Here’s Who Should Pay for Everyone’s Ozempic

It’s no exaggeration to say that Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and the other novel GPL-1 drugs are among the most revolutionary medications to hit the market in decades. The drugs decrease appetite, which fuels weight loss and helps prevent and treat diabetes, lowers blood pressure, and lowers blood sugar level. They decrease the risk of serious illnesses including heart and kidney disease, improving health and prolonging life. For many of the millions of people who have used them, these drugs have quieted the “food noise” in their brains. The demand for them is so extraordinary that there is a global shortage, which some think could create a budgetary problem enormous enough to break the U.S. health care system. And you know these drugs have really hit the big time because Oprah just did a special on them.

Much has been written about GPL-1 drugs and their potential impacts on our bodies, our culture, our feelings, and our money. But few of the conversations about these novel medications mention one of the primary culprits behind the ill health that necessitates them in the first place: Big Food.

Who would naturally be the ones talking about Big Food’s responsibility, perhaps even proposing that Big Food should bear the cost of these wildly expensive and effective drugs? Liberals. But since these novel weight loss drugs hit the market, liberals have seemed especially unsure of how to respond to them. How might they compromise hard-earned wins for body positivity? Will they challenge some progressive narratives about weight and health? Well, no—liberals aren’t really wading into it. (Conservatives, for their part, seem happy to adopt the Big Food line that one’s health and what one eats are matters of individual responsibility, and should be free from government interference.)

And yet, the reality remains: American Big Food industries have spent decades funneling highly processed, nutritionally deficient food products into American and global markets. These ultraprocessed foods are engineered to tap into our biological desire for salt, sugar, and fat, ingredients that are not on their own necessarily bad, but are particularly harmful to human health when Frankensteined into products made via industrial processes, and often rife with additives and chemicals or reconstituted in ways not found in traditional whole-food human diets. Ultraprocessed foods are designed to be so addictive that, as a Lay’s potato chip ad campaign put it, you “can’t eat just one.” And they are painstakingly developed to hit our pleasure and desire centers, to avoid our satiation points, to make us want more—to paraphrase Michael Moss, who has written two books on Big Food, to make us eat impulsively and compulsively. And our bodies do not seem to process these foods the same way we do whole or even less processed ones.

Ultraprocessed foods now make up more than 60 percent of what Americans eat. Study after study has linked ultraprocessed foods to a range of health problems, from numerous cancers to depression. Some researchers now believe that processed and fast foods kill more Americans than cigarettes. It’s........

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