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Losing weight is mental as much as it is physical, and the biggest hurdle for most people is having the discipline and perseverance to make the necessary lifestyle changes. But now, with the single weekly injection, anyone can drop weight without having to change what they eat or how they live. With seemingly minimal side effects and a never-ending impressive before-after testimonials, weight-loss drugs with names like Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have become all the rage. Despite costing up to $1,000 a month, people can't get enough, whether that's the diabetic, the Hollywood elite, or the average Joes and Janes. These days, it's the only thing hotter than AI. The hype is not for one brand or one
manufacturer, but rather this entire class of drugs. Weight-loss medications are also known as glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs, or GLP-1 for short. The simplest scientific explanation is that these drugs mimic a natural hormone that occurs in your gut, and it stimulates your pancreas to produce more insulin, which in turn affects your brain signals on appetite and hunger. When you're on these drugs, food moves slower through your digestive system, so you feel satiated with less volume and for longer. The application of these drugs go beyond the medically obese and body conscious. Obesity is recognized as the precursor to more lethal chronic diseases, and it cripples economies just
as much as societies. If a population is getting sicker and spending more time in hospitals than at work, it's a blow to productivity and public health just as much as it is to taxes and GDP. The potential here is so massive that many speculate that obesity medication will be more lucrative than any other class of drug, even cancer. Big Pharma is pounding the drum that obesity is a disease, not a cosmetic condition, and if the insurance companies and world governments can agree with them on that, a market of trillions of dollars is truly possible. Instead of talking about side effects and risks, they frame the conversation to be about how these weight-loss drugs have cured food addiction, and how they can be the
gateway to curing other forms of addiction, like gambling and substance abuse. This promise has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the market cap of leading pharmaceuticals in the past few years. Just like how tech startups have hitched their wagon to AI, drug manufacturers have hitched their valuations on obesity. But despite their altruistic mission statements, pharmaceutical companies through history have demonstrated that they're not to be trusted. As the opioid epidemic showed, if you give pharmaceuticals an inch, they'll take a mile. In their world, drugs are the hammer and everything is a nail. Their only goal is to get as many people on as many drugs at as high of a
dose and frequency as possible to keep profits up. If Big Pharma succeeds in classifying obesity as a disease, just like OxyContin once classified pain as a disease, they would be able to monetize the greatest patient pool in the world. As the testimonials have continued, the world has also forgotten that the manufacturers of these weight-loss drugs are the same exact companies who endangered millions and killed thousands of Americans over decades with insulin price gouging. In this episode, we're diving into the dirty business of Big Pharma and weight-loss drugs from the perspective of the two biggest players, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. To grasp the commercial potential of weight-loss drugs, we have to first
understand that the pharmaceutical industry is a feast or famine system that's ruled by incentives. You either win big or you lose, and there's not much room in between. To make the most money, you need to create the most critical, life-saving drugs for the most lethal chronic diseases. It's more profitable to sell cancer and diabetes medication that patients need to continuously take to stay alive than it is to sell one-and-done antidotes and vaccines. And that earnings delta can be seen when looking at sales by drug class. When we look at the best-selling drugs in history and we exclude the COVID vaccines and weight-loss drugs, they're all frequent-use drugs that
fight against cancer, stroke, heart attack, arthritis, or Crohn's disease, and must be taken once a day or every few weeks to be effective. These are all blockbuster drugs, meaning that they each generate over a billion dollars of sales per year and contribute a meaningful percentage of each manufacturer's annual business. The reason why these drugs in particular make so much money is because they're legalized monopolies protected by patents. Drug patents generally last for 20 years, and treatment is only available in this brand from this one manufacturer. When the patent finally expires, the monopoly ends as other manufacturers are now free to produce generics. The flood of supply means that prices come down as patients now get
alternatives, and generics are often substantially cheaper than brand-name drugs. There's a few nuances. Manufacturers typically get their patents while they're still in R&D, meaning that if the drug works, and by the time it's available on the market, there's only 10 or so years left on the patent. As their reward for inventing the drug in the first place, pharmaceuticals get not just market exclusivity, but also monopoly pricing. They can set any price they want, and they can also hike prices year after year. There's nothing anyone can do until the patent expires, short of government intervention. But no government wants to be involved as the entire pharmaceutical system hinges on
