Magic pill The extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight-loss drugs

Johann Hari

Book - 2024

"The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it--from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society's dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor New Shelf Show me where

613.25/Hari
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor New Shelf 613.25/Hari (NEW SHELF) Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Crown 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Johann Hari (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxix, 288 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780593728635
  • Introduction The Holy Grail
  • Chapter 1. Finding the Treasure Chest How the Drugs Work
  • Chapter 2. Cheesecake Park Why We Gained Weight
  • Chapter 3. The Death and Rebirth of Satiety The Strange Connection Between Processed Food and the New Drugs
  • Chapter 4. Living in an Inflamed State What Has Happened to Our Bodies-And Do These Drugs Reverse It?
  • Chapter 5. An Old Story Repeating Itself? The Risks of the Old Weight-Loss Drugs-And the New Ones
  • Chapter 6. Why Don't You Diet and Exercise Instead? The Two Biggest Alternatives to Weight-Loss Drugs-And Why They Have (Mostly) Failed
  • Chapter 7. The Brain Breakthrough Good News for Addiction, Bad News for Depression?
  • Chapter 8. What Job Was Overeating Doing for You? The Five Reasons Why We Eat-And What Happens When They Are Taken Away from Us
  • Chapter 9. "I Don't Think You're in Your Body" How Ozempic Made Me Realize I Had to Change
  • Chapter 10. Self-Acceptance vs. Self-Starvation? What Wilt These Drugs Mean for Eating Disorders?
  • Chapter 11. The Forbidden Body? What Do These New Drugs Mean for Stigma?
  • Chapter 12. The Land That Doesn't Need Ozempic What the Japanese Do Right-And How We Can Become like Them
  • Conclusion
  • The Choices Now So What Do We Do, for Us, and Our Kids?
  • What You Can Do to Improve the Food System
  • Further Reading
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Dunkin' peddles enough donuts daily to encircle the planet twice. After Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald is the second best-known character in the world. The typical American adult is now more than 20 pounds heavier than in 1960. Overeating, consuming unhealthy foods, and obesity keep growing. Costly new drugs producing amazing weight loss are now available. But are they safe? Hari interviews many obesity experts in his informative, lively, and careful description of weight-reduction pharmaceuticals, mainly semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus). These medications promote satiety and provoke insulin production. Concerned about his own health and weight, Hari opts to try Ozempic. After only two days, he experiences no hunger but has mild nausea. After six months, he feels emotionally dulled, but his weight loss is dramatic. Possible side effects of these medications include gastrointestinal problems, lightheadedness, and, rarely, an increased chance of thyroid cancer, pancreatitis, and suicidal thoughts. Hari worries about potential, as yet unidentified long-term adverse effects but contrasts those with the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and cancer associated with untreated obesity. Hari also considers society's preference for thinness, body image, the psychology of overeating, and concerns about the online availability of these drugs. A terrific read for anyone curious about or considering using these remarkable medications.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ozempic and Wegovy carry "huge potential benefits... and huge potential risks," according to this balanced assessment. Journalist Hari (Stolen Focus) explains how the research on GLP-1, a hormone that's released in the gut after eating, led to the development of weight-loss drugs that generate long-lasting copies of the hormone, helping users feel sated for longer after meals. There are pros and cons to these medications, he contends, noting that while they reduce the likelihood of cardiac events by 20% and stabilize blood sugar levels in people with diabetes, the long-term risks remain unknown. More troubling, he argues, is that the drugs allow the food industry to escape culpability for manufacturing harmful, ultra-processed products designed to generate cravings while providing little nutritional value. Hari, who was formerly considered clinically obese, probes his own ambivalence about taking Ozempic, recounting how his confidence swelled after losing more than 30 pounds on the drug, even as he felt guilty about not losing the weight "through hard work." The levelheaded analysis recognizes how weight-loss drugs can serve as band-aids for broader problems even as they provide real benefits, and Hari's candid introspection reveals the complex psychological effects of taking the medications. One of the first books about the Ozempic age, this sets a high bar for those to follow. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A current overview of the drugs available for weight loss. Journalist Hari, author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections, begins with a vivid description of his fascination with junk food, along with the oft-told story of the food industry's post--World War II breakthrough in manufacturing calorie-dense, fatty, salty, chemically enhanced edible products, many not found in nature but irresistible to consumers. "The average American adult weighs twenty-three pounds more than in 1960," writes the author, "and more than 70 percent of all Americans are ei-ther overweight or obese." Unfortunately, diets rarely work. Weight-loss drugs, touted for decades, were mostly worthless; the few that worked turned out to be toxic. Following the history lesson, Hari reveals that the wildly popular drugs--Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy--are effective. Six months after starting Ozempic, the author was thinner, fitter, and more confident, but also uneasy. He felt full soon after beginning a meal, food lacked its usual appeal, and he felt nauseous more than before. As he relates, 5% to 10% of users stop because the side effects aren't worth it. However, the drugs have been treating diabetes for 18 years, so the odds of a patient developing a serious side effect seem small. In addition to his personal story, Hari chronicles his travels around the world interviewing users, researchers, physicians, and the drug's developers, pausing for thoughtful essays on why we eat and overeat, why dieting almost never works, and how the world may change when these drugs become affordable after the patent expires in 2032. In a mildly optimistic conclusion, Hari argues that our first priority should be to eliminate the superprocessed quasi-foods that we can't resist--unlikely, of course, so the author offers a digestible survey of the possibilities of pharmaceuticals. A sober exploration of weight-loss pills that actually work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 Finding the Treasure Chest How the drugs work I opened my eyes and immediately felt that something was off. Thwacking my alarm clock into silence, I lay there for five minutes, trying to figure out what it was. It was two days since I had started taking Ozempic. I felt mildly nauseous, but it was not severe--if it had happened on a normal day, it wouldn't have stopped me from doing anything. So that wasn't it. It took me a while to realize what it was. I always wake up ravenously hungry, but on that morning, I had no appetite at all. It was gone. I got out of bed and, on autopilot, went through my normal morning routine. I left my flat and went to a local café run by a Brazilian woman named Tatiana, where my order is always the same: a large, toasted bread roll, filled with chicken and mayonnaise. As I sat there reading the newspapers, the food was placed in front of me, and I looked at it. I felt like I was looking at a block of wood. I took a bite. It tasted fine. Normal. I took three or four more bites, and I felt full. I left almost all of it on the plate. As I hurried out, Tatiana called after me, "Are you sick?" I went to my office and wrote for three hours. Normally, by noon, I would have a snack, something small and sugary, and then at about 1 p.m. would go down the street to a local Turkish café for lunch. It got to 2 p.m. and I wasn't hungry. Again, my sense of routine kicked in, and again, I went to the café and asked for my standard order, a large Mediterranean lamb with rice and bread. I managed to eat a third of it. It seemed to me for the first time to be incredibly salty, like I was drinking seawater. I wrote some more, and at 7 p.m. I left my office to go and meet a friend in Camden Market, one of my favorite parts of London. We walked between the stalls, staring at food from every part of the world. Normally, I could stuff my face from three different stalls, but that night, I had no hunger. I couldn't even manage a few mouthfuls. I went home, feeling exhausted, and went to sleep at the unprecedentedly early time of 9 p.m. As that first week passed, it felt like the shutters had come down on my appetite, and now only tiny peeks of light could get through. I was about 80 percent less hungry than I normally am. The sense of mild nausea kept stirring and passing. When I got on the bus or in a car, I felt a kind of exaggerated travel sickness. Whenever I ate, I became full startlingly fast. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you have just eaten a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and then somebody popped up and offered you a whole new meal to get started on. Some people say Ozempic makes them find food disgusting. To me, it made food, beyond small quantities, feel unfeasible. On the fifth night, a friend came by to watch a movie, and we flicked through Uber Eats. The app suggested all my usual haunts. I realized I couldn't eat any of this food now. Instead, she got a kebab, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup. On the sixth day, I took my godsons out, and they wanted to go into McDonald's. When they got Happy Meals and I got nothing at all, one of them said suspiciously: "Who are you and what have you done with Johann Hari?" I wanted to