Maintenance Phase - Ozempic

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

Ozempic is being hailed as “the end of the Obesity Epidemic.” This week, Mike and Aubrey dig through the sensational claims. But will they make it past the caveats?Links: How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic The Discovery and Development of Liraglutide and Semaglutide Ozempic and Wegovy maker courts prominent Black leaders to get Medicare's favor Insurers clamping down on doctors who prescribe Ozempic for weight lossOzempic prescriptions can be easy to get online. Its popularity for weight loss is hurting those who need it most    Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists in patients with type 2 diabetes: real-world evidence from a Mediterranean areaSemaglutide in Patients with Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and ObesityReal-world weight change, adherence, and discontinuation among patients with type 2 diabetes initiating glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists in the UKSafety of SemaglutideSemaglutide for the treatment of overweight and obesity: A reviewOnce-Weekly Semaglutide in Adolescents with ObesitySemaglutide 2.4 mg for the Treatment of Obesity: Key Elements of the STEP Trials 1 to 5Association of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonist Use With Risk of Gallbladder and Biliary DiseasesReal-World Adherence and Discontinuation of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists Therapy in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients in the United StatesMedications and conditions associated with weight loss in patients prescribed semaglutide based on real-world dataThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Wait, have I ever told you about Steakhouse or Gay Bar? Oh, see. Hey, God. I want to look it up just because it's, yep. Is it? Here we go. What does it have? Uh, magic castle. Oh, it's got to be Steakhouse.

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I'm not touching that. I'm not touching that. Let's move on. It was a steakhouse. Aubrey, why can't we do a fun episode? Why can't we just do this for an hour instead of talking about ozempic? Welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast that works in the short term, but has never been tested for more than two years.

That's kind of true, actually, accidentally. That is a pretty accurate thing to say about our podcast. It hasn't been tested in a long term. People go back to where they were. Uh, I'm Michael Hops. I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase

or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael, Aubrey, let's start with your nervousness. My nervousness. We're gonna talkb-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b Million doctors say somaglotide. Somaglotide? Doesn't that seem wrong? Yeah, but sure. I mean, they're made up words anyway, and then on some level, every word is made up. So whatever.

Well, listen, from Mr. Denowment. Yeah. It's a safe space for creative pronunciation. The thing is, so much of the fucking feedback to this show is about my pronunciations of words. No one ever wants to give me feedback on the content of the fucking feedback to this show is about my pronunciations of words. No one ever wants to give me feedback on the content of the show. Michael, Aubrey.

This episode is actually a little different than how we usually do things. Yes. I'm gonna walk us through the drug and its origins. You're gonna walk us through the clinical trials into this sort of class of drugs. And then we're gonna talk about what I think is the thorniest part of all of this, the discourse around those drugs.

The discomers. This is a big one. It feels like a really high stakes conversation. So I'm curious about for you, what are some of the things that you're sort of like bringing to that? I think my weirdness with this episode is the culmination of my weirdness with every episode of the show, where both of us are interested in public health, in the kinds of things that are prescribed,

how drugs get approved, what they mean societally, whereas because Americans have been trained by health media for our entire lives to see everything through an individualistic lens, we are going to be spending basically this entire episode talking about the narratives around ozemic and wagovie. We have this new generation of weight loss drugs that as of now appear to deliver much more weight loss

than any previous generation of weight loss drugs. And we've had this immediate, huge wave of media being like, is this the end of obesity? Does this invalidate body positivity and like being a dietician in the age of ozempic and all this just insufferable kind of end point prediction stuff based on very little information. And what we are interested in

and like what we have been talking about behind the scenes non-stop for the last couple of months is like how poisonous these narratives are. But what people tend to hear is like individual health advice. Mike and Aubrey think you shouldn't take ozmpec, or Mike and Aubrey think you should take ozmpec. And like, that is just not something that we are interested in. We've said on the show before that if you want to lose weight

and you want to do keto or a cleanse, you can do that. We don't have opinions on that. Yeah, totally. And if people don't want to do that, they also shouldn't be pressured to do so. And I just know that this is like a big topic for a lot of people, right? For me included both because I'm engaging

with all of this media and fat people writ large or engaging with all this media that is like, could we finally be rid of fat people? Is like the framing of a lot of this conversation. But like on top of that, I mean, we've talked about this before on the show that one of my very best friends was diabetic and passed away because she couldn't access treatment.

