Weight-loss jabs are reshaping grocery shelves and business bottom lines. But where did they come from? In The Hunger Game (BBC Radio 4), molecular biologist and obesity researcher Professor Giles Yeo charts the stratospheric rise of the drugs we now know as Ozempic, WeGovy and Mounjaro.
Across five calorie-controlled but nutrient-rich 15-minute episodes, Yeo charts the early breakthroughs of the 1970s where scientists in a freezing New York laboratory identified the glucagon-like peptide-1 hormone.
He details the 18-year arms race between Novo Nordisk and rival drug makers Amylin and Eli Lily to develop effective diabetes drugs that didn’t involve killing “a lot of pigs”, resulting in the happy side effect that people lost weight. By the third episode ‘fat jabs’ have “gone kablooie” as big pharma goes all out to get a slice of the “billion-dollar pie”.
Unsurprisingly, the podcast strays at times into the slightly esoteric world of molecular biology. But it’s grounded with amusing sound bites of self-confessed food lover Yeo ordering the double cheeseburger with a side of loaded fries at his staff canteen at Cambridge University. Accounts of GLP-1 users, like Yeo’s son Harry, bring a human face to the transformative impact that the drugs are having on people’s lives.
Alarmingly, despite the very real-world repercussions on grocery shelves, Yeo reveals that “the manufacturers making these drugs still don’t know how they work on the brain”. Which prompts some necessary questions that are often lost amid the hype.
Is it right to rely on medication as a solution to a failing food system? Should access to these drugs be universal? And perhaps most pressingly, what are the long-term risks of so many people relying on treatments that we fundamentally still don’t understand?
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