understand what was happening to my body. I figured that the best people to educate me were the scientists who made the key discoveries that led to the development of Ozempic and the other new weight-loss drugs. So I began to track many of them down and interview them, along with many other key scientists working in the field. Almost all of them have received funding from the pharmaceutical companies that now profit from these drugs, and we should bear that in mind as we hear what they say. They taught me that these extraordinary effects were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and my brain, and in yours. To understand what it is, I think it helps to understand how it was discovered. * * * One day in 1984, a lean twenty-eight-year-old Canadian research scientist walked into a lab in Massachusetts General Hospital and felt instinctively uneasy. Daniel Drucker had been assigned to work in one of the huge buildings there, and he expected to find a shiny state-of-the-art setup. Instead, it was shabby and run-down. As he sat at his bench, pigeons were constantly cooing from their nests in the roof above him, threatening to poop and contaminate any experiment he might carry out. He knew he had only made it to this lab in the first place by a few thin twists of fate. His mother had been born in Poland and fled the Nazis without a moment to spare--the day after she got out of the ghetto, her mother and sister were shot dead. She survived by hiding in attics. Even after she made it to the safety of Canada and learned her relatives had been murdered, and she made it to the safety of Canada, she never stopped searching for them. She would ask her son: What if the witnesses who saw them being killed were wrong, and they're still out there alive somewhere, looking for me? Daniel trained to be a thyroid specialist, so he was surprised and disappointed when the lab's head told him that the hospital didn't have any thyroid work and he was assigned to a different project. Every human body is made up of cells, and in the 1970s, scientists had discovered new tools they could use to figure out for the first time what is going on inside them. They were working their way through many of the cells, and Daniel was allocated the inner workings of something named the glucagon gene, which is produced in the pancreas. Very little was known about its deeper structure. Go figure it out, he was told. It didn't particularly excite him, but it was work, so he got started. He found it tough. He told me that when it came to clinical medicine, "I was very capable, but when I got to the lab, I was completely incapable. I had never done [this kind of] research before. It was a struggle for me." When he successfully carried out an experiment that teased apart the functioning of this particular cell, he was just relieved that "I actually managed to do something with these clumsy wooden hands," and that the pigeons didn't poop on the results. As he investigated what was happening inside the glucagon gene, he started to look into a specific question. He knew the gene consisted of different constituent parts--it's a long chain--and one of them, found at the end, was a snippet of the overall genetic code, labeled as GLP-1. Daniel and the other scientists in his team wanted to figure out if this part of the gene was just an inert or redundant bit of code that didn't do anything on its own, or if it could be teased out and investigated as a thing in its own right. After a lot of experimenting, he discovered that, in fact, it could be broken off from the wider code. Once he knew this could be done, he began to ask: What does GLP-1 actually do? He decided to start putting it into lab dishes, to see how it interacted with many different chemicals that are found in that part of the body. It was on one of those afternoons that he tried something that, years later, he told me was his "aha moment"--one that was going to reshape his whole career, and the lives of millions of people, including my own. When he mixed GLP-1 with some cells that produce insulin, he noticed something striking: the GLP-1 stimulated the creation of insulin. Something about this tiny gut hormone could spur the making of another hormone, one that is essential for your body to regulate your blood sugar levels and keep you alive. His mind flickered immediately to diabetes, a medical condition where your body doesn't produce enough insulin, leading to all sorts of disastrous health effects. He could see, in the Petri dish right in front of him, that GLP-1 "was making more insulin." Could it be used to treat diabetics? Another scientist on the team named Svetlana Mojsov worked with a group to put GLP-1 into a rat's pancreas. She found that there, too, it led to the creation of more insulin. This meant it didn't just work in a dish in a lab--it worked in a living creature. Around the same time, a team in Copenhagen put GLP-1 into a pig's pancreas. They found the same effect. But finding a way to apply this to human diabetics was going to be a long road--and some surreal turns had to take place first. Excerpted from Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.