut will produce a hormone called GLP one, really important hormone.
It's basically part of your body's natural system, just saying okay,
you've had enough, stop eating now right, you're full. But

(24:25):
natural GLP one only stays in your system, in your
gut for a couple of minutes, and then it's washed away.
What these drugs do is they inject into you an
artificial copy of GLP one, but instead of staying in
your system for just a few minutes, they stay in
your system for a whole week, which has this really
weird effect. I will never forget a moment. So two
days after I first took o zen Pic, I woke

(24:45):
up and I was lying in bed. I mean, you know,
when you're just coming around, and I had this feeling
and I thought, I feel something really weird. What do
I feel? And I couldn't figure out what it was.
I couldn't locate what the sensation was. And I suddenly
realized I had woken up and I wasn't hung Every
day before that, I remember often I would be woken
up by my stomach rumbling. I'd be woken up by
being hungry, and I was like, oh, that's a bit weird.

(25:07):
And I went to this cafe up the road that
I used to go to every morning. I would get
a huge brown roll with lots of chicken and lots
of mayo in it. And I ordered it from Tatiana,
the lovely Brazilian woman who runs a cafe, and she
brought it over and I had like three or four
male falls and I was just full. Right, I now
know that's it was that effect, right. The drug basically
makes you really close to full a lot of the time,

(25:28):
so you feel very full, very quickly, and I just
didn't want to eat anyone when I left the cafe,
Tatiana literally yelled after me, are you okay? Right, because like,
why have you left the food? And for lunch that day,
I went to there was a Turkish restaurant next to
my office that used to go to, and I ordered
the same thing every day, pretty much, a Mediterranean lamb,
and again I had like a few mouth falls and
I just didn't want any more. It was the weirdest thing.

(25:48):
It was like kind of shutters had come down on
my appetite. It was a very strange sensation.

Speaker 4 (25:53):
Did it change the things that you wanted to eat
as well?

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Like you say, you went and you were still ordering
the same types of food, But over time did it
change and not just your appetite but your food aversions?

Speaker 2 (26:03):
I guess. So it's a really complicated question this and
I think I was a bit unusual. So I know
I was unusual because I've spoken to lots of people.
So one of the most common things that people report
as a drawback from these drugs is that it ruins
their pleasure in food, that they just don't get very
much pleasure from food anymore. So, for example, there's a
brilliant food critic in Britain and he started taking his
MPIC and he describes like he would go to the

(26:25):
best Mitchellin starred restaurants in Paris and it would just
do nothing for him, which for him was like a nightmare, right,
as you can imagine. Weirdly, it had the opposite effect
on me. But I'm sure I'm unusual, so I really
began to realize this. I went for dinner one night
with a friend of mine a while in to take
in the drug, and she said, it's always been a
bit weird eating with you. She were my oldest friends,

(26:47):
because you eat so much so quickly, but you never
seem to enjoy the food. You don't taste it, you
don't savor it, You just kind of cram it in.
And I think I grew up in a very crazy
and violent family where there was a lot of addiction.
Looking back, I realize one of the ways I cope
with that was by stuffing myself with food. It was
you know, when you're a kid like that, you don't
have that much control, but you can sort of cram

(27:09):
food in, and stuffing is a very particular kind of eating.
So where you eat beyond the point of being full,
we all do it sometimes, like Christmas Day or whatever,
where you feel a kind of pressure upwards on your
esophagus and outwards on your stomach. You can't eat like
that when you're on azembic. You would just vomit. You
wouldn't be able to do it, which had the effect
had some bad effects on me, losing that kind of soothing,

(27:29):
But one of the positive effects is I really had
to slow down my eating. So actually I started kind
of tasting food a bit more. And I don't want
to overstate it. I haven't become Joe Rayner. I'm not,
like you know, I'm not never going to be a foodie.
That's not who I am. But actually I've started to
enjoy food more. But for the first six months or so,
I was basically in smaller portions of the same old shit,
you know, Like I would go into with Donalds and

(27:50):
instead of getting a large big macmeal and six nuggets,
I would get like a hamburger. But then after six
months I did start to well, I learned to cook.
I'm ashamed to say. I was forty four years old.
I had no idea how to cook. So I did
start to learn stuff like that, and it did really
help me. But it took a while for that adjustment
to kick in, and I still like today I've eaten
basically smaller portions of the odd shit I would have eaten.

(28:11):
Have not been very good today.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
So you know, I'm so interested by what you just said.
You said, I've not been very good today, and I
think that that is so reflective of the way that
we've been conditioned to think about food weight. All of
this stigma is so deeply ingrained in us. When I
was reading your book, I actually had a moment where
I put the book down and I sat and I
thought about the question that you asked. This is what
you said. Uncomfortably, I asked myself, do you have this

(28:35):
psychological objection to these drugs because at some level you
believe that obese people don't deserve to be healthy? Yohen
why is it that we think diet drugs like a
zenpic are cheating. Why do we have such an aversion
to people taking this quick route to weight loss.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
I think there's a lot of reasons. And I've really
struggled with this myself because I felt I was doing
something wrong when I was taking these drugs. I don't
mean I felt like I was taking risks with my health.
I knew that, right, I knew there are risks associated
with these drugs, and I'm sure we'll talk about them.
I don't mean that. I mean I felt like I
was doing something morally wrong. Kept thinking this is really weird.
Why do I think that? Like, I've got a friend,

(29:14):
one of my best friends, to take statins right for
his cholesterol, and I never look at him and go, ah,
you fucker getting ahead of me on cholesterol with these drugs, cheating,
It would never occur to me. I would think someone
was mad if they said that, right, And I was like, well,
what's the difference? And I think there's a few things
going on here. It's so interesting. These drugs bring to
the surface so many things that we push down that

