A brave new world of Brits on Wegovy won’t fix our problem with junk food
Weight loss drugs promise to cure Brits of obesity, revive the NHS and save the economy billions of pounds, but could it be too good to be true, asks Lucy Kenningham
A wonder drug is how the UK media hailed the announcement of Wegovy, a new weight loss drug, to be used by the NHS. And it does seem to be – it’s something thousands of Brits will have dreamed of for decades: an injection that can make you thin. No fasting, no freaky exercise regime, no weird remedies suggested by internet ads or sad trips to Weight Watchers classes. Science has found a cure!
If it’s true, it really would be a miracle. Our weight problem in Britain is undeniable. Two thirds of us are now clinically obese. This doesn’t just hurt our lifespans – it hurts the economy, costing £98bn a year, a number that’s shot up from £58bn in just 2020, according to the Tony Blair Institute. Obesity prevents people working, contributing to our high numbers of long-term sick. It piles pressure onto the NHS and makes people miserable. 38 per cent of us are trying to lose weight – a struggle that can trigger shame, guilt and isolation.
So we need a fix. But is medication the answer? A recent study found that after one year on the injections, 40 per cent of patients were still taking wonder-drug Wegovy. How long do we want people taking drugs, which come with both side effects and expense?
If your name is Dr Lee Kaplan, then the answer is forever. Obesity, this esteemed American obesity expert told a conference of physicians in June, should be treated by doctors issuing lifelong prescriptions. “We are going to have to use these medications,” he said, “for as long as the body wants to have obesity”.
If that sounds chilling, Kaplan would say he is helping shed light on treatment for a serious illness. Yet a Reuters investigation found that Wegovy’s maker, Danish giant Novo Nordisk, has paid Kaplan an astonishing $1.4m for consulting work and travel since 2013. This sits alongside a wider $25.8m in fees and expenses Novo paid to doctors across the US in relation to its weight-loss drugs (it makes both Wegovy and Ozempic, a very similar drug). This money was concentrated on an elite group of obesity experts, 57 of whom received fully $100,000 and are now advocating Wegovy’s prescription ($1,300 a month per patient) for tens of millions of overweight Americans.
The UK has, so far, taken a less liberal approach to prescribing Wegovy than the US; the NHS has said only 35,000 people are thus far eligible – those with weight-related health problems – but another 50,000 could soon be added to the list and representatives from Novo have met with the health minister to advocate its expanded use against obesity.
The world has gone through many drug crazes. There was the discovery of antidepressants, which became so ubiquitous, especially in the US, that books and movies like ‘Prozac Nation’ became blockbusters. Then, of course, there was Oxycontin, a powerful opiate, aggressively marketed to doctors, and winning over such market saturation that, today, most deaths of young Americans are due to fentanyl. Of course, Wegovy and Oxycontin are far from the same. But both drugs demonstrate a powerful psychological impulse to medicate problems we’re just not quite sure how to treat otherwise.
Overprescription is a real and pressing issue: some 15 per cent of people in England take five plus prescription drugs daily. 2021’s National Overprescribing Review found one in 10 prescriptions should never have been issued in the first place.
We’re also ignoring the real causes of our ailments. Obesity is not a purely medical issue; for the vast majority of people it is environmental. The Food Foundation recently found that healthy food is two times as expensive as non-healthy food. Healthy food was recently shown to be twice as expensive as unhealthy options.
But food itself has also become unhealthier. According to Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon and the author of the National Food Strategy, we’re stuck in a ‘junk food cycle’: food companies have developed and marketed calorie-dense foods that fill people up less – which inevitably makes us eat more and buy more. And a nation of Wegovy injectors will do nothing to change this – a future Dimbleby deems “dystopian”.
Humans have always dreamed of magic cures to the limitations that come with being, well, human. But the truth is that magic cure-alls don’t always exist. The UK needs to act on obesity – but it needs to do so with a long-term vision that doesn’t resemble a Brave New World-esque army of zombified drug-injectors.