Dinner by Prescription

We are witnessing a troubling shift in public health, and it’ s being delivered in a syringe.

For most of human history, eating has been a biological feedback loop: you feel hungry, you eat, and your hormones signals satiety. Ozempic overrides this by mimicking the gut hormone GLP-1 and telling the brain to stop eating before the meal even begins.

While these drugs are meant for treating Type 2 diabetes and clinical obesity, their move into the mainstream reveals a troubling and deeper issue. We are now outsourcing a basic biological signal to a pharmaceutical industry that views our appetite as a market opportunity.

Our society uses weight as a moral test, a battle of grit at the gym or won by skipping dessert. Ozempic exposes this as a convenient lie. By providing a chemical fix for a biological problem, these drugs strip away the pretence of virtue. They suggest that willpower can be prescribed. The real scandal, however, is the system that makes these drugs so profitable. For decades, the global food industry has engineered ultra-processed foods (UPFs) specifically designed to bypass our natural fullness triggers; and the result is a systemic circle of profit:

The food industry sells us UPFs that disrupt our metabolism. The pharmaceutical industry sells us an expensive, lifelong subscription to manage the damage.

This is not a public health solution. It treats the symptoms of a toxic food system while leaving the cause, the overproduction and aggressive marketing of UPFs, completely untouched. We have traded the farm for the factory, and the factory for the pharmacy.

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