Latest news with #appetitesuppressant
Times
15-05-2025
- Health
- Times
Half puds? Tiny plates? How Ozempic has changed restaurant menus
The other week, I suffered a minor bout of food poisoning — nothing too serious, but certainly enough to dent my usual enthusiasm for eating. It was unfortunate timing because, that evening, I was due to sit down to a ten-course tasting menu cooked by a celebrated chef and it was not something I felt I could duck out of. So I put on a brave face, took a tiny forkful of each dish and sent the rest back to the kitchen largely uneaten. This is going to be awkward, I thought, expecting the chef, or waiter at least, to ask if everything had been all right. But no. Silence. They took away the plates without a murmur, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to spend £250 on dinner and barely touch a morsel. 'It's obvious, isn't it?' my wife said as we left. 'They just assumed you are on Ozempic.' Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro — however we know the new class of GLP-1 appetite-suppressing drugs, they are already changing our relationship with food, and with ministers exploring how they can be accessed more widely, their influence is only going to grow. First to feel the pinch? Restaurants, which have already noticed the subtle effects on their bottom line. Chefs are having to reconsider their menus and diners are trying to establish the new codes of etiquette that their reduced appetites require. • Ozempic seems like a miracle drug. But what's it doing to our brains? The restaurateur Jonathan Downey, who has just opened Town restaurant on Drury Lane in central London with the chef Stevie Parle, says that they 'absolutely design dishes specifically for the Mounjaro generation'. The common complaint among restaurateurs is that no one orders pudding any more, so they have their 'skinny slice puddings' such as half-sized portions of chocolate tart, single scoop servings of sorbet and individual spiced doughnuts. More tellingly, they have made main courses available in smaller portions. 'When you are taking Mounjaro it's important to maintain muscle mass, so the focus is on getting enough protein even when your appetite is reduced,' Downey says. 'It used just to be gym bunnies who were obsessed with that, but now it's middle-aged mums and dad-bod men too.' At Town they serve a butterflied sea bass just with lemon, oil and salt, available as a whole or half fish, and 200g steaks as opposed to a more regular-sized 350g one. Cynics might say it's a way of reducing portion size to keep prices down, but Downey says not. 'It sits with the times. We thought we were just giving people more options, but it turns out to be part of the zeitgeist. You have to give people what they want.' What the Ozempic diner really, really wants, though, is the chance to eat less without signposting it to one and all. Hence the return of the small sharing plate. These were popular before, of course, but after the pandemic they were disappearing in favour of longer, no-choice set menus as restaurateurs tried to push up the average spend. Now it's a brave restaurant that forces so much food on a customer. Even the smaller steaks and pork chops at Town arrive at the table already sliced to make sharing easier, and a dish of five asparagus spears draped with slices of lardo was quickly reconfigured, Downey says, to have each spear individually wrapped 'so people could divide it up more easily'. • Ozempic jabs could soon be eclipsed by first weight-loss pill The Times critic Giles Coren has quickly seen the effects. 'It used just to be rich women who never ate anything in restaurants, but now it's all the men too,' he says. 'I met a friend the other day and he was looking a bit gaunt, and I asked if he was on Ozempic and he just laughed and said, 'Of course I bloody am.' Absolutely everyone I know is. 'I love a sharing plate, because it means you can spread yourself across more of the menu,' he adds, 'but the whole point is that you get lots of them. And as soon as you start ordering, your Ozempic mates go, 'Stop, stop, I can't possibly eat all that.' And I'm thinking, but I've only ordered some ham and half a dozen clams. That's going to make for a hell of a boring review.' At least he knows where he stands when his companion is upfront about it. Much more irritating are those people who try to hide their Ozempic habit in plain sight. 'I've got friends who, for whatever reason, don't want to admit they are taking the jab,' says another regular restaurant-goer. 'So they order loads of sharing plates to make a big show of how hungry they are and then push a salad around their plate and hope that someone else will do the heavy lifting. The trouble is, half the table are probably secretly in the same position and you just end up ordering way too much food, and it all goes to waste.' Gareth Birchley, buying director at Burns & German Vintners, who took Ozempic for six months last year, takes the view that honesty is the best way. 'People can be very cagey about it, but I think it's best to be open with your friends and the restaurant,' he says. He spends much of his time eating out with clients and hates the idea of spoiling his relationship with some of the country's best chefs. He recalls a low point in the private dining room of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Hélène Darroze at the Connaught. 'It was kind of embarrassing only being able to eat one mouthful of each course, but at least because I had been honest about the reason it made it less awkward.' In the end he came off the drug when his weight plateaued. 'I wasn't losing more weight, I wasn't having much fun and I was shelling out £400 a month. It wasn't a hard decision to make.' Luckily for his line of work, he didn't feel sick drinking alcohol, which is a side-effect for many, but it did curb his intake. 'The obvious factor is that if you are not consuming so much food, you can't drink as much.' This is another headache that badly hits restaurants' margins. • How to control your appetite without Ozempic 'Last year the typical restaurant revenue split between food and drink was 55:45, but now it's more like 60:40,' Downey says. 'We know people aren't drinking so much.' He has countered this by offering more wines by the glass and carafe and introducing a range of smaller-serve cocktails, such as half-measure martinis. He has also introduced a new category called 'chargers', served in small glasses as aperitifs. The restaurateur Jeremy King has introduced something similar at the Park, in Queensway, with his small-serve 'sharpeners'. For the time being, GLP-1s are a rich person's drug, so it is only the more upmarket restaurants that are noticing the changes. However, as the drug becomes more widely used, as it inevitably will, it's going to be the mid-market chains and fast food shops that will be next in the firing line. Anyone fancy going halves on a Chicken McNugget?