Yeah. Right? That was like facilitated by a lot of things. It was facilitated by capitalism and anti-blackness and transphobia and lots of things. But it was also facilitated by our lot of things, it was facilitated by capitalism and anti-blackness and transphobia and lots of things. But it was also facilitated by our sort of cultural disregard and disdain for people who have diabetes or any health conditions

that we deem as, quote unquote, doing it to yourself. For many folks, this is like a matter of body image, which is really tender and personal for other folks for people who are on this medication, for their diabetes, this can very literally be a matter of life and death. Right. Right. We're talking about like a wide range of big feelings.

And it's like understandable, right? This is one of the most intense and sort of widespread moments of body-related discourse we've had in quite some time, right? People who are taking this for weight loss are told that they're sort of taking the easy way out, which they absolutely are not, and which also presumes that people are fat because they don't try hard enough, right? And when those people are fat, they're often being forced into this kind of weight loss in order to access healthcare treatments, surgeries, other like super basic needs, right? This just feels like huge that way.

I think a fun bit for the show would be to just do a bunch of table setting and like caveats and then just never get to the topic. Another thing we want to say right off the bat, we have gotten dangerously close to an entire set of caveats. We're working toward it. So for part one, we're just gonna talk about the drug itself. We're gonna talk about somagletide, which is the active ingredient in ozempic and wigovi. Ozempic and wigovi are injections

that are produced by novo nornisk, which is a big pharmaceutical company. They're part of a group of medications that are called GLP1 agonists. GLP1 helps regulate our hunger and satiety signals and production of other hormones like insulin. There are other GLP1 agonists sort of on the market. Most of them approved for diabetes treatment. Those are rebellsis, minjaro, and there are about another dozen that are sort of coming down the pipeline. Simaglitide has been on the market as a treatment for type 2 diabetes

in the US since 2018 under the name ozampic. When it's prescribed for weight loss, it's prescribed under the name wegovi. It's the same thing, They're just different doses. Interestingly, the weight loss one requires a slightly higher dosage of somagletide. So this drug started to be sort of studied. It's glimmers begin in 1984 with an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto. His name is Dr. Daniel Drucker, and he discovers a new hormone in humans, which is GLP1. It's called glucagon-like peptide-1. Girl, glucagon. As he and other researchers tried to figure out how GLP1 functioned in the human body, it starts to show real promise as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, but they

have this problem. GLP1 disappears from your system very quickly. It makes it really hard to study much less reproduce it. They start looking for alternate sources of GLP1 that might last a little longer than the human version. That's when the Gila Monster comes in. Oh. Mike, have you ever heard of the Gila Monster?

Yeah, there's like a cute little lizard. They're like a kind of like a thick, like robust lizard. I did not know about them before this episode. I didn't know a thing about them. They're the largest lizard in North America. They're almost two feet. I've never seen one in real life, but I've seen them in zoo books and they're really cute.

Well, listen, Dr. Drucker had one shipped to him in Toronto. Okay. Because it goes through long periods without food and it has the ability to slow down its appetite and metabolism. Okay. And Drucker wanted to know how they were able to do that. food and it has the ability to slow down its appetite and metabolism. Okay. And Drucker wanted to know how they were able to do that.