(29:37):
are sort of there in the culture, but we don't
really think about their leeching them out. They leach them
out for you as an individual psychologically and in the culture.
There's two very deep ways of thinking about overweight people
in our culture. So one is that they're sinners. And
I looked at the history of this. You go right
back to the sixth century, the Pope Pope Gregory, the
first it's the first person to lay out the seven
deadly sins, right, and one of them is go and

(30:00):
it's always depicted as like some overweight person depicted to
look grotesque, kind of overeating. Think about the film seven, right,
and that is so deep in our culture, the idea
that the overweight people are sinning. And one of the
ways you know that is there's only one kind of
weight loss we admire, and that's one that follows the
pattern of how sinners get to be redeemed in like

(30:22):
old Christian theology. Right. Think about that disgusting American game
show The Biggest Loser. So if people who haven't seen,
it's where you get people who are very severely overweight
and very unwell and they get them to compete to
be the biggest loser by going through these horrific ruling
exercise regimes and literally starving themselves.

Speaker 4 (30:40):
We had nine seasons of it here in Australia. Yeah,
it was massive.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, another reason to be proud along with Tony Abbott.
You think about that game show, what is that that's
the classic pattern. You're a sinner, You've got to go
to Hell and then we'll let you come back. And
it's like, oh, now you've been punished, we'll forgive you. Right.
So that's why we like to his story of suffering.
The more painful a diet is, the more we admire it.

(31:04):
But with these drugs, there's no suffering. You go from
being a sinner to what I just in sinner. I'm
putting that inverted commas obviously, what you just inject yourself
in the leg once a week and you get to
be like everyone else. It's like you've offended against God,
against the natural order. Right. But I also think there's
another thing that's going on loads of people, particularly women,
because of the horrendous pressures that are put on them

(31:26):
that you can you know much better than me. Loads
of women are making painful sacrifices every day to be thin.
We live in a culture that pushes us to be OBEs,
so I can talk about why, and it's really hard
to keep weight off and so that a lot of
women are experiencing pain every day to not be fat.
And so we picture ourselves as in a race, right,

(31:47):
I'm in this race against you. I'm imposing suffering on myself.
You're imposing suffering on yourself, and we compete to be thinner,
and in that contest. That's why I'm not angry with
my friend who takes statins. Right, We're not on a
race to have better cholesterol, but we are in a
race to be thin. So in that situation, I look
like Lance Armstrong. It's like, you know how other cyclists

(32:08):
must think about Lance Armstrong. Well, I put in all
z effort and you your fucker. You just inject yourself
once a week and you get all the benefits I
get without any of the effort. I can see why
it brings out this anger. But I think the way
we need to reframe that is once you bring those
ideas to the surface, you can begin to say, okay, well,
is this how we want to think about obesity. Right,
I would hope we've moved on from the ideas of

(32:28):
a sixth century pope. We're not sinners. We don't think
that way about being gay, for example, anymore. Right. But
also in a deeper way, I think we are in
a race. We are in a contest, but it's not
you against me, with each of us competing to suffer.
The race we're against is the forces in the society
that are making us obese, which are the processed food industry.

(32:51):
We are in a race to protect ourselves in our
children against that. But when you reframe it is it's
not us against each other like rats in a sack,
tearing at each other. And when you lose I'll try
to tear you down, and when I lose weight, you know,
we'll try and tear each other down. It's more all
of us together against these forces that are undermining our health.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
When you speak about this idea that we're also in
a fight against the fast food industries, and you say that,
you know everybody is working towards keeping weight off in
a society that is fundamentally built to do the opposite.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
Can you talk us a little bit through why that's
the case.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
So I found this really fascinating when I started investigating
this because for a long time I thought I was
looking at two different subjects. I wanted to understand why
obesity massively exploded in my lifetime. So I was born
in nineteen seventy nine. The year I was born, six
percent of British people were obese. It's now twenty seven percent.
Australia has had a comparable explosion.

Speaker 4 (33:47):
Has the benchmark for ob same definition.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Same definition, exactly, and it's a very important question. So
between the year I was born and the year I
turned twenty one, obesity doubled in the US, and then
in the next twenty years severe obesiti again. Right, So
this has never happened in the wholy human history. It's
a really interesting example in Australian history. Actually, just google.
You know when Harold Holt, your Prime minister, drowned. It
would think it was nineteen sixty six and nty sixty seven.

(34:11):
Just google. So people random Australians who were on the
beach go and look for him that day, right, and
you look at it, the footage of them. It looks
really weird to us because everyone was skinny. Everyone on
that beach was skinny, right, what we would call skinny.
And you look at it and you're like, well, where
was everyone else on the beach that day? Was it
like a skinny person convention? And then you look at

(34:34):
the population figures for Australia. That is what Australians look
like in ninety sixty seven. Right, there were almost no
obese people in Britain and Australia in ninety sixty seven.
Ask your parents when they were at school were there
any obese children in their class. There was usually one
in a class of thirty. And actually they look at
what the kids who were thought of his overweight, then
they would not be thought of his overweight. Now that's

(34:56):
really weird, right, That's never happened in three hundred thousand
years of humans EXAs thing, and then in my lifetime
it blows up why. And I was also looking at,
obviously how these drugs work, and for a while I thought, oh,
they're separate stories, but they're drain up at the end
because the obest means we want the drugs. But actually
the answer to these two mysteries why we got obese

(35:16):
and how these drugs work is densely interconnected, and it
comes down to a word we don't use that often
in English. It's satiety. Satiety is the feeling of having
had enough, and we all know the feeling of satiety.
I didn't actually know it from food until I took
these drugs. But I didn't know what you think about sex,
for example, like after you've had really good sex and
you're lying there, even if Keanu Reeves walked into the room,
you'd be like, sorry, Keanu, I'm sated, right, I mean

(35:39):
to be fair. Just in case Keanu listens to your podcast,
I never will be. That's not a good example. But
but you see the point of mate, We've all had
the feeling of being sated in some way in our lives, right,
And what we know is obesity explodes everywhere where one
change happens. It's not where people become weak week or

(36:00):
they become greedy, or all the other stigmatizing things we say.
It's where one change happens. It's where people move from
mostly eating fresh food, whole foods that they prepare on
the day, to mostly eating processed and ultra processed foods
which are constructed out of chemicals in factories in a
process that isn't even core cooking. It's called manufacturing food. Right.