incentives. When patents expire, manufacturers instantly lose a significant chunk of their business, and the only way to restore profits is to keep innovating. Drug innovation is essential, but also so cost-prohibitive and risky that no government could ever fit the bill for. It costs on average a billion dollars and 10 to 15 years of R&D for a single successful drug. And throwing more money doesn't improve success as 90% of drugs still fail. There's many reasons for failure. The research doesn't go as expected, there's too many side effects, the FDA deems it unsafe, or the treatment is simply not effective enough. Only one out of every 10 drugs actually reach the market. This
is why there's always so many pharmaceutical penny stocks floating around that seek funding for research. They promise a real payout if the stars align, which is why these stocks always spike whenever there's news of promising trials or hints of regulatory approval. But they always generally plummet back down to lottery ticket territory as the odds of success remain low and the time horizons are too long for the average retail or institutional investor. It's feast or famine, and the industry is littered with the corpses of many well-funded startups. Getting approval can be just as complex as every country has its own agencies and standards. And the hurdles don't end when the drug
finally makes it to the market. The drug has to win over doctors on merit, and doctors have significantly higher standards than regulators. If the drug is not effective enough to be standard of care, doctors won't prescribe it, and if patients don't know about it, they won't ask their doctors to prescribe it. Just like how hundreds of millions of dollars are burnt in R&D, millions more have to be plowed into marketing, advertising, lobbying, and sales for any one drug to turn a profit post-launch. Science is unpredictable, and the winners by nature are so few. Drug manufacturers have to be incentivized to keep trying in the spite of the massive risk, low success rates, and capital
burn. When they do win, governments almost have to let them win big in order to encourage other manufacturers. Their message is simple. If you innovate, you'll be rewarded with a guaranteed monopoly and billions of dollars for a fixed period of time. And the only way to make more money in the future is to keep innovating. In this regard, drug innovation is better off privatized, where manufacturers of all sizes are all promised the same massive payday, and thus compete with each other to develop the fastest, most effective treatments for the world's deadliest diseases. No government could afford or replicate this pace of innovation off tax revenue alone. Living under a monopoly is harsh
for the current patients in the short term, but it's a net positive in the long run, as once the patent expires, the same treatment will be accessible and get cheaper for future generations. Under this system, drugs start off expensive, but then get more affordable and better over time, which is huge compared to not getting the drugs at all. This is why governments try not to get involved whenever manufacturers aggressively raise prices during their monopolies. Ultimately, the drug industry is a modern example of how the world is not black and white, and while no system is perfect, it's still one of the better ones today in the net
positive that it's created along the facets of shareholder wealth, drug innovation, and public health. Weight-loss drugs are a big deal because they've bucked all the levers of the American healthcare system. Americans consume and spend more money on drugs, legal and illegal, than any other country in the world. They're the most valuable market for both cartels and pharmaceuticals. But you can't buy most drugs over the counter, and doctors, by design, are gatekeepers. Pharmaceuticals spend millions every year wooing doctors through traveling salesmen, lavish dinners, free products, and all-expenses-paid trips. Courted doctors are more likely to recommend one manufacturer over the others and write prescriptions at higher doses, thereby
converting their patient bases one at a time into high-value customers for the pharmaceutical. To pressure doctors from the other end, pharmaceuticals blast the public with advertising every year with the same call to action, ask your doctor about this drug. But even if a pharmaceutical gets all of the doctors and patients on board, none of it matters much if the drug isn't covered by insurance. Pharmaceuticals move in lockstep with insurers, and both sides work together to maximize profits. Americans pay for drugs either out of pocket at list price or pay the discounted price that's been negotiated down by their health insurance. It's sometimes cheaper to pay out of pocket, but for patented brand names, the list prices are generally so high that
patients must go through insurance to afford treatment. Consumers will generally always prioritize the drugs covered under their insurance before going out of pocket. Because manufacturers want their drugs to be purchased by as many people and as frequently as possible, they're willing to give discounts to insurance companies in exchange for access to their members. Pharmaceuticals could force patients to pay the astronomical list prices out of pocket, but that would only shrink their total addressable market as only a slice of Americans could ever afford those rates. It's essential for manufacturers
