Weight-loss drugs can lead to serious eye conditions
Collectively known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs mimic the hormone GLP-1. This limits both hunger and interest in food, helping users lose weight, and helps control blood sugar levels.
But two new studies show that people taking these drugs may have a small increased risk of serious eye conditions and vision loss. Here's what you need to know if you're taking or considering these medications.
Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, is a rare but devastating eye condition that occurs when blood flow to the optic nerve is suddenly reduced or blocked. It's also called an 'eye stroke'. The exact cause of NAION remains unclear, and there are no current treatments available. People with diabetes are at increased risk of developing NAION.
Unlike other eye conditions that develop gradually, NAION causes a sudden, painless loss of vision. Patients typically notice the condition when they wake up and discover they've lost vision in one eye. Vision tends to worsen over a couple of weeks and slowly stabilises. Recovery of vision is variable, but around 70 per cent of people do not experience improvement in their vision. What has previous research shown?
A previous study from 2024 found that participants prescribed semaglutide for diabetes were four times more likely to develop NAION. For those taking it for weight loss, the risk was almost eight times higher. In June, the European Medicines Agency concluded NAION represented a 'very rare' side effect of semaglutide medications: a one in 10,000 chance. However, recent studies suggest the risks may be lower than we first thought. In addition to NAION, there is also evidence to suggest GLP-1 drugs can worsen diabetic eye disease, also known as diabetic retinopathy.
This occurs when high blood sugar levels damage the small blood vessels in the retina, which can lead to vision loss.Studies also show that patients with heart conditions who better adhere to their medication prescriptions have lower risks of NAION than those who don't. Doctors should discuss NAION risks during prescribing decisions and work with eye care providers to monitor regularly for diabetic eye disease. Patients need clear instructions to seek immediate medical attention for sudden vision loss and the need for regular eye examinations.
Aggressive treatment of sleep apnoea and other heart conditions may also help reduce NAION risks. But for now, there remains an ongoing need for more research to understand how GLP-1 medications can affect the eye.
(Flora Hui is with the University of Melbourne and Pete A Williams is from Karolinska Institutet)
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Mint
4 hours ago
- Mint
Weight-loss drugs have a surprising foe: Fat activists
In the world of fat activism, the 'O-words"—overweight and obesity—are expressly verboten. That's because advocates and 'fat studies" scholars want to destigmatize and accommodate fatness—their preferred term—and push back against the view that overweight or obese people are somehow abnormal or diseased. Now a third problematic O-word has emerged: Ozempic. From the perspective of these activists and scholars, the hype around GLP-1 agonists, for which Ozempic has become the catchall term, only dials up the pressure to lose weight. It's one thing for an obese person to refuse to undergo bariatric surgery, which involves hospitalization, complications and a significant recovery. But to resist a weekly home injection? That can really test peoples' sympathy. 'Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us," said Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), an advocacy group founded in 1969. 'It's created an even louder public narrative that you could just solve all your problems by taking this magical drug, and if you don't take it, well then, you deserve what you get." 'Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,' said Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, pictured in July. These concerns contrast sharply with the latest thinking in obesity medicine, which views reframing obesity as a disease—which the American Medical Association did in 2013—as a crucial step toward destigmatization. For doctors, GLP-1s such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro are breakthrough tools for addressing obesity, which increases the risk of developing other serious conditions, including type-2 diabetes and heart disease. 'We are not prosecuting people for having obesity," said Louis Aronne, one of the founders of obesity medicine as a subspecialty and the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. 'We look at treating obesity as central to helping with all their other health problems." Patients who lose weight with GLP-1s regularly see their health markers for prediabetes and hypertension improve. They often suffer less from sleep apnea, which allows them to feel better rested and elevates their mood. This can eliminate the need for antidepressants, which can themselves cause weight gain. Over the past 60 years, obesity rates have tripled in the U.S. due in part to more sedentary lifestyles and changes in diet, including more calorie-dense ultraprocessed foods. 