(36:23):
Wherever people make that change, obesity blows up in the aftermath.
That's it. It's by far the biggest factor. And what
we know is processed and ultra processed food profoundly undermines
your satiety, your feeling that you've had enough. And there's
an experiment that really helped me to understand this. It's
a very simple experiment. There's a brilliant scientist called Paul Kenny.

(36:43):
He's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New York.
Great guy. And he grew up in Ireland in Dublin,
and when he was in his twenties he moved to
San Diego to Think. I Think to Do is PhD.
And it quickly clocked that Americans do not eat like
Irish people did at the time. Right. They eat much
more processed food, much more sugary, salty food. And like
a good immigrant, he assimilated and within a year he
gained like thirty pounds and he was like, ah. He

(37:07):
started to feel like this different kind of food that
he was eating wasn't just changing his body, it was
changing his brain. It was changing what he wanted. So
he designed an experiment to figure out what it does
to us. It's very simple experiment. I've nicknamed it Cheesecake Park.
That's not the official title. He got a load of
rats and he raised them in a cage and for ages.
All they had to eat was the kind of healthy,
whole foods that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years,

(37:30):
and they had loads of that food. But when that
was all they had, they would eat it when they
were hungry and then they would stop right So, when
they had the kind of natural foods that they evolved
to eat, they had a kind of nutritional wisdom that
meant they ate when they were hungry and just knew
to stop. At that point, they never became overweight or obese.
Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He

(37:51):
fried up some bacon, he bought some Snickers bars, and crucially,
he bought a shitload of cheesecake. And when he put
it in the cage, they still had the healthy food.
The rats went crazy for the American diet. They would
hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their way out
and emerge just totally slicked with cheesecake covered in it.

(38:12):
They would just eat and eat and eat. That natural
nutritional wisdom that they had when they had the kind
of food they evolved to eat, vanished. As Professor Kenny
put it to me, within a few days they were
different animals, and within a very short period of time
they were all actually quite seriously obese. Then Professor Kenny
varied the experiment in a way that feels very cruel

(38:32):
to me as a former junk food addict. He took
away all the American food, and he left them with
nothing but the healthy food they had for the first
part of their lives. And he was sure he knew
what would happen. They would eat more of the healthy
food than they had before, and this would prove that
junk food expands the number of calories you eat in
a day. That is not what happened. What happened was
much weirder. Once they'd had the American diet and all

(38:54):
they had left was their healthy food, they refused to
eat the healthy food. It was like they no longer
recognized it as food at all. They shunned it. They
only went back to eating it when they were literally starving.
Right now, this fits with a much wider body of
evidence with human beings. What we know is I go
through seven reasons why I can explain them. But processed
food and ultra processed food profoundly undermines your ability to

(39:18):
get a signal that you are full, that you've had enough.
And what these drugs do is they give you back
that feeling of satiety. Right the way one of the
scientists who developed them describe it to me is they
give you satiety hormones. But when you hear that what
you realize is how weird a situation we're in. One
of the professors, Professor Michael Lowe, put it to me,
these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem. Right,

(39:42):
process and ultraprocessed food undermine our satiety, and these drugs
give us back our satiety. The countries that never moved
to process food, like Japan, where I spent a load
of time, they don't have any demand for these drugs
because they didn't have any obesity, because they didn't get
screwed up in the first place. Right, there's almost no
market for a zepic in Japan. I realize how weird
this situation we're in.

Speaker 4 (40:02):
He really is, Yeah, and it makes me question something
that I know is written about a lot in the media,
and that is that once you start taking drugs like this,
you then have to be on them forever because of
exactly what you're talking about, this kind of satiation feeling.
Is that the case from the researchers that you spoke to,
and has that been the case for you?

Speaker 2 (40:24):
So what we know is that most people who stopped
taking the drugs regain the weight quite quickly. We need
more studies on this the only ones we hed up
to now funded by the drug companies, who obviously have
a vested interest in you taking it forever, because then
you have to keep buying it from them. I do
know some people who took these drugs used it to
interrupt their food patterns and eating patterns, and have now

(40:46):
stopped and are staying at a lower weight. In the
research we have at the moment, they seem to be
quite a small minority. It's not nobody. We'll know more
in the coming years, but for me, I have not
tried stopping them, and it's for one key reason. I
know we're going to talk a lot about the risks,
and there's a lot of risks I'm really worried about.
I also want to talk about the benefits, and the

(41:07):
evidence about the benefits is really striking, and actually I
think one of the best ways to start to see
it is to look at a different area of science.
So people have only been taking these drugs for obesity
for a couple of years now. Diabetics have been taking
them the longer, so actually I think the best evidence
we have to look at something different. So up to now,
it's been extremely hard to lose a lot of weight
and keep it off. And the best way of doing

(41:29):
it best in inverted comma is the most reliable way
of doing it has been bariatric surgery, things like stomach stapling.
Right now, baratric surgery is horrific. It's a really grueling
form of surgery. One in a thousand people die in
the operation. It's no joke, right, But what we know
is and bear in mind, obviously people who go through
the operation are severei obese. Otherwise they wouldn't get it,

(41:49):
they would be allowed to do it.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
But you've also got to get your weight down to
a certain point in order to have it in the
first place. Some people are not even suitable for it
because they're too overweight exactly.