to ensure their drugs are covered under as many insurance plans and carriers as possible, even if that means giving up a bit of margin. The US is the only developed country in the world without public healthcare and spends twice as much on it than anyone else. Yet Americans still die younger than Europeans and Asians. One reason behind the inefficiency of American healthcare is the middlemen that drive up costs in every transaction, and the same dynamic exists in drugs. Insurance companies don't negotiate drug prices with pharmaceuticals directly. Instead, drug prices are negotiated through third-party intermediaries called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs for short. PBMs negotiate drug prices on
behalf of the insurance companies, and manufacturers play ball because no drug gets covered by insurance by default. Insurance companies keep a running list of drugs that they cover. Every insurance plan has its own list, and these lists are typically hierarchical, where every drug is assigned to one tier. The lowest-tier drugs are often generics with the greatest discounts, and the highest-tier drugs are specialty patented brand names with the lowest discounts. Manufacturers want to find the sweet spot. They don't want their drug to be the cheapest unless it has to be, but they also don't want to be completely cost-prohibitive. Insurance companies tend to recommend the drugs
that are on the lower tier over those on the higher tiers, and patients do the same as they value the lower-tier drugs since they save more money. The profits are ultimately in frequent consumption and not one-time purchase. Hence, the placement of a drug on the list is just as critical to sales as it is to get on the list in the first place. As private middlemen, PBMs want their slice of the cake, too. They negotiate price, then take a cut of that discount for themselves, and finally pass on the remaining savings to the insured patients. Since PBMs negotiate every single drug, no rebate is the same. PBMs maximize their own profits by placing the drugs that they earn the biggest
cuts from in the more popular tiers just to push patients to buy those over others, thereby earning more profits for themselves. At the end of the day, PBMs, manufacturers, and insurance companies are all in cahoots to make the most money possible, with each party influencing the other to do what they want. Weight-loss drugs are the first-ever drug to break all these levers for better or worse. Thanks to the unprecedented virality, mainstream demand, and overwhelmingly positive sentiment, drug manufacturers for the first time ever hold all the cards. They don't need to burn as much money wooing doctors and educating the public since consumers are pressuring doctors for prescriptions on their own. People have
already convinced themselves that the benefits of these drugs outweigh the risks, that higher doses only means better results faster, and they eat up every bit of speculation with rose-colored glasses. Manufacturers now have the upper hand in negotiations. People want the drugs that we're selling, and if you, as the PBMs, don't cover our drugs at the prices we want, we'll make deals with your competition instead. It no longer matters as much where our drug is on your list because customers are asking for our drugs by name. And lack of coverage will only hurt you as an insurance company as your members will either downgrade or enroll with a different carrier that will give them what they want.
The biggest beneficiary to all this has been the American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, whose share price and market cap has gone up 11 times since 2019. Their experience and evolution over the past two decades have shaped their aggression and commercial prowess. While Eli Lilly is synonymous with weight-loss and diabetes medication today, the company 20 years ago was built on antipsychotics and oncology. Their business in the 2000s was carried by Zyprexa, a drug for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, and supplemental blockbusters like Gemzar, a chemotherapy drug, insulin for the diabetic and Humalog and Humulin, and Evista for bone-loss prevention. Out of their
entire portfolio, these five patented blockbusters contributed on average over half of annual revenue every year. There was also the antidepressant Cymbalta, which surpassed the billion dollars in sales just 3 years after launch, and Cialis for erectile dysfunction, which took 5 years to hit the same mark. Zyprexa was the biggest winner and earned up to 5 billion dollars every year, but that success was tainted when Eli Lilly was criminally convicted of downplaying the side effects and marketing the drug as dementia and Alzheimer's treatment without approval. Regardless, their blockbuster patents were expiring, and Eli Lilly needed new drugs to replace the future earnings loss. Zyprexa and Gemzar sales fell off
a cliff as soon as their patents expired in 2011, and the same happened with Cymbalta and Evista in 2014. The company believed that its latest diabetes drug, Byetta, would be that ace in the hole. It was the first-ever GLP-1 drug, the grandfather of this new class of weight-loss drugs. It stimulated the pancreas to release hormones just like Ozempic and Zepbound do today, but Byetta's primary use case back then was managing blood sugar levels for diabetics. Weight-loss was more of an observed, yet unintended bonus. It was the right direction, but wrong execution. Byetta had to be injected twice a day as its half-life was too short, which scared off most patients for a non-critical medication. Reports