'Obesity experts have been trying to overcome these challenges for decades and give people better lives, and we finally feel like we're really getting somewhere," Aronne said. The advent and ubiquity of GLP-1 drugs may mark a turning point for the treatment of obesity, but they have also widened a chasm between activists and academics and much of the rest of the world, including medical specialists. One side believes it can help people overcome obesity; the other wants to shift the focus from changing their bodies to helping them live in them. 'People think that if everyone can just take this expensive, dangerous drug, we can get rid of fat people," said Marilyn Wann, 58, a longtime fat activist in the Bay Area, who like many activists is suspicious of GLP-1s' possible long-term side effects. 'These drugs are going through the same excitement-and-disappointment cycle we've seen with every method of intentional weight loss. It just creates more work for fat activists." Certain facts are indisputable. Four in 10 adults in the U.S. have a body-mass index or BMI over 30. The financial costs are significant. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently estimated that obesity is associated with approximately $385 billion in health spending in 2024. According to a recent paper in JAMA, employees with obesity have seven times the medical claims costs and 11 times the indemnity claims costs of those with a healthy weight. They file twice as many worker compensation claims. These costs correspond with obesity's significant health consequences, which include osteoarthritis, hyperlipidemia and other chronic diseases. Obesity-related complications include incontinence, asthma, psoriasis, reflux and kidney disease. According to a 2023 paper in the journal Nature, roughly 8% of all medical expenditures in the U.S. are associated with the treatment of obesity. Weight loss expenditures are similarly outsized. According to Grand View Research, the weight loss industry was $142.58 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $298.66 billion by 2030. UBS estimates the GLP-1 market alone will grow to $126 billion in sales by 2029. Other aspects of obesity are less well understood. While there's a consensus that genetics, environment, insulin and other hormones play a role, no one quite knows how, or why some people become obese in the first place while others don't. Fat activists and scholars argue that a causal relationship between obesity and its associated maladies has yet to be definitively established, and that obesity itself is not a disease. In their view, it is inaccurate and unhelpful to stigmatize overweight people as inherently ill. Fat people, they point out, can be just as healthy as thin people, and diseases like hypertension can afflict anyone, regardless of weight. Obesity doctors see rejecting the disease framework as counterproductive. 'I don't think we should be using the argument that we don't know the etiology of obesity to say that it's not a disease," said Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. 'We have incredibly good data showing that excess fat tissue causes inflammation, heart disease and diabetes." She bristles at efforts to claim that obesity doesn't raise the risk for complications: 'that is simply not the case." Apovian acknowledged that some heavy people, including Sumo wrestlers and other athletes, are 'very healthy," but noted that 'the majority of people with high BMIs are not." In her practice, she said, patients cry happy tears and weep with relief when she explains that they have a disease, that a malfunction in their system is sending false signals around hunger and satiety. Deborah McPhail, a medical sociologist at the University of Manitoba, understands that sense of relief. 'We as individuals internalize this notion that we have failed ourselves, our family, our society, our public healthcare system because we have 'allowed' ourselves to become a certain weight and therefore a burden," she said. 'To be told, 'This is beyond you, you don't have control over it' is really important for people to hear." Activists believe that some of the health problems afflicting the overweight are products of a biased healthcare system that treats their bodies as problems in themselves. 'The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the time, fat people don't get the care they need, which can result in healthcare disparities," said Ani Janzen, operations and project leader at the Association for Size Diversity in Health, one of several organizations that address fat bias in medicine. 'It's an awful Catch-22 because those disparities are then used to enforce the idea that larger people are in worse health than people are in smaller bodies." Pamela Mejia, a researcher who conducted a study on fat bias in the media for NAAFA, is familiar with this prejudice. 'I have a doctor who is convinced that everything that happens to me, from a sprained ankle to a migraine, would be helped if I lost weight," she said. 