Speaker 2 (41:59):
So they've got to cut down. You have to have
been in a pretty bad state with obesity, you know,
kind of unhealthy state with obesity to get it. So
why do people take this extraordinary risk. It's because of
what we know about what happens next. So if you
have bariatric surgery, so you massively reduce your obesity in
the seven years that follow you are fifty six percent
less slightly to die of a heart attack. You're sixty

(42:21):
percent less slightly to die of cancer. You're ninety two
percent less likely to die of diabetes related causes. In fact,
it's so good for your health that you're forty percent
less slightly to die of any cause at all. And
what we know is with these drugs they move us
in the same direction. So we know from the best
long term study so far that if you take these

(42:41):
drugs and you started with a BMI higher than twenty seven,
you are twenty percent less slightly to have a heart
attack or stroke. And for me, that was the thing
that just decided it for me. What we've got to
do is carefully way the benefits against the risks, because realistically,
for me, I would have carried on being obese. I
had tried dieting many times, it had always failed than
the long time, So for me, I had to weigh

(43:02):
the risks of these drugs versus the risks of continuing
to be obese. And given my family's history and my granddad,
as I said, died of a heart attack when he
was younger than I am now, my dad had to
have quadruple heart bypass surgery. And that wasn't even his dad,
who was my granddad that was the other side of
my family. My uncle died of a heart attack, my
other uncle had to have a pacemaker. Given all of that,
I thought for me, and given that many of the

(43:24):
risks that I'm really worried about don't apply to me,
I don't have a history of beating disorders. I'm worried
about the risk for pregnant women. Obviously I'm not a
risk of getting pregnant. The pleasure issue didn't come up
for me, this big issue around thyroid cancer. I don't
have thyroid cancer in my family, so for me, that
calculation went that way. But lots of very reasonable people
reading about the risks that I write about in Magic

(43:44):
Pill will look at it the other way, and well,
the risks will apply differently to them. So yeah, that
was why I've not taken a break from it, because
I just thought, Okay, for me, the heart issue is
so significant that I'm going.

Speaker 4 (43:56):
To stay on it for now, justifiable almost, you know,
for you up the pros and the cons. But I
think something else that I learned about from your book
was this increased risk of things like pancreatic cancer. And
these are the things that we currently know about. Can
you elaborate on what scientists are saying, and as you
previously mentioned, it's a biased view because a lot of
the scientists were involved in the development of these drugs,

(44:19):
and so they're not going to come out and be like, oh, well,
actually we've found something that's going to derail this trillion
dollar thing that we've just created.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
But also they would have a pretty fair understanding of
what risks are involved since people who are diabetic have
been taking this drug for a very long time. It's
not that the drug itself is not new, it's just
the application of it that's new.

Speaker 4 (44:38):
The amounts that people are taking have changed, but also
there have been drugs on the market previously and we
haven't known the effects of those things until sixty years later.
What's coming out of the science at the moment.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yeah, I obviously dug very deeply into this. I was
worried about it for myself and for the millions of
people who are taking these drugs. So when you ask
the experts about safety, and you know, these are serious
scientists who I don't think would cover up harm. I
know they wouldn't. They're very serious doctors. When you talk
to people about safety, a lot of them say a
point that is true and should give people some sense

(45:11):
of security, which is, like you say, people have actually
been taking these drugs for quite a long time, so
some people won't know. But in addition to having this
effect on your appetite, these drugs also stimulate the creation
of insulin, which is what diabetics are lacking. So diabetics
have been taking them, including in Australia, for eighteen years now.
So what a lot of the scientists say, Look, if
there was some disastrous short or medium term effect beyond

(45:33):
the well known side effects like nausea, we would know
by now if it made you grow horns, the diabetics
would have horns, right, But some other scientists said, okay,
if that's our reason to feel secure about this, let's
actually dig into the diabetes the evidence from the diabetics. So,
for example, there's a guy called Professor Jean Luc Fayi,
who's the professor who's a professor at the University Hospital

(45:55):
in Montpellier. So he was asked by the French Medicines
Agency to investigate these drugs to see their safety for
the French market, and he looked at a lot of
the him and his team looked at a lot of
the clinical evidence and preclinical evidence, which means animal studies,
and one thing really caught his eye. If you give
these drugs to rats, they are much more likely to
get thyroid cancer. So what him and his colleagues did

(46:15):
is they look they have very good medical databases in France,
because you basically can't opt out of them. It's extremely hard.
So what they did is they looked at a few
thousand diabetics who'd taken these drugs between I think it
was two thousand and six and twenty twelve, and they
compared them to a very similar group of diabetics who
had not been taking these drugs to see what were
they different outcomes in thyroid cancer. What they calculated is

(46:37):
quite startling. So if he's right, and other scientists dispute this,
these drugs increase your thyroid cancer risk by between fifty
to seventy five percent. Now, at first you hear that,
you're like, what the fuck? But it's important to understand
what that doesn't mean. Is he explained to me, it
doesn't mean if you take these drugs you have a
fifty to seventy five percent chance of getting thyroid cancer.
If that was the case, we'd be burning them in
bonfires all over the world. What it means is, whatever

(47:01):
your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, if he's right,
you are fifty to seventy five percent more likely to
get it. Now, as he points out, thyroid cancer is
relatively rare. One point two percent of people get it
in their lives. Eighty four percent of people who get
it survive. Nonetheless, it's a pretty big increase in a
small risk now against that, and this gives you a

