Jia Tolentino on the Ozempic Weight-Loss Craze

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.0	At the Oscars recently, Jimmy Kimmel had a line about a drug that seems to be coming up a lot these days.
0:23.1	You look great. Everybody looks so great. When I look around this room, I can't help but wonder,
0:28.5	is OZemPEC right for me?
0:31.6	To listen to some people talk about OZemPEC, you'd think we're walking into a sci-fi future of
0:37.4	universally trimmed bodies
0:39.4	all achieved without sweat or tears. And if you turn your brain back on, you'll think it's probably
0:45.9	a lot more complicated than that. Staff writer Gia Tolentino has been reporting on the use
0:52.5	and misuse of OZemempic and what it says about our
0:56.3	relationships to our bodies today.
1:01.5	Gia, let's start with the drug itself.
1:03.9	Let's start with OZemPEC.
1:05.4	What is it supposed to be used for?
1:08.1	And what is it actually being used for?
1:11.0	So, OZembek is part of this relatively new class of drugs called GLP1 agonists.
1:17.6	They have existed in some form since 2005, so they're not totally new, but they are fairly new.
1:23.1	OZempec was first approved in 2017 as a treatment for type 2 diabetes.
1:28.6	It's a substance called semaglutide, and the same substance was approved as a treatment for obesity under the name
1:33.7	Wagovi in 2021. So how does it help you lose weight? Because that's what we're hearing about. We're
1:39.1	hearing about OZempic as a weight loss drug now. Right. These drugs, these GLP1 agonists, the reason that they
1:46.5	help people lose weight is because they replicate a hormone that our body produces naturally
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.