'Once I fell and bruised myself hiking and the doctors said, 'It would be better if you lose weight.' I just fell off a mountain! Does he think the mountain attacked me because I'm fat?" Nearly every fat activist has similar nightmare stories. Tigress Osborn recalls being pressured to have weight-loss surgery before undergoing a medically necessary hysterectomy. Then there are the smaller but repeated indignities confronted during routine medical visits. The absence of larger chairs in the waiting room. Hospital robes that won't fully cover their naked bodies. Equipment ranging from blood-pressure cuffs to MRI machines that cannot accommodate them. Orthopedic surgeons who refuse to do knee or hip replacements because they believe it will be too complicated or that body weight will compromise recovery. Doctors who immediately assume the reason for any visit is to lose weight and if that's not why they're there, well, it should be. No wonder overweight and obese people avoid or delay healthcare services, a fact backed by multiple studies. Either they are embarrassed by their weight or want to avoid being lectured about it. They put off cancer screenings and other tests, which some believe contribute to higher mortality rates among overweight people. Obesity doctors concede that the medical profession has a long way to go in how it approaches excess weight. Not only are more specialists needed, but doctors across the field need to be better trained. Apovian described an obese man in his 60s who couldn't move his legs, and a doctor had written on his chart, 'Patient didn't want to move his legs." By the time doctors realized the patient had an abscess blocking his spinal cord, he was paralyzed. In 2022, when leading U.S. organizations dedicated to obesity medicine gathered to discuss treatment and prevention, their consensus statement acknowledged that 'Bias and stigmatization directed at people with obesity contributes to poor health and impairs treatment." Fat studies, an interdisciplinary field that arose in the 1990s, focuses on what it calls 'weight-based oppression" and those who benefit from it. It criticizes the weight-loss industry for repeatedly selling quick fixes that help perpetuate weight cycling in a drive for profit. Fen-Phen, a 1990s diet drug that was recalled after it was shown to cause life-threatening heart problems, serves as a cautionary tale. Like ethnic studies and queer studies, fat studies was inspired by activism and organized around identity, incorporating aspects of social sciences, the arts and the humanities. In the language of fat studies, to 'fatten" an issue means to examine it through the lens of the fat justice movement. Scholars are now 'fattening" GLP-1s. One fear is an increased pressure to lose weight and a demonization of those who don't, despite the fact that GLP-1s are ineffective in 10-15% of patients. Even when successful, the drugs tend to yield a weight loss of 5% to 20%, which won't transform someone who weighs 350 pounds into a thin person. Much of the work of fat studies scholars focuses on stigma, building on 20th-century sociologist Erving Goffman's pioneering theory that stigmas around 'guilty" traits like obesity result in stronger biases than ones that are 'not your fault," such as schizophrenia. A general awareness of unconscious biases has grown in recent years, but body size remains an outlier. Research has shown that weight discrimination is nearly as common as race discrimination, and stronger against women than men. 'The most pressing issue to me is how amazingly negative and gratuitous the negative stereotypes are against fat people and all the daily ways in which this bias is made clear," Esther Rothblum, a professor emerita of psychology at San Diego State University and former editor of Fat Studies, an academic journal, told me. 'People say things about fat people that they would never say about black or elderly or gay people. It's very hard to be a member of any oppressed group in society but when it comes to fatness, people don't even see a problem with their prejudice." Of course, fat activists, like all identity campaigners, don't speak for everyone they aim to represent. Many overweight people find the movement's preferred word, 'fat," shaming. Plenty still want to escape what they see as an emotional and medical burden. Tommy Tomlinson, author of the 2019 memoir 'The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America," has lost 58 pounds since he began taking GLP-1s last year. For him, the change has been more than physical. 'The constant food noise in my head, always thinking about the next meal, looking up the menu for the place you're going to that night—all that has disappeared," he told me. 'It's an incredibly transformative thing in my life." Tomlinson described a conversation he once had with Lee Kaplan, an obesity doctor and pioneer in the field. Kaplan asked Tomlinson if after being on the drugs for a while, he believed there was a chemical component to losing weight. Tomlinson said he did. Could this also mean, Kaplan asked, that something chemical in his body made Tomlinson gain all that weight in the first place? 'I hadn't thought about it in those clear and direct terms before," Tomlinson recalled. 'It was shattering in a way but also comforting. To be told, 'It's not your fault.'" The fracas over whether a slimmed down Lizzo or Kelly Clarkson has betrayed the body positivity movement may garner more attention, but activists readily acknowledge that these drugs offer real relief to some people. The more important point, they maintain, is that regardless of the successes GLP-1s bring to any one individual, the larger problem of how fatness is handled socially, medically and economically persists. 'My goal isn't to stop people from wanting to lose weight," Osborn of NAAFA told me. Instead, it's 'to reach more people with the knowledge that you don't have to beat yourself up over being in this body, that we can work toward creating a world where people can live freely in the bodies they are in." That kind of message, she says, 'offers that same sense of relief—but delivers it to everyone."