And he discovers that those gila monsters have genes for something called Extendin IV, which when sort of synthesized in a lab eventually became ozemic. How ironic that a thick lizard gave us thin women. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. So, researchers don't totally know the mechanism for what makes GLP1 agonists work the way that they do, but we do know that somagletide sort of mimics that GLP1 hormone that is, again, released after you eat. It's part of what makes you feel full, and it's part of what signals your brain

that it's time to stop eating. And so it works by you end up eating less because you just basically feel full after each meal. Yeah. So it triggers your society hormone. So ordinarily, you'd be hungry again, two hours after breakfast, but now it's like three or four hours after breakfast. And so over the course of a day,

you just end up eating like, I don't know, 20, 30% less. Yes, and on top of that, it's holding that food longer in your stomach. So you are physically full for a longer period of time, right? And it's triggering a release of insulin. And also, it may help grow pancreatic beta cells, which are the cells that produce and release insulin. So it's not just that it helps you release insulin

in the short term, it's also sort of like building up your ability to release insulin in the moment. Oh, interesting. So it's like flexing a muscle. It's actually like building the muscle that secretes insulin. It seems like it. It seems like it might be. The results for people with diabetes in clinical trials are really incredible.

So for diabetic people, the most important measure of your blood glucose is your A1C. That's a measure of the amount of hemoglobin in your blood that reflects your blood glucose levels over the last like few months. Most guidance for people with type 2 diabetes suggests that they should keep their A1C below 7 to minimize complications, but people whose blood sugar isn't well managed can have A1Cs that are like 10, 11, 12, 13, like really high.

It can lead to damage to that person's eyes, including possible blindness. Their kidneys, including kidney failure to their nerves and to their heart. With the introduction of these GLP1 agonists, the results are kind of miraculous. There are stories that are told about the initial presenting

of the research on these at the American Diabetes Association Conference. And people were weeping and gave it a standing ovation. No, why? Because what they're talking about is people whose A1Cs went from like 11 to seven, right? From like really, urgent risk down to a pretty safe range, just with this one drug, right?

I do think one of the fundamental difficult things to process about any of these kinds of health conditions is that we all hate pharmaceutical companies like under a system of capitalism. It's like these are big global profit maximizing entities. But then on the other hand, they deliver a product that is genuinely life-saving. Yeah, we just get kind of weird. Whenever people like praise pharmaceutical companies, I'm like, I don't know about that. But then whenever people overly criticize pharmaceutical companies, I'm also like, I don't know either. So in the trials for Ozempic,

they start noticing pretty significant weight loss and researchers start going, well, what if we could just use this as a weight loss drug? So they created Wigovie. It's the same drug at a higher dose. It uses more of the active ingredients, some aglatide, and because of that, it costs more. Diabetic version hovers at around $900 a month.

And it costs more for weight loss. It costs like $1,300 a month out of pocket and most insurers do not cover it. Not that like my main purpose with the show is to like widen the availability of weight loss drugs. But like there is something fascinating about how we've gotten all this stuff about like the obesity epidemic is so bad.

It's like killing our kids. And then it's like we get a drug that ostensibly treats it, and they're like, that's too expensive. Yeah, it is really wild that this is an issue where we like talk out of both sides of our mouth constantly as a culture. Yeah. In a lot of ways, the experiences of people who are taking wigo v for weight loss or muncharo or rebelcis or whatever the other ones are that are getting prescribed off label, right? That like a lot of folks are being told that they're like taking the easy way out. Yeah, that's really bizarre

That's the kind of rhetoric that reveals itself to be not about concern Not about your health. Yeah, just about I want you to suffer for looking the way that you look. We're doing discourse, Aubrey. We're doing discourse. We're doing discourse, and we're not even into the discourse section. I know, we haven't, we haven't.

I know, I know. I'm keeping my discourse powder dry, but we're just coercing. So, WegoVee was approved for weight loss by the FDA in June 2021. Almost as soon as WegoVee was approved for weight loss by the FDA in June 2021. Almost as soon as we go, we was approved for weight loss. Both we go, we and Ozempic went into shortage.

That impacts both people seeking the drug for weight loss and the people using it to manage their blood glucose for diabetes because what happens is that we go,v goes into shortage first, right, that's the weight loss one. And then, Dr. Start prescribing ozemic, the diabetes medication off label to people who want to start to lose weight.

