Weight Loss Drugs Go Hand-in-Hand With Junk Food Industry
Manufacturers of the new weight-loss drugs that have taken the nation by storm are salivating at the prospect of how best to extract profits from people. What Americans eat, how they diet and exercise, what nutritional supplements they take, the sugar content of their sodas, the high fructose corn syrup in their processed foods, and the price of their diabetes medication have long been objects of endless gambling on Wall Street. Now, with drugs like Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic in the mix, new vistas of corporate exploitation have opened up. Companies are eager to figure out how best to milk people who might be losing their taste for the plentiful calories that food producers got them hooked on in the first place.
It’s not a conspiracy theory that food addiction is a tool of corporate profiteering. Consider that tobacco companies, upon being regulated out of the business of addictive smoking, turned their sights onto addictive eating. The Washington Post’s health columnist, Anahad O’Connor wrote, “In America, the steepest increase in the prevalence of hyper-palatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001—the era when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned the world’s leading food companies.” Further, “the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.”
Many of these ultra-processed foods are specially marketed to children, which in turn can change their brain chemistry to desire those foods for life. According to a paper published in Science Daily, “The current obesity epidemic is due, in part, to hormonal responses to changes in food quality: in particular, high-glycemic load foods, which fundamentally change metabolism.” Today we would be appalled at the idea of marketing tobacco to children, but the same companies pushed addictive foods onto kids, and even though Big Tobacco is no longer in the business of food, its practices remain widespread.
The harmful impacts of unhealthy foods also fall disproportionately along racial lines, with aggressive marketing aimed at communities of color. Black children, in particular, are subjected to significantly greater advertising of high-calorie addictive foods than their white peers.
As obesity rates have risen in the U.S., there is an all-too-familiar blame game that individualizes the harm being caused by a capitalist system that thrives off of addiction. Doctors warn people struggling to manage their weight that they must simply restrict their intake of calories while expending more calories through rigorous exercise. High-profile reality shows such as The Biggest Loser have cemented the narrative that obesity is the result of individuals not being able to manage their urges to eat. And American pop culture’s obsession with increasingly unattainable thinness generates shame spirals among individuals and further fuels the idea that people are fat simply because they are too weak to control themselves. Meanwhile, there are few, if any, government regulations on unhealthy foods in the U.S.
There’s a similar analogy to be found in personal finance. American culture is steeped in the myth of a meritocracy where people struggling to make ends meet are blamed for simply not being good managers of money and where well-meaning budgeting guides are offered without the broader context of rising inequality, suppressed wages, bloated student debt, and inflation.
The causes of both, obesity and wealth inequality, are systemic, while the solutions being offered are individualized, often spawning lucrative industries of their own.
Alongside the aggressive marketing of hyper-palatable foods is a massively profitable weight-loss industry that preys upon individual shame to the tune of more than $60 billion a year. In fact, some of the same companies pushing high-calorie foods are in the business of weight loss.
With the advent of the new revolutionary weight-loss drugs, watching the industry reconfigure itself is fascinating. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Since drugs such as Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic became sensations last year, Wall Street has rushed to work out just how disruptive the drugs, called GLP-1s, might be.” By “disruptive,” the journal is referring to a discouraging trend in food industry profits. If weight-loss drugs curb appetite, who will buy enough Krispy Kreme donuts to keep the sugar-peddling company in business? That’s a big worry for corporate CEOs and shareholders.
Another story in the Journal lamented the impact of these drugs on the weight-loss industry “which long pushed calorie-counting and willpower,” and are now “grappling with the surging popularity of new drugs.” If weight-loss drugs curb appetite without expensive gym memberships, supplements, and programs like WeightWatchers, will the traditional weight-loss industry go out of business?
Today, the manufacturers of weight-loss drugs are clear winners in the changing landscape of food consumption and weight, charging tens of thousands of dollars for a year’s supply, and ensuring that only the wealthy have access to the thinness that our culture celebrates. Not only do the high price tags keep these drugs out of the hands of low-income people struggling to manage their weight, but also out of the hands of diabetics whom the drugs were originally meant for.
The capitalist maxim of higher demand fueling higher prices is very much at work here. Ozempic for example, could have a price tag of only $57 a year its manufacturer Novo Nordisk would still reap a profit. Instead, it is being sold in the U.S. for a whopping $11,600 a year simply because the company can charge an arm and a leg, ensuring that the drugs remain in the hands of the wealthy while tidying up a nice profit for Novo Nordisk’s shareholders.
Eventually, however, the prices will come down once the elite market for the drugs saturates. And drug manufacturers are already busy ensuring their future market share by pushing doctors to prescribe the drugs widely. One obesity expert named Dr. Lee Kaplan, who received $1.4 million from Novo Nordisk, told his fellow physicians, “We are going to have to use these medications…for as long as the body wants to have obesity.” What he didn’t say out loud was that there will be obesity for as long as food manufacturers market and sell junk foods.