Hindustan Times
6 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Weight-Loss Drugs Have a Surprising Foe: Fat Activists
In the world of fat activism, the 'O-words'—overweight and obesity—are expressly verboten. That's because advocates and 'fat studies' scholars want to destigmatize and accommodate fatness—their preferred term—and push back against the view that overweight or obese people are somehow abnormal or diseased. Now a third problematic O-word has emerged: Ozempic. From the perspective of these activists and scholars, the hype around GLP-1 agonists, for which Ozempic has become the catchall term, only dials up the pressure to lose weight. It's one thing for an obese person to refuse to undergo bariatric surgery, which involves hospitalization, complications and a significant recovery. But to resist a weekly home injection? That can really test peoples' sympathy. 'Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,' said Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), an advocacy group founded in 1969. 'It's created an even louder public narrative that you could just solve all your problems by taking this magical drug, and if you don't take it, well then, you deserve what you get.' 'Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,' said Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, pictured in July. These concerns contrast sharply with the latest thinking in obesity medicine, which views reframing obesity as a disease—which the American Medical Association did in 2013—as a crucial step toward destigmatization. For doctors, GLP-1s such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro are breakthrough tools for addressing obesity, which increases the risk of developing other serious conditions, including type-2 diabetes and heart disease. 'We are not prosecuting people for having obesity,' said Louis Aronne, one of the founders of obesity medicine as a subspecialty and the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. 'We look at treating obesity as central to helping with all their other health problems.' Patients who lose weight with GLP-1s regularly see their health markers for prediabetes and hypertension improve. They often suffer less from sleep apnea, which allows them to feel better rested and elevates their mood. This can eliminate the need for antidepressants, which can themselves cause weight gain. Over the past 60 years, obesity rates have tripled in the U.S. due in part to more sedentary lifestyles and changes in diet, including more calorie-dense ultraprocessed foods. 'Obesity experts have been trying to overcome these challenges for decades and give people better lives, and we finally feel like we're really getting somewhere,' Aronne said. The advent and ubiquity of GLP-1 drugs may mark a turning point for the treatment of obesity, but they have also widened a chasm between activists and academics and much of the rest of the world, including medical specialists. One side believes it can help people overcome obesity; the other wants to shift the focus from changing their bodies to helping them live in them. 'People think that if everyone can just take this expensive, dangerous drug, we can get rid of fat people,' said Marilyn Wann, 58, a longtime fat activist in the Bay Area, who like many activists is suspicious of GLP-1s' possible long-term side effects. 'These drugs are going through the same excitement-and-disappointment cycle we've seen with every method of intentional weight loss. It just creates more work for fat activists.' Obesity's toll Certain facts are indisputable. Four in 10 adults in the U.S. have a body-mass index or BMI over 30. The financial costs are significant. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently estimated that obesity is associated with approximately $385 billion in health spending in 2024. According to a recent paper in JAMA, employees with obesity have seven times the medical claims costs and 11 times the indemnity claims costs of those with a healthy weight. They file twice as many worker compensation claims. These costs correspond with obesity's significant health consequences, which include osteoarthritis, hyperlipidemia and other chronic diseases. Obesity-related complications include incontinence, asthma, psoriasis, reflux and kidney disease. According to a 2023 paper in the journal Nature, roughly 8% of all medical expenditures in the U.S. are associated with the treatment of obesity. Weight loss expenditures are similarly outsized. According to Grand View Research, the weight loss industry was $142.58 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $298.66 billion by 2030. UBS estimates the GLP-1 market alone will grow to $126 billion in sales by 2029. Other aspects of obesity are less well understood. While there's a consensus that genetics, environment, insulin and other hormones play a role, no one quite knows how, or why some people become obese in the first place while others don't. Dr. Caroline Apovian, with patient Natasha Monahan at the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said she often sees patients weep with relief when she explains that obesity is a disease. Fat activists and scholars argue that a causal relationship between obesity and its associated maladies has yet to be definitively established, and that obesity itself is not a disease. In their view, it is inaccurate and unhelpful to stigmatize overweight people as inherently ill. Fat people, they point out, can be just as healthy as thin people, and diseases like hypertension can afflict anyone, regardless of weight. Obesity doctors see rejecting the disease framework as counterproductive. 'I don't think we should be using the argument that we don't know the etiology of obesity to say that it's not a disease,' said Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. 