America Isn’t Ready for the Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution That’s Coming

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have historically thought about weight as the mere outcome of our deliberate choices about diet and exercise. We have not typically thought about weight like a disease. But in the past 18 months, there’s been an extraordinary revolution in weight-loss medication that's putting in our hands a therapy that can help people easily shed weight without major side effects. You may have heard these drugs go by the name Wegovy or Ozempic. What happens when you take a country obsessed with self-image and diet and tell them that the mystery of weight loss has now been reduced to a daily injection? You change a lot more than body mass index. You change society. Today’s guest is Susan Z. Yanovski. She is the co-director of the Office of Obesity Research and the program director of the Division of Digestive Diseases and Nutrition at NIH. We talk about the stakes of anti-obesity medication, why diet and exercise doesn’t work for so many people, how these weight-loss drugs could help American health care, strain American insurance, and revolutionize America’s sense of willpower, responsibility, and diet. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Susan Z. Yanovski Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:22.1	I'm combed join the best community in MMA. Perse were out of here.
0:28.9	Today's episode is about a medical revolution, a new class of weight loss drugs that could
0:35.1	change America, our healthcare, our bodies, and the way that we think about weight and willpower.
0:44.2	For a long time, many people thought about obesity or weight, fatness, thinness, fitness,
0:49.8	body type. We thought about these things as the outcome of behavior, of deliberate choices,
0:56.3	right? As the result of a set of good decisions versus bad decisions,
0:59.3	are you eating the right stuff? Are you working out enough?
1:02.9	We have not historically thought about weight the way we think about a disease,
1:07.7	or a genetic disorder, something that people have very little control over.
1:12.8	In fact, you think about the phrase weight loss pill, historically it's been kind of a
1:17.6	pejorative, right? It has a terrible reputation from the pills of the 1980s, 1990s.
1:23.4	But in the past 18 months, there has been an extraordinary revolution in weight loss medication.
1:32.8	A few years ago, doctors realized that a medication originally prescribed for diabetes,
1:37.7	called somaglotide, was having a very obvious effect on a lot of patients.
1:43.2	That obvious effect was that they were losing a ton of weight without terrible side effects.
1:49.0	And so somaglotide kicked off this wave of new weight loss therapies,
1:53.2	with brand names like Wigovii and ozempic.
	...

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