(47:22):
sense of the complexity and how you have to weigh
this against that. Some scientists said to me, well, if
he's right. Even if he's right, you've got a weigh
the risk that risk against the cancer risk that just
comes from being obese, which was one of the facts
that most took me aback. As Cancer Research UK, the
main British group, explained, if you carry excess weight in
your body, that fat isn't inert It doesn't just sit

(47:44):
there doing nothing. It sends signals through your body and
one of the signals it sends is for yourselves to
divide more rapidly, which can cause cancer. It's why obesity
is one of the biggest causes of cancer in both
Britain and Australia. I'm really conscious, I'm thinking about something
you asked me before. It's playing on my mind because
we have this. It's such one of the really difficult

(48:05):
things in talking about this. It's when I said I
haven't been good today and you picked up on it
quite rightly. There's good in the sense of good for
my health, right, and then there's good in the sense
of morally good and you know, like shaming myself. And
it's really hard to disentangle those two things when you've
got all these millennia of fat shaming. And one of

(48:27):
the really terrible things about stigma. There are so many
bad things about it, but one of them is it
actually makes us harder to hear. It makes it much
harder for us to hear well intention medical advice. Right.
If you're constantly soaking up insults, it makes it harder
when you do actually need to hear a difficult truth
like cancer increases the risk of obesity.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
I also think it's because it's the first thing that
trolls use as their kind of backing mechanism. You know,
it's like, well, being fat is bad for you, and
here's how it's bad for you. So it's intertwined. This
medical advice is given by non medical professionals has been
a weapon that people have used to be fat phobic
for a really long time. So I can understand why

(49:08):
there's such a complexity with receiving kind medical advice because
it's the same speech, it's just delivered with a different intention.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
That's such a good way of putting it. I wish
I put it that way in the book you put idea.
But you're so right because it's that thing about you know,
they call it concern trolling. O baby, I'm just worried
about your health. That's why I don't want you to
be this jaba like pig and all the insulting well,
you know, you see how the I think that's literally
something Lodge of my market said to me years ago,

(49:37):
literally that phrase. So yeah, if you if you're soaking
up concern trolling, then even loving concern can sound like
concern trolling. Right. It's another reason why we need to
a post stigma because it really fucks us over on
so many levels.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
The big debate at the moment, which I'm not sure
if it's the same in the UK, because Australia is
a little bit behind in the way it's being prescribed,
but a lot of stigma and a lot of the
debate against ozepic has been how it's taking medication away
from diabetics and how like it's inconsionable that you know,
people who are obese would be able to get something
that is absolutely necessary to the health and well being

(50:14):
of diabetic people. Do you think that there is a
fair debate in this or do you think that that
is just more fat phobia wrapped up in like the
hysteria of it, and people are able to then weaponize
this as a way of being like, well, these people
shouldn't be allowed to have the drug in the first place.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
I think it's such an important question though. I think
it's a bit like the concern trolling. There's a legitimate
concern here, and a lot of people are using it
to concern troll and you know, kind of give their
stigma a kind of fake moral exterior. So I think
to pull back. Basically, what's happened is every person who
takes these drugs becomes a walking advertisement for these drugs.

(50:49):
Everyone goes, wow, Bob's lost a load away. What do
you mean Bob's kidney problems have gone away. Wow. What
did you do, Bob? Oh? I took ozeenpic. So part
of the issue is the drug companies are ramping up
manufacturing of these drugs the whole time, but they're rushing
to meet a finish line that gets further and further
away because everyone who uses it inspires other people to

(51:10):
use it and inspire other people to use it. I mean,
we're at the point where forty seven percent of Americans
so they want to take these drugs, right wow. So
in that rush, what we should have done is we
should have done what we did in Australia and Britain
with the COVID vaccine. We should have said, Okay, this
is a thing that's really important to lots of people's health.
We've got a limited supply, we need to ration it
based on medical need. And if we had done that,

(51:32):
absolutely diabetics would have been at the front of the
line right. Also, pretty close to the front of the
line would have been people like, for example, a guy
called Jeff Parker who I interviewed. He's a sixty six
year old retired lighting engineer in San Francisco. He was
very severely overweight, and it was very painful for him
to walk. His knees were getting really screwed up, and

(51:52):
he had kidney problems, liver problems, heart problems, and he
had gout and he was swallowing fistfuls of every day.
And his friend Mel gave him some Munjaro, which is
one of these drugs, and he lost an enormous amount
of weight. His doctor cut back almost all his pills.
Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate Bridge

(52:13):
every day and he said to me, I feel like
I'm going to enjoy my retirement now. So Jeff would
have been pretty near the front. I mean, you would
have had the diabetics at the absolute front, but Jeff
would have been near the front. You would have had
someone like me round the middle because of my family.
I wasn't hugely overweight, had a BMI of thirty, So
you know, I would have been around the middle, and
you would have had you know, I won't name the
Hollywood stars. We all know we're taking these drugs, but

(52:35):
you know they would have been at the very end
of their line, right, not all of them. Some of
them were very over weight, but you know the ones
who weren't the people at that party that I went
to would have been at the back of the line, right,
we didn't do that. We have a you know, capitalist
free for all, and in that capitalist free for all,
which we should not have done, some people who had
greater need are not getting it. So I interviewed a

(52:55):
guy called Zami Jaliel. He's a musician here in Britain.
His diabetics. He couldn't get it. And I was really
ashamed when I interviewed him, because I thought, well, I've
got a load in my fridge, right, and his need
was greater than mine, and I didn't give it to him,
and I felt ashamed of that. I really understand why
Zamy is really pissed off with people like me. I
would be if I was him as well. Now I'd

(53:16):
rather he was angry with the system. But he can
make the perfect reasonable point, well, given that system isn't
in place, we didn't ration it. If people like you
hadn't done what you've done, then I would still have
my ozen pic right. And he's not wrong. So I
think there's a real I chose to prioritize my own
health in this chaotic system. But he's not wrong that

(53:38):
his need is greater than mine. He's definitely right about that.
So I think there's a complicated thing going on there. Again,
I always try to drive people more towards thinking, well,
how do we solve this systemically, rather than how do
we just tear each other down and scream abuse at
each other? But I don't want to delegitimize the anger
someone like Zamy feels, because it's he's right to feel angry.