'We have incredibly good data showing that excess fat tissue causes inflammation, heart disease and diabetes.' She bristles at efforts to claim that obesity doesn't raise the risk for complications: 'that is simply not the case.' Apovian acknowledged that some heavy people, including Sumo wrestlers and other athletes, are 'very healthy,' but noted that 'the majority of people with high BMIs are not.' In her practice, she said, patients cry happy tears and weep with relief when she explains that they have a disease, that a malfunction in their system is sending false signals around hunger and satiety. Deborah McPhail, a medical sociologist at the University of Manitoba, understands that sense of relief. 'We as individuals internalize this notion that we have failed ourselves, our family, our society, our public healthcare system because we have 'allowed' ourselves to become a certain weight and therefore a burden,' she said. 'To be told, 'This is beyond you, you don't have control over it' is really important for people to hear.' Activists believe that some of the health problems afflicting the overweight are products of a biased healthcare system that treats their bodies as problems in themselves. 'The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the time, fat people don't get the care they need, which can result in healthcare disparities,' said Ani Janzen, operations and project leader at the Association for Size Diversity in Health, one of several organizations that address fat bias in medicine. 'It's an awful Catch-22 because those disparities are then used to enforce the idea that larger people are in worse health than people are in smaller bodies.' Four in 10 adults in the U.S. have a body-mass index or BMI over 30. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently estimated that obesity is associated with approximately $385 billion in health spending in 2024. Pamela Mejia, a researcher who conducted a study on fat bias in the media for NAAFA, is familiar with this prejudice. 'I have a doctor who is convinced that everything that happens to me, from a sprained ankle to a migraine, would be helped if I lost weight,' she said. 'Once I fell and bruised myself hiking and the doctors said, 'It would be better if you lose weight.' I just fell off a mountain! Does he think the mountain attacked me because I'm fat?' Nearly every fat activist has similar nightmare stories. Tigress Osborn recalls being pressured to have weight-loss surgery before undergoing a medically necessary hysterectomy. Then there are the smaller but repeated indignities confronted during routine medical visits. The absence of larger chairs in the waiting room. Hospital robes that won't fully cover their naked bodies. Equipment ranging from blood-pressure cuffs to MRI machines that cannot accommodate them. Orthopedic surgeons who refuse to do knee or hip replacements because they believe it will be too complicated or that body weight will compromise recovery. Doctors who immediately assume the reason for any visit is to lose weight and if that's not why they're there, well, it should be. No wonder overweight and obese people avoid or delay healthcare services, a fact backed by multiple studies. Either they are embarrassed by their weight or want to avoid being lectured about it. They put off cancer screenings and other tests, which some believe contribute to higher mortality rates among overweight people. Obesity doctors concede that the medical profession has a long way to go in how it approaches excess weight. Not only are more specialists needed, but doctors across the field need to be better trained. Apovian described an obese man in his 60s who couldn't move his legs, and a doctor had written on his chart, 'Patient didn't want to move his legs.' By the time doctors realized the patient had an abscess blocking his spinal cord, he was paralyzed. In 2022, when leading U.S. organizations dedicated to obesity medicine gathered to discuss treatment and prevention, their consensus statement acknowledged that 'Bias and stigmatization directed at people with obesity contributes to poor health and impairs treatment.' Losses and gains Fat studies, an interdisciplinary field that arose in the 1990s, focuses on what it calls 'weight-based oppression' and those who benefit from it. It criticizes the weight-loss industry for repeatedly selling quick fixes that help perpetuate weight cycling in a drive for profit. Fen-Phen, a 1990s diet drug that was recalled after it was shown to cause life-threatening heart problems, serves as a cautionary tale. Like ethnic studies and queer studies, fat studies was inspired by activism and organized around identity, incorporating aspects of social sciences, the arts and the humanities. In the language of fat studies, to 'fatten' an issue means to examine it through the lens of the fat justice movement. Scholars are now 'fattening' GLP-1s. One fear is an increased pressure to lose weight and a demonization of those who don't, despite the fact that GLP-1s are ineffective in 10-15% of patients. Even when successful, the drugs tend to yield a weight loss of 5% to 20%, which won't transform someone who weighs 350 pounds into a thin person. Much of the work of fat studies scholars focuses on stigma, building on 20th-century sociologist Erving Goffman's pioneering theory that stigmas around 'guilty' traits like obesity result in stronger biases than ones that are 'not your fault,' such as schizophrenia. A general awareness of unconscious biases has grown in recent years, but body size remains an outlier. Research has shown that weight discrimination is nearly as common as race discrimination, and stronger against women than men. 