11 hours ago
Fat jabs are changing the world. It's time to embrace them
At a recent business conference in London (Chatham House rules apply, so I have to keep it vague), an executive from a major American clothes retailer dropped this extraordinary statistic: the average item of women's clothing sold by her company in the US has gone down by a size in the past year.
Just one year! The nation that practically invented obesity, and then exported it around the world, is now shrinking so fast that clothing companies can't keep up. Retailers which based their manufacturing orders on 2024 sizes stand to lose millions in unsold stock.
I used to think the idea of solving the obesity crisis through drugs was borderline dystopian. It's the modern food system that has made us fat, after all: the sheer abundance of cheap, sugary, mass-produced junk that has flooded the consumer landscape, and which our hungry caveman appetites are predisposed to crave. Shouldn't we be trying to fix the broken system, rather than medicalising its victims?
For decades, politicians and food companies have prevaricated, mumbling about personal responsibility and the importance of willpower, while a tidal wave of sickness rolled in. Diet-related disease now costs the UK around £98 billion a year – almost twice the current defence budget – in NHS treatments, lost productivity and welfare costs.
Appetite-suppressing drugs seemed, at first, like an admission of defeat: we can't work out how to improve the food system, so you'll just have to inject your way out of it. But now it seems the drugs themselves might be about to fix the system, from the bottom up.
Within the space of four years, a fifth of American adults have been prescribed GLP-1 medications. (In the UK, the figure is around one in ten, although we are catching up fast.) This is a long way off market saturation, given that three quarters of Americans are overweight, but enough to create significant changes in consumer behaviour.
A study by Cornell University has found that in US households where one person is on GLP-1 drugs, spending on snacks fell by between 6.7 and 11.1 per cent. If that doesn't sound like much, remember, this is the weekly shop for the entire household, not just the person on the jabs. Savoury snacks and sweet baked goods saw the biggest reductions, while spending on yoghurt, fresh meat and fruit and veg ticked upwards.
In other words, the profits are on the move. Sales of snacks and ultra-processed foods will keep falling as the drugs become cheaper and more widely available. Within families, this may have unforeseen benefits. Children who grow up eating healthily are likely to maintain good habits into adulthood. It's not impossible, as one economist suggested to me, that this first wave of GLP-1 prescriptions will transform the food landscape so dramatically that our children's generation will no longer need drugs to survive it.
Junk food manufacturers have always defended their business model on the grounds that they are merely giving consumers what they want. They may now find themselves at the sharp end of that argument.
It turns out that consumers don't actually want to be fat and ill. We have been caught in a toxic feedback loop between our evolved appetites and the profitability of cheap, ultra-processed food. GLP-1 drugs have, for the first time, given us a tool strong enough to jemmy open that trap.