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
I've seen a friend fall off the Wegovy wagon – it isn't pretty
A dear friend dropped by Woods Towers last weekend and what I witnessed in my kitchen was nothing short of terrifying. The woman who had barely allowed so much as a Hobnob to pass her lips this entire year had suddenly morphed into The Tiger Who Came to Tea, breakfast, dinner and the rest. To explain, Genevieve (not her real name) is one of those high fliers who's busy and buzzy and seldom alights anywhere for long. Late-night takeaways and shop-bought sandwiches are not the best for healthy living, and in recent years her weight had crept inexorably upwards to the point where she felt in genuine despair. 'Fat jabs' such as Wegovy and Mounjaro were like (low-calorie) manna from heaven, and since January she's been on Wegovy, prescribed by her private GP. Wegovy and Mounjaro are given as weekly injections via pre-filled pens that can be self-administered into the upper arm, thigh or stomach. They work as an appetite suppressant by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), an intestinal hormone that is released after eating, and typically makes people feel fuller. Not a shy dieter by any means, Genevieve is upfront – evangelical even – with her social circle about the difference it has made. The 'food noise' has been silenced; her energy levels have risen; even her joints ache less. I have found myself getting quite envious, truth be told, even though I'm not a realistic candidate for something so drastic. Slow and steady works fine for my metabolism – although it's shocking how a few days of overindulgence immediately shows. Anyway, Genevieve, who is in her early 50s, never goes near the scales interestingly. When her doctor records her weight loss every month, she looks away. 'Proof that I do, actually, have some willpower,' she laughs. Instead, she measures her progress by her waistband and the reflection in her full-length mirror. And she looks amazing, no doubt about it; younger, sleeker, slimmer. Her clothes hang better and she radiates a sort of bien dans sa peau confidence. But on Friday evening, when she swung by ostensibly for a (small) glass of wine and some nibbles, she transformed into a sort of demented wolverine. She demolished the crisps, reached for the nuts, then, when I invited her to stay for supper, hoovered up pasta bake and made short shrift of the leftover bread and butter pudding (a variation on Nigella's deluxe version made with brioche; the fruit marinated in Grand Marnier). I had to say something. She was clearly relishing food for the first time in five months, but there was an edge of mania to her hunger. What on earth was going on? 'I was travelling for work and then I took a few days' leave, but I forgot my Wegovy pen so I missed my injection,' she admitted. 'It's been 10 days and now I feel ravenous, all the time. It's like my body is insisting I cram as much food as I can into it so I can get back to my old weight. The rebound effect is both horrible – and fascinating.' Later that evening she would be clambering back on the Wegovy wagon so she was able to intellectualise the (temporary) fixation on food and wasn't unduly concerned. But we both agreed it was a troubling insight into the way weight-loss injections function – they might dramatically alter your eating habits while you're on them, but after that you're effectively back to square one. That's why reputable clinicians are trying very hard to impress upon people the work they need to do while the drugs manage their appetite. Unless you alter your lifestyle by taking exercise, choosing healthy options when you do eat, and, perhaps most important of all, addressing the reasons why you over-consumed snacks or carbs or burgers in the first place (boredom, stress, an addiction to ultra-processed foods) you are unlikely to maintain your weight loss. Just this week WeightWatchers, which is based in the US, revealed it is filing for bankruptcy, having fallen victim to the fat jab quick fix. But as more of the population on both sides of the Atlantic start taking these medications – under current government plans they will eventually be offered at pharmacies for the £9.90 cost of an NHS prescription – the long-term consequences need to be scrutinised. Unless we accept that, like statins, users will need to be on semaglutide forever and they have indeed been developed as a lifelong medication, there will have to be a massive public health push to build better eating habits when people stop taking them. A report by CNN last November revealed that one in eight adults in the US had used a weight-loss drug. But an analysis of US pharmacy data show that only one in four patients was still taking them two years later – and although no details were given about the reasons for quitting, it is worth remembering that, unlike Britain, the US healthcare system is based on insurance policies. Other studies in the US show that most people who come off Wegovy regain almost all the weight they shed, although crucially there's around a 5 per cent permanent loss, which does have a positive effect in continuing to ward off prediabetes but does little for morale. I have a hunch that here in the UK we will be crying out for the sort of habit-changing programmes offered by WeightWatchers and others, those systems that support healthy lifestyles and promote discipline – but it may be too late if they all go belly-up. As my friend Genevieve conceded: '.'