Speaker 4 (53:56):
I also do think it's important because this is the
number one clime. I asked a friend of mine who's
an endocrinologist, and I said, are people taking these drugs away?
And for people listening and putting that in quotation marks
from diabetic people, you know, are they taking away something
that they need? And she said, it's complex. There are

(54:18):
other options for people with diabetes. There are quite a
lot of options, and there have been for a long time.
Whether they've developed a resistance or a sensitivity to a
certain medication that's why they've needed to go on to this.
That could be the case. So I feel as though
it's complex talking about this because I battle with the
idea that there haven't been many options for people who

(54:40):
were overweight to severely increase the enjoyment that they get
out of life and the ability that they can have
to experience pleasure by not having these health complications, because
the options up until this point for people who you
know need again in quotation marks to lose weight have
been so limited.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
You know.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
I think that these things, like you've said multiple times
in your hand, they're so deeply complex, and they're intertwined
with stigma, and they're intertwined with who needs this the most,
because what is a need?

Speaker 3 (55:11):
But I think it goes further than that, because I mean,
on one hand, like a diabetic does need medication to
live to live, and I don't think that we can.
We have spoken a lot about health on this episode,
and I think that that is by far for people
who are chosen to take a zepic for obesity, for

(55:32):
being you know, dramatically overweight, that is such an important thing.
But then when we talk about this line, this order
of priority, we cannot not mention or not speak about
the fact that people take it as well because there
is an aesthetic to it. Weight loss does have a
physical aesthetic that we praise with in society, and I

(55:53):
think it's this like crazed obsession that we have with
weight loss, which then also we link to to success
in some ways. Do you, for yourself think as much
as so much of this was loaded in health, do
you think there is a physical part of this?

Speaker 4 (56:08):
Do you think there is an esthetic?

Speaker 3 (56:09):
Do you think there is a vanity part that you
have received or that you feel people treat you differently
now that you've lost a lot of weight.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
Yeah. One of the most difficult moments for me and
working on the book was a moment with my a
friend of mine who I call Lara in the book.
That's not her real name. It's really strange. So, as
you know from I was talking before, and I'm sure
you can tell, I do a lot of research, and
one of the ways I process what I'm reading and
the people I'm interviewing is I talk to my friends
about it the whole time, right, And I'm very lucky
that I have friends are interested in the kind of
things I'm interested in, So I'm constantly, you know, all

(56:38):
the way through working on a book, I'm like, Wow,
you won't believe what I learned today. And most of
my friends were really really interested in the stuff I
was learning. Right for different reasons. And Lara is one
of my oldest and closest friends, and she was not
interested in what I was learning. She's not overweight, so
it wasn't like a personal sensitivity, and I could tell
I was kind of pissing her off as we were talking.

(57:00):
That's a bit weird. And she was in London. She
doesn't live in London, and she was in London. One
day we went out for dinner and I was talking
about it was actually just after what happened with my
niece that moment, my niece and I'm talking about how,
you know, I thinking about eighteen disorders and doing the
research on that at the time, and She's like, I
can't listen to this bullshit for another fucking moment. And
I was like what, And she said, you are not

(57:20):
being honest with yourself. I was retaken aback and she
I said, what do you mean? She said, you're constantly
talking to me about these the risk benefit analysis and
all these things. That's not why you're doing this right.
You've got a level with yourself, she said. All the
time I've known you, and she's known me since I
was seventeen, You've never been happy with how you looked.
I've always thought you look fine. You've never been happy

(57:42):
with how you looked. This is not about health for you.
This is about vanity, right, and just admit that to yourself.
And I was kind of going and she was overstating it.
I knew she was. I knew there was a real
health concern for me, but I was like throwing into
this moment of doubt having to acknowledge there was also
a lot of truth in what she was saying, and
I was kind of pushing back a bit. She said,

(58:02):
be honest with me. If this drug gave you all
the health benefits that it currently gives you, but it
also gave you boils on your face, would you take it?
And I had to be honest. The answer is no,
I wouldn't. I definitely wouldn't, right should Well doesn't that
tell you something? And it's complicated, isn't it? Because part

(58:23):
of what happen is I felt physically better. I actually
felt emotionally worse. We can talk about that for the
first six months, that's the separate thing. But I felt
physically better, and I was getting it feedback, right, I mean,
literally like four months in my neighbor's hot gardener who
I'd been walking past for years hit on me and
gave me his phone number. Right, I was getting a
lot more male attention. I could feel I was higher
status in this culture. Was that part of my motivation? Yes,

(58:49):
it absolutely was? And I suppose it's funny when I
said because I how would I put it? I feel
embarrassed to say that, because it feels like, oh, if
I talk to you about health, it's a moral I
could talk to you in these moral tones on this.
You know, I'm a journalist talking about morality, and.

Speaker 4 (59:12):
It feels superficial.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Yeah, it feels superficial. It feels vain. That's not No
one ever uses that word as a compliment, right, Oh,
I really I went a great date with a guy
who was really vain. Right, No one's ever said that, right,
it's not so. Yes, that was part. That was and
is part of my motivation. And I can't separate that
from I mean, I can sort of intellectually theoretically separate

(59:35):
it from the other stuff, but I can't really separate it.