Right. Then that goes into shortage two. So, as we record this, we gov and ozic are both in shortage, according to the FDA's sort of drug shortage database. Okay. When a drug goes on the FDA's shortage list, the FDA then allows what are called compounding pharmacies

to mix up what is basically their own version of that drug without prior FDA approval or screening. When Ozempic and Wigovie went into shortage, compounding pharmacies across the country started compounding their own versions of somagletide. Here's the problem. Novo Nordisk has patented the semaglotide molecule, and only they can produce it until 2032. So the active ingredient simply isn't available to those compounding pharmacies. These compounding pharmacies are prescribing something, they're calling it semaglotide. Okay.

It's not ozempic and it's not wigovie. It might be a watered-down dose of those things. It could be something called somaglotide sodium. Okay. It's called somaglotide, but it's used in lab animal experiments and is not cleared for use in humans. Oh, that's like when people were taking like horse antibiotics that you could buy on Amazon because they couldn't get like human antibiotics

because they're like roughly the same thing. Well, except this is not roughly the same thing and is a hazardous to humans' health. So, the fact that sodium is not cleared for use in humans because it is bad for humans. Oh, fuck. And the third option is that it's something else entirely because this is in shortage and because there is less FDA

oversight, she's compounding pharmacies are not required to tell anyone. What's in the drugs that they are giving people? This may sound niche, these compounding pharmacies may sound niche. This is every web advertisement you see that says, ozempick for $99 a month or $499 a month or whatever. All of these, all of the little startups that are like,

just call and talk to a doctor and you'll have it the next day. All of that stuff is powered by compounding pharmacies. Now, way. So this got so bad, the compounding pharmacy stuff has gotten so bad that the FDA has issued a number of official warnings about this, and specifically has warned against buying from these startups.

This is such a bizarre system. It's so weird. It's like, there's a shortage of this drug, so we're just gonna let people buy it from weird, fly-by-night, carnival, barker-ass companies selling whatever the fuck on the internet, we're not gonna regulate it at all. There's not enforcement mechanism

beyond these letters so far. They're not doing more than that yet, at least not in reporting. Do you have any sense of when this could resolve itself? Like as Nova Nordic said that they're massively ramping up production? Basically, the goalposts just keep getting moved for when the shortage will end. You know, I checked a couple months ago,

it said it would be over by the fall. I checked again, it said it would be over by the end of the year. Oh, it's like self-driving car. It's always five years away. Right on the horizon. As we're talking about these compounding pharmacies, big weight loss companies are buying up these startups. Oh.

Weight watchers bought one of these and their stock price jumped almost 60% in a day. Oh, from like $12 to like $16 or something. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's... Weight watcher's stock was not doing great, but the 60% increase is a 60% increase, you know? They've gone from a limp to a gate. And I would say because the discourse around this is all focused on like the real housewives are taking it and frivolous rich people and celebrities are taking it, it makes the issue seem like it isn't incredibly pressing

and important, particularly for people with type 2 diabetes, particularly for people who can't access health care and other basic needs at their current weight. This is the other thing about this discourse that drives me utterly fucking bananas is that there's not meaningful acknowledgement of the straight up income barriers to getting this medication.

Yeah. That this is a shortage that is largely presumably created by people with the disposable income to pay out of pocket for a weight loss medication that almost no insurers are covering. Right. You and I have discussed this until we're blue in the face. Like, neither one of us wants to litigate

individual behaviors, but like that is one that really doesn't sit right with me. My views on this are also very contingent. Honestly, like once we get to a point where these are super duper available, if you wanna take one to lose 10 pounds, genuinely I don't give a shit.

In the same way, I don't give a shit if you wanna get a nose job. Yeah, but like in time of a shortage. The same thing, there's an Adderall shortage. If you're not prescribed Adderall, don't take Adderall right now. If you don't need Sriracha. Ha!

I've been doing my part. I'm buying slightly less Sriracha than usual. Dude, the Sriracha shortage has been a big topic of conversation in our household. Are you still doing it? Can