Ultimately, our individual appetites and waistlines are pawns in the highly lucrative game of profit extraction that private companies and industries play. It is in the interest of drug manufacturers that Americans remain hooked on hyper-palatable high-calorie foods so that a market exists for their weight-loss drugs. The ultra-processed food industry is becoming symbiotic with the weight-loss drug industry. The former ensures we eat poorly and the latter is there to feed off our shame.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Ultraprocessed Deadly Corporate Food Demands Action
Image by Carolina Grabowska.
About forty-five years ago, at a social gathering, I asked an executive of a Minneapolis-based large food processing company if he fed heavily sugared cereals to his children. He smiled as he shook his head. Smart person. His and other major companies producing what is now called Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) had scientists and labs. They knew that ever higher doses of sugars, fats, and salts were being poured into nutritionally stripped foods and deceptively promoted to youngsters on kiddy television. They profitably ignored the serious damage they were causing!
These companies’ marketeers succeeded in getting these children, as my mother would say, to turn their tongues against their brains. The children were also shown how to nag their parents into buying junk food and drink. In fact, Madison Avenue advertising firms would give high ratings for ads “with a high nag factor.”
It was about 1980 when obesity rates started rising at alarming rates. Now about 30% of adults are obese, another 35% are overweight. Recently, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that by 2028 up to 70 million Americans will be taking the new weight-loss drugs, whose longer-term effects are yet to be known. Their apparent present success in suppressing extra food intake is already worrying the fast-food chains like McDonald’s that thrive on selling huge cheeseburgers.
It was also about 1980 when the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) staff and its leader, Dr. Michael Jacobson, were appearing in the mass media and on major national talk shows. They graphically showed the public the large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt that were in the hot dogs, potato chips, and soft drinks they consumed. Millions of Americans started changing their food purchases toward multi-grained breads and more fresh fruits and vegetables. Many people became vegetarians. But most consumers remained wedded to misleadingly promoted and greatly diluted UPFs, short on nutrition and long on harm to their health.
During recent decades there has been an increase in peer-reviewed scientific studies showing that certain foods you can easily buy in the markets can increase your life expectancy while others reduce your longevity. Long-time medical and science reporter/author Jean Carper boiled down these findings into a highly usable new little book titled, “100 Life or Death Foods: A Scientific Guide to Which Foods Prolong Life or Kill You Prematurely.” (See my recent column New Book: Choosing Regular Food to Extend Longevity, April 12, 2024).
On May 8, 2024 – the New York Times defined Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) as “using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores – like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate. They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable. Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.”
The Times continued: “In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.” Caution, not all UPFs are associated with these problems.
UPFs make up two-thirds of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States. Still, the giant food companies are getting away with little regulation, especially for their heaviest advertising that pushes their profitable ultraprocessed foods. Have you ever seen TV ads for fresh carrots, radishes, celery, lentils, spinach, kale and asparagus? Unlikely. The mass merchandising ads go for foods, described by a report in the journal BMJ, as “designed by manufacturers to achieve a certain ‘bliss point,’ which causes us to crave and overeat them. They also tend to be low in nutrients, such as fiber, vitamins and minerals.”
We are behind other governments in our official dietary guidelines. Canada and Mexico recommend avoiding or limiting UPFs while the U.S. guidelines make no mention of them. Such is the dominance of giant agribusiness corporations over the indentured U.S. Department of Agriculture and the mostly bought members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees.
This corporate interference also extends to constantly putting such UPFs into school lunch programs.
Absent taking over the 535 members of corporate Congress by 250 million eligible voters, we are left with parents and their children availing themselves of publications such as CSPI’s Nutrition Action newsletter to become smart buyers and consumers of safer, healthier, nutritious food. If you can, add a home garden to your food supply.
Some of these simple recipes, often called a Mediterranean diet, are in my “Ralph Nader and Family Cookbook,” (2020) with an introduction on how my mother educated us very early on to want to eat nutritious foods prepared to be delicious as well. She baked her own bread, cooked “from scratch” and avoided processed foods with unknown ingredients, such as hot dogs.
Our snacks were fresh fruits and vegetables, including chickpeas, munched while walking to school. For a sweet taste, we were treated to honey and maple syrup. We were taught not to whine because it wasn’t smart and didn’t get us anywhere.
Parents are protectors of their children. They have to be especially on guard to protect their children from pervasive direct mass marketing, using influencers, peer groups, and abduction of their youngsters into the Internet Gulag. The earlier in their child’s life that parents do their job, the easier it will be. Children so liberated can become active allies of Mom and Dad, showcasing their special knowledge. (See, “You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination, and Intellect of Tweens” by Dr. Claire Nader).
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