Jia Tolentino on the Ozempic Weight-Loss Craze

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

The prescription drug Ozempic was designed to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their disease, and, under the name Wegovy, to treat obesity. But it has been embraced recently as a tool for weight loss, and many celebrities are rumored to use it in order to shed pounds. Known generically as semaglutide, the drug gives users the feeling of satiation—even to the point of uncomfortable fullness. “One doctor I spoke to compared it to a turkey dinner in a pen,” the staff writer Jia Tolentino tells David Remnick. Tolentino recently reported on the use and misuse of the drug, and what its prominence among celebrities says about our relationship to thinness today. After some years in which body culture seemed to become more accepting, Tolentino fears the drug will wind the clock back to the brutal insistence on thinness of decades past. “Like any technology, it’s very complicated,” she says. “For some people, this drug might save their lives. For others, it does not make sense to be used in any casual way.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.4	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:16.6	At the Oscars recently, Jimmy Kimmel had a line about a drug that seems to be coming
0:21.6	up a lot these days.
0:23.6	You look great.
0:24.6	Everybody looks so great.
0:25.9	I look around this room, I can't help but wonder, is OZEMPIC right for me?
0:32.0	To listen to some people talk about OZEMPIC, you'd think we're walking into a sci-fi future
0:37.1	of universally trimmed bodies all achieved without sweat or tears.
0:42.8	And if you turn your brain back on, you'll think it's probably a lot more complicated
0:47.8	than that.
0:49.4	Staff writer Geotolentino has been reporting on the use and misuse of OZEMPIC.
0:54.9	And what it says about our relationships to our bodies today.
1:01.9	Geot, let's start with the drug itself.
1:04.0	Let's start with OZEMPIC.
1:05.7	What is it supposed to be used for and what is it actually being used for?
1:11.4	So OZEMPIC is part of this relatively new class of drugs called GLP1 agonists.
1:17.7	They have existed in some form since 2005, so they're not totally new, but they are fairly
1:22.4	new.
1:23.5	OZEMPIC was first approved in 2017 as a treatment for type 2 diabetes.
1:27.8	It's a substance called Semiglutide, and the same substance was approved as a treatment
1:32.4	for obesity under the name Wigovii in 2021.
	...

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