Speaker 3 (59:39):
I think it's also a really big contributing factor as
to why people lie about taking it. So many people
who are using ozenpic to assist in their weight loss,
lie about taking it, and you even mentioned in the
first color pages of your book, you were like, more.

Speaker 4 (59:54):
Women lie about it than men do.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
Men seem to be more okay with being open about
the reasons and what they're taking. But we have a
culture where the people who are taking it because it's shameful,
because there's so many opinions, because it's this idea of cheating,
because there's vanity loaded into this. It's so complex that
it's easier to just say, well, I started eating healthy
and walking more.

Speaker 4 (01:00:16):
It was pilates in lockdown.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
That's easy to say unless there has literally been an
outbreak of dysentery in Malibu, like a lot of those
people are not to But I totally get it. It
relates to I wonder what you thought about this. I
was speaking to one of my editors the other day
and it's like a weird position, right that pik is
one of the biggest news stories in the world and
my book is the first book about it, and there
are no rivals on the horizon. We're all finding it

(01:00:39):
really weird, Like, why are then where I thought there
would be like five competitor books by this point, and
one of my editors said to me, it's because no
woman could. A woman would be crucified if she wrote
this book. A woman would just be absolutely crucified. And
so that rules out, like, you know, whatever, it is,
sixty percent of books a written by women, Right, she
automatically ruled out sixty percent of your competitors. Does that

(01:01:01):
ring true to you? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:01:04):
It does, And I think it actually goes full circle
back to what you spoke about a long time ago.
And I even think that this could be what's going
on in your own head. We have been conditioned to
think that the only way we value weight loss is
through suffering. Yeah, it delegitimizes it exactly. It takes away
the legitimacy of it, and it takes away this idea
of redemption, back to a point that we deem you

(01:01:26):
a higher status person, as you mentioned, Johand the number
one thing that I really sat and thought about throughout
the entire time I was reading your book is that
we could try to have a conversation about ozenbic from
a health benefit or from a psychological point of view,
but you can't without the other because we are so
deeply intertwined with the way that we value weight, weight

(01:01:49):
loss and how we feel about our bodies. And it's
not just external, it's not just from the food industry.
It's so deep that it's internal as well. It's so
deep that even children, like little children pick up on it.
Like my little girls. She's four years old, and we
don't talk about wait.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Wait's not something that we have to And I don't
say this to be like we don't have to worry
about it, Like we're a slim household and so wait
is not something that we ever really have to focus
on in our house. But she was standing in the
mirror the other day and she was like, I look
fat in this, and she had a dress on that
had a big frill. She's four, she's four years old.

(01:02:26):
And I was like, when have you ever even heard
people use the word fat? Like why is that something
that you know exists? But it's so ingrained in so
many parts of what we speak about that they pick
it up at daycare or in their friends, or you know,
around maybe an auntie or an uncle or someone else
who's just said, oh, I feel fat.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
It starts as soon as they're born.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
So more three year old children know what the McDonald's
m means than know their own last name. So they're
simultaneously getting the signal it's bad to be fat, it's
bad to be fat, and you don't feel good. Good news,
there's a happy meal waiting for you, right, So it's
the worst possible combination. They're living in what's called an
obesogenic environment that's pushing the fact. In fact, the explosion

(01:03:11):
in childhood obesity is absolutely when you look at the graphs,
it's breathtaking, and they're being told that it makes them disgusting,
you know, and then all these stigmatizing things which actually
make the problem worse and make them more likely to
become obese and make them more likely to hate their
own bodies. So it's it's a really bad combo.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
John, I will let you go eventually. One last question
for you. When I initially heard about, you know, the
shortages of this and how it was kind of wanting
to be preferenced, but that's not possible because we live
in a capitalist society where people can be greedy. Question
I had was, why don't they just make more? Why
don't they just make more of this if there's more
of a need get in the lab cook up a

(01:03:49):
few more batches dispense it. Why is that not possible
to be done? And how does copyright come into this?

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
Yes, there's two bits of that. So there's Novo nordiskin
Eli Lilly, who are the company that own the patents
on these drugs, are scaling up as fast as they
can because obviously, I mean, they have an inherent incentive
to do that. I mean, Novo Nordisk is now the
most profitable company in the whole of Europe. The entire
debt they're from Denmark, the entire Danish economy has had

(01:04:16):
a massive boost just from Mozebic, like a staggering economic boost.
And there's all these crazy if you look at the
figures on this, how much it's blowing up, and how
fascinating and unpredictable the effects that I mean. Barclay's Bank
commissioned a very sober minded financial analyst called Emily Field,
to go away and look into the implications of these
drugs for their future financial investments. And she came back

(01:04:38):
and said, if you want a comparison point for how
much this is going to change things, you've got to
look at the invention of the smartphone. Right, But that's
how big the effect will be. I even just crazy
things like this, But just been a financial report showing
that the American airlines are going to have to spend
much less on jet fuel in the quite soon because
it takes much less jet fuel to fly a much

(01:04:58):
thinner population. It's wild. So why aren't they just scaling
up massively? I mean, they are scaling up as fast
as they can, but there are just logistical challenges. You
have to have physical factories, you have to establish them.
And I have a lot of criticisms of these companies
and concerns about them, as well as some praise for them.
But I think they are doing it as fast as
they reasonably can without compromising safety. But you asked about

(01:05:21):
a second thing, which is about patents, which is really important.
So at the moment, these drugs are unbelievably expensive. When
I buy them in Vegas, it's a two hundred dollars
per month. Here in Britain. Can spend a lot time
in last phase. But here in Britain, when I get
it here, it's about two hundred and fifty pounds a month.
So it's not actually that expensive inherently to make them.
It's about forty dollars a month just to make them.