of kidney failure, pancreas failure, pancreatic cancer, and even deaths on Byetta flowed in years after launch. The FDA had no choice but to slap on a black-label warning on the box, which scared off all future customers. When an independent investigation confirmed that patients on Byetta over 5 years were three times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer, the writing was on the wall. To prepare for the downturn, the company proactively broke up its monolithic business in pursuit of diversification. They ramped up R&D spend, went on a shopping spree buying up smaller labs and manufacturers, and focused on three core areas: diabetes, oncology, and animal health through the 2000s. Cancer was a safe bet as it was a
top three leading cause of death worldwide even 20 years ago. Diabetes was another high-value market with annual double-digit growth since the '90s. And animal medication was a hedge against human medication with less regulation, cheaper R&D, and shorter time to market. By the early 2010s, Eli Lilly had quadrupled the number of candidates that it had in its pipeline. Despite continuous billions in R&D, the company still could not avoid the top line and bottom line drop with patent expiration. Some drugs took longer than expected to reach blockbuster status like the cancer treatment Alimta, or didn't have enough to single-handedly replicate the commercial success of the prior decade. As the numbers went down,
Eli Lilly chose to double down on insulin. Insulin was the only medication in the portfolio where the patient pool would be simultaneously big enough and desperate enough to pay continuously for at any price. All the R&D had been done decades ago. The other blockbusters were limited in their scope and application. Cialis, for instance, was for bedroom performance, and Alimta addressed only lung cancer and was not a prerequisite for day-to-day function. And with cancer, there are many alternatives for treatment beyond chemo. In contrast, type 1 diabetics depend on insulin to survive, and it's a matter of when and not if for type 2 diabetics. As earnings went backwards in the early 2010s, Eli
Lilly started aggressively raising prices on insulin by thousands of dollars year after year. These price hikes were greater than even that of cancer drugs. Eli Lilly is one of the big three pharmaceuticals who produces 90% of the world's insulin. Unsurprisingly, when they raised their prices, so did their competition. People who depended on insulin had no choice but to pay these prices year after year across all brands. The only \{quote\} \{unquote\} cheap price was last year's. When the patent for Eli Lilly's primary insulin product Humalog expired in 2013, there should have been a flood of cheaper generics to bring costs down for all patients. But instead, Eli Lilly, in collusion with its rivals, used the
tried-and-true tactics of cash and corporate litigation to extend its monopoly. While drug patents expire after 20 years, manufacturers can get extensions if they make improvements and submit those in as secondary patents. There's no definition of what constitutes an improvement, and Big Pharma has learned to submit tens to hundreds of secondary junk patents to prolong their monopolies. Smaller manufacturers have the freedom to challenge these extensions in court or to try to navigate around the red tape, but given the cost of drug R&D, few, if any, startups are going to waste money on lawyers. It's a war of attrition that Big Pharma will always win. This is called patent thicketing, and it delays
competition regardless of whether or not the patent is officially extended. This is why even though the patent for Humalog officially expired in 2013, Eli Lilly's insulin oligopoly has lasted another full decade. And it's the same case for brand-name insulin products from other manufacturers. This practice is ultimately not unique to insulin. Big Pharma has done this for arthritis, painkillers, and cancer drugs. Monopolies get extended, prices go up, and billions flow in. By the mid-2010s, this strategy was paying off. As long as people continue to get diabetes, and if Eli Lilly could get more of these people hooked on their insulin products, they
could apply the playbook to reap greater monopolies and billions more than they had ever gotten from antipsychotics and antidepressants. The company's focus shifted from running horses in three different races to creating a portfolio of essential diabetes drugs. Even if patients weren't on insulin yet, they could still be monetized earlier in the life cycle. By 2016, Eli Lilly had launched Jardiance and Trulicity to manage blood sugar for type 2 diabetics. Trulicity was a new and improved GLP-1 drug from Byetta 10 years ago. It only needed to be injected once a week rather than twice a day. It stimulated the pancreas, but was engineered on a different strand of GLP-1. Byetta was first-generation exenatide, and
Trulicity was second-generation dulaglutide. It took Jardiance 4 years to surpass a billion dollars of sales in a single year, while Trulicity only needed three. Combined with the radical price hikes on insulin, Eli Lilly regained its footing on earnings and margins by the late 2010s as patients were now hooked on not just the daily insulin, but also the weekly GLP-1. The company had noticed signs of weight-loss in the clinical trials of Trulicity as early as 2015, but didn't think much of it. But by 2017, even the control patients were experiencing considerable weight-loss. Doctors had been prescribing insulin for decades as the first line of treatment for diabetes, but insulin is actually counterproductive in the sense that it
actually causes weight gain. There was increasing evidence that GLP-1s not only lowered blood sugar levels, but also guaranteed weight-loss. This made GLP-1s a far more promising first line of treatment for diabetics, and insulin in turn would become a last resort. Eli Lilly was concerned that their rivals would disrupt diabetes with a superior GLP product, that it would negate insulin demand and it would crush their three-decade-long cash cow. Obesity was the precursor and if Eli Lilly stood around while other pharmaceuticals cured the pre-diabetics, there wouldn't be many diabetics left in the future to sell insulin to. By 2018, Eli Lilly had ramped up investment in a third-generation GLP-1 even as they
raked in profits from the second-gen Trulicity. The other angle is that weight loss was the perfect exit to escape the political pressure that had been mounting on the company. Public outrage over insulin price hikes and patent ticketing had reached the ears of DC. Eli Lilly had become a named target of federal agencies, the White House, and politicians across both aisles. To avoid becoming a national punching bag during an election year, Eli Lilly proactively rolled back its monopoly by launching a cheaper generic in 2019 and has since been quickly settling the price gouging lawsuits as they come in to keep the attention on weight loss drugs. As a result, sales for Humalog
and Humulin have both been on a steady decline since 2019. By the early 2020s, Eli Lilly was deep into its third-gen GLP-1 called tirzepatide and unfazed by the expiring patents for Cialis and Alimta. As long as tirzepatide could achieve greater weight loss and blood sugar reduction than Trulicity, the R&D would be worthwhile. Tirzepatide was approved in 2023 and branded into Mounjaro specifically for diabetics and Zepbound for the obese. The weight loss benefit was indeed the difference-maker as Mounjaro has gone from just a half a billion dollars of sales in its first year to over five billion dollars in its second, which is more than the company ever grossed in a single year with its
insulin monopolies. To this day, insurance companies and Medicare still don't deem weight loss drugs as eligible for coverage. As a result, Zepbound sales have been slower out the gate given that the only patients buying them are paying a thousand dollars for a month's supply out of pocket. It's more probable that Americans are getting their weight loss fixed from Mounjaro, whether they're officially diabetic or not, as those prescriptions are cheaper and covered by insurance. Eli Lilly is already working on its fourth-generation GLP-1 where it hopes to get up to 25% weight loss, which would match conventional bariatric surgeries like gastric bypass and liposuction. There's
continued hype that this fourth-gen GLP-1 will have even more positive side effects like curing sleep apnea and migraines, which would only further improve the chances of future coverage from insurance and Medicare. And since the demand from consumers has eclipsed the supply of doctors willing to write prescriptions, Eli Lilly has taken matters into its own hands. It doesn't want to lose customers to its competitors as people are likely to stick to one brand rather than flip-flop between multiple. If you want these drugs, your fastest way today is to call Lilly Direct, their newest telehealth portal where a doctor will write your prescription if your regular doctor won't and you can buy the drugs directly
from the company to be shipped straight to your front door. Going direct to consumer and cutting out the doctor is a slippery slope that's only viable when you have a drug as viral as weight loss medication. While doctors and regulators work within the parameters of science and the Hippocratic oath, pharmaceuticals are loyal only to the dollar. Their greed hasn't changed. Insulin was the cash cow of the past decade and Eli Lilly is still figuring out how to best milk GLP-1s as their new golden goose.
Eli Lilly's biggest rival is the Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk. While the two companies colluded over the insulin price hikes as members of the insulin cartel, they were still fighting over who could take the biggest piece of pie for themselves. While Eli Lilly put as many irons in the fire as it could, Novo had lasered in on diabetes as early as the 2000s. The Danes found it obvious that the modern Western lifestyle with its high-fat, high-sugar foods and conveniences like televisions, computers, and cars to be the main culprit for declining health. In the 2000s, diabetes was not just appearing in the elderly, but also in working adults and children around the world as even developing countries pursued this
Western lifestyle for its own populations. Novo went all in on diabetes and developed entire suite of insulin products with varying durations and storage methods so that people could find the injectables that fit their comfort level and schedule. The business was built on selling as much insulin as possible and the company burned billions of dollars in pursuit of this final form. The only way to get insulin in your body is through needles. Novo and Eli Lilly have both tried over the years to downplay the stigma behind subcutaneous injections by bundling the needle and medication into preloaded pens. If someone could package insulin into tablets that could be swallowed like vitamins or breathed in with inhalants, it could potentially expand
the total addressable market and getting more people hooked on insulin faster and earlier was the most cost-effective way for Novo to grow. But when the oral and nasal insulin ventures failed, Novo pivoted. They had seen Eli Lilly's launch of Byetta in the mid-2000s. While Byetta struggled, Novo saw potential. In 2009, at the peak of Byetta's controversies, Novo released their own GLP-1 drug liraglutide and studied its weight loss performance post-launch. Trial subjects had lost 5 to 7% of their body weight after a year on liraglutide, which gave Novo all the ammunition it needed to differentiate the drug in its pitches to doctors and diabetics alike.
Liraglutide was branded as Victoza and pitched for lowering blood sugar as well as losing weight. Victoza shot out the gate and broke over a billion dollars in sales in its fourth year, five years ahead of Eli Lilly's Trulicity. The momentum of Victoza gave Novo the confidence that if they could increase weight loss and make the drug last longer, that would be an even greater payday. So while Victoza raked in the cash in the 2010s, the company launched Saxenda, a weight loss variant for non-diabetics. Saxenda became a blockbuster, but the absence of insurance coverage and the internal fears of sales cannibalization kept growth slow. In the mid-2010s, between the insulin price hikes and the GLP-1
drugs, Novo had doubled its annual revenue in less than six years and with far fewer assets than Eli Lilly. Its bottom line reached record highs with operating margins that were double than that of its main American rival. It was in 2018 when Novo launched its GLP-1 crown jewel in semaglutide or more commonly known as Ozempic with an industry-leading 17% weight loss. Ozempic exploded and has maintained its rocket ship streak to this day grossing more money than the company has ever made in a single year from insulin. Novo is the leader in both diabetes and weight loss medication and the company
is already on its fourth-generation GLP-1 promising even greater weight loss. When you're hammer, everything is a nail. To lawyers, every problem can be solved in court. To techies, every problem can be solved with software. And to pharmaceuticals, every ailment can be solved with drugs. In America, there's a poor societal understanding of the concept of over-medication. The last companies that should be trusted to handle this hype with responsibility are the same insulin cartels that colluded to rake in billions of dollars over the past 20 years. In one breath, these manufacturers promote balance. They say that these weight loss drugs are not lifelong medications, that everyone
eventually stops using them at some point and that lifestyle and diet changes are still useful. But in the other breath, they push greater doses, they make it easy to obtain prescriptions by removing primary care physicians from the equation, and they maintain public hype by teasing the potential of curing addiction once and for all. For now, Eli Lilly and Novo are playing nice to get the insurers, employers, and governments on board with covering their drugs. Ultimately, just like with insulin, their goal is profits, which comes down to getting as many of these people on these drugs and consuming them as frequently as possible. The price gouging that these manufacturers pulled off with insulin
was so effective that there's no chance that these companies won't do the same for their latest golden goose. From a medical standpoint, these pharmaceuticals bury news around side effects, they pretend not to acknowledge the long-running unresolved issues of pancreatitis, and they refuse to admit that they're not really sure why these drugs work the way they do. Initially, the belief was that GLP-1 drugs simply trigger the pancreas, but these days, the consensus is that it's more neurological than it is intestinal. The point is not that manufacturers should have all the answers right away, but rather that it's dangerous to promote only the known positives at face value while ignoring the unknowns. Every
medicine has side effects, especially when it can rewire your digestive system and trick your brain into having no appetite. There's no such thing as a miracle cure as much as Eli Lilly and Novo want the public to believe GLP-1s are. Eli Lilly in particular has a terrible track record in the past two decades when it comes to acknowledging side effects and accepting responsibility. Scientists and doctors have their code of ethics, but it's the suits that run the show. Another angle is that weight loss drugs are treating obesity, but obesity is more of a symptom than it is a root cause. Obesity in the US has much to do with the underlying American food system where profit-driven corporations freely pump essential ingredients in foods with
toxins, dyes, additives, and hormones that are banned everywhere else in the world. It seems strange that the solution is to have taxpayers spend their savings on drugs to lose the weight that's put on by the failing food and consumer protection systems. While opioids were inherently addictive, it can be argued that the social stigma around weight creates comparable pressures. And when someone is faced with a decision between guaranteed results from a weekly injection or slow, incremental progress from months of consistent dieting and exercise, it's obvious which will win out in the long run. And at a personal level, as someone who used to be overweight with a BMI of 30, it feels odd to be in an era where willpower can be medically induced rather than earned.