'The most pressing issue to me is how amazingly negative and gratuitous the negative stereotypes are against fat people and all the daily ways in which this bias is made clear,' Esther Rothblum, a professor emerita of psychology at San Diego State University and former editor of Fat Studies, an academic journal, told me. 'People say things about fat people that they would never say about black or elderly or gay people. It's very hard to be a member of any oppressed group in society but when it comes to fatness, people don't even see a problem with their prejudice.' Of course, fat activists, like all identity campaigners, don't speak for everyone they aim to represent. Many overweight people find the movement's preferred word, 'fat,' shaming. Plenty still want to escape what they see as an emotional and medical burden. For Tommy Tomlinson, pictured in 2018, taking GLP-1s has proven 'transformative' in how he views food and weight. Tommy Tomlinson, author of the 2019 memoir 'The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America,' has lost 58 pounds since he began taking GLP-1s last year. For him, the change has been more than physical. 'The constant food noise in my head, always thinking about the next meal, looking up the menu for the place you're going to that night—all that has disappeared,' he told me. 'It's an incredibly transformative thing in my life.' Tomlinson described a conversation he once had with Lee Kaplan, an obesity doctor and pioneer in the field. Kaplan asked Tomlinson if after being on the drugs for a while, he believed there was a chemical component to losing weight. Tomlinson said he did. Could this also mean, Kaplan asked, that something chemical in his body made Tomlinson gain all that weight in the first place? 'I hadn't thought about it in those clear and direct terms before,' Tomlinson recalled. 'It was shattering in a way but also comforting. To be told, 'It's not your fault.'' The fracas over whether a slimmed down Lizzo or Kelly Clarkson has betrayed the body positivity movement may garner more attention, but activists readily acknowledge that these drugs offer real relief to some people. The more important point, they maintain, is that regardless of the successes GLP-1s bring to any one individual, the larger problem of how fatness is handled socially, medically and economically persists. 'My goal isn't to stop people from wanting to lose weight,' Osborn of NAAFA told me. Instead, it's 'to reach more people with the knowledge that you don't have to beat yourself up over being in this body, that we can work toward creating a world where people can live freely in the bodies they are in.' That kind of message, she says, 'offers that same sense of relief—but delivers it to everyone.' Weight-Loss Drugs Have a Surprising Foe: Fat Activists Weight-Loss Drugs Have a Surprising Foe: Fat Activists Weight-Loss Drugs Have a Surprising Foe: Fat Activists
The Print
a day ago
- The Print
‘Must take proactive steps'—PM Modi reiterates concern over obesity crisis in I-Day address
Modi reinforced his previous recommendations to address this, urging families to purchase 10 percent less cooking oil, and reduce its consumption by the same margin on a regular basis. 'When discussing fitness, I am compelled to raise an important concern. Obesity is becoming a significant challenge that every family should take seriously. We must take proactive steps to protect ourselves from it,' the prime minister said. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has once again raised concerns about the issue of obesity, stressing on the need for collective action to tackle the crisis. In his address at Red Fort in Delhi on the occasion of the 79th Independence Day, Modi highlighted expert forecasts indicating that one in every three individuals in the country could become obese in near future. A 2023 survey by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF) had shown that 25.4 crore Indians or 28.6 percent of the population had generalised obesity. This survey had estimated the number of people with abdominal obesity at 351 million, or 39.5 percent of the population. The ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition, in its dietary guidelines last year, had noted that there is rising prevalence of overweight and obesity in several states, adding that 56.4 percent of India's total disease burden is due to unhealthy diets with a major focus on carbohydrates. Obesity, now recognised as a chronic, relapsing disease, is a major risk factor for diabetes, and is found to be linked to over 200 health complications, including hypertension, dyslipidemia or high blood cholesterol, coronary heart disease, some types of cancers and obstructive sleep apnea, among others. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines overweight and obesity in adults using body mass index. Those with a BMI between 25 and 30 kilograms per square metre are considered overweight, while people with a BMI of more than 30 kilograms per square metre are classified as obese. However, according to experts, India has a larger problem of abdominal obesity, characterised by fat deposition around crucial internal organs, but comparatively thinner limbs, which throws its own set of challenges. The growing obesity crisis has prompted Modi, on several occasions this year, to make a pitch for efforts to curb the epidemic. In his monthly radio broadcast in February, he had first called on people to reduce the use of cooking oils commonly found in unhealthy food. He had also previously urged people to adopt an active and healthy lifestyle in order to prevent obesity. This year, India saw the launch of two drugs—Wegovy by Novo Nordisk and Mounjaro by Eli Lilly and Company—that have been global smash hits for years for obesity treatment exclusively. (Edited by Mannat Chugh) Also Read: 82.5 mn Indians were 'obese' in 2022, shows Lancet study. Doctors, nutritionists say 'tip of iceberg'