(01:05:42):
It's the rest of that goes in profit to the
drug company who argue, look, we developed this, We develop
lots of drugs that never come to anything. This wouldn't
have happened without ours. There's some truth in that. I mean,
I would say, you don't have to make quite this
much money right like that. I mean you have to
be the richest people in the world. So what a
lot of places are doing is making compounded versions of
the drugs basically generics the equivalent of a knockoff Louis

(01:06:04):
Vu tom Bag. There are dangers to that, obviously, processes
not supervised. You had some instances I think four corners
just at an investigation in Australia, people who were selling
stuff they claim as a zen Pick. It wasn't a
zen pic all in Austria, not that long ago. There
were a load of people who thought they bought a
zen pic and ended up going into comas because they've
got a completely different drug. So as inherent risks with that,

(01:06:25):
the shortage is going to continue for the foreseeable future
because every time they meet the new benchmark, more people
want it, more, people want it more, people want it.
I mean, it's funny that the book is called magic
Pill because there's three ways in which this could be magic. Right.
The first way is the most obvious. It could just
solve the problem, right, And there are days when it
feels like that, you know, my whole life, I've overeaten

(01:06:47):
and now what. I inject myself once a week in
the leg and I eat drastically less, and I've lost
three stone. There are days it just feels like magic.
The second way in which it could be magic is
much more disturbing. It could be a magic trick, right,
like the you know, the magician who shows you a
card trick while he's picking your pocket. It could be
that the twelve big drawbacks to these drugs and risks

(01:07:07):
that I described in the book are actually going to
outweigh the benefit in stcrewer is over. That is a
real possibility. But the third scenario, I think is the
one that's relevant to this question, which is and actually
I think the most likely scenario. If you think about
most of the stories of magic that we grew up,
we think about Aladdin. Right, you find the lamp, rub it,
the genie grants your wish and your wish comes true,

(01:07:28):
but never quite in the way that you expected it,
with some unpredictable element. You think about a fantasia. You
unleash the magic, and then the magic runs away from you.
I think that's what we're seeing now, right. The magic
is running away from us. It's having unpredictable effects. But
what we know is by twenty thirty two, a ZEPI
will be out of patent, at which point anyone can

(01:07:49):
manufacture it for forty dollars a month. By then it
will be pills. The pills are already available at the
point of which you've got a pill that's a little
bit more than a US dollar a day that's giving
you twenty percent body weight loss. I mean most of
the scientists I spoke to, their anticipation is that conservatively
thirty percent of people will be taking it, assuming we
don't discover some horrendous side effect between now and then.

(01:08:11):
So you can see how explosive that will be and
how important it is that we really pause and think
about this now. If we have been talking on the
day that Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in two thousand
and seven, we would not have been able to game
out you know TikTok and Uberans and Donald Trump and
all these things that have transformed our lives. This is
going to transform our lives. It's coming for us. There

(01:08:34):
are lots of people listening here who can think, well,
I never want to take these drugs, and a lot
of them will be making absolutely the right decision for them.
Even if you're not interested. It's going to transform the
culture around you, particularly for women, particularly for girls, in
some ways that are positive, in some ways that are
really negative. I think we really need to take a
beat and really think about it and what this is
going to mean for all of us.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
John, thank you so much for coming and for being
a part of the podcast. You're an absolute delight. Love
having you on, and just for how even handedly you
speak about it. I think it's so important because we
would hate to have this conversation and for someone to
walk away from it and think it's the magic fix,
or for it to be promoting something that is unsafe.

(01:09:15):
But it's very real, and I think there's so many
people who are interested in finding out more but don't.
No one wants to talk about it. That's the reality.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
Yeah, I feel I'm not normally a very even handed person.
It's just I think actually the truth, the truth with
this is quite even handed. I think it is genuinely complicated.
One of my favorite writers, Graham Green, said, when we
are unsure, we are alive. And when I was working
on this book, I really felt quite alive to the
gray in the middle and the you know, I don't
think it'd be much used to people to write a

(01:09:43):
book going yeah a zempiic woo or boo boo, no
nothing good here? Do you think the reality is in
this much more interesting and complicated.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
We hope that you loved the episode with Johan Harry
and also if you want to hear any more from him,
we did do an episode back in twenty twenty two
all around stolen focus, as you mentioned, which if you're
somebody who feels as though they're trapped to their phone,
or you feel like your relationships are affected by your
inability to really clock in on the people that are
important to you because you're so distracted by all the

(01:10:14):
things that we're subjected to.

Speaker 4 (01:10:16):
It is such a good conversation and we will link
all of that in the show notes as well. The
other thing that I think was quite interesting that popped
up in that conversation that we just had with Yohn,
and also in the one back in twenty twenty two
was this conversation around processed food and how much that
affects not only our satiety like we just talked about,
but also affects our attention. He's got his finger on

(01:10:37):
the pulse of these things that are really affecting us
right now and are going to be affecting us in
the future. So yeah, go back and listen to that
if you have the chance. That links to Johan's book
and all of his social media are that he doesn't
really use will be in the show notes. And you
know the drill, say Mum to.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
You, dad, to your doctor, your friends, and shad love
because we are love and turn and

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Is Ozempic The Magic Pill? Weighing Up Society’s Dysfunctional Obsession with Weight, Food and Our Bodies - Uncut with Johann Hari

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Is Ozempic The Magic Pill? Weighing Up Society’s Dysfunctional Obsession with Weight, Food and Our Bodies - Uncut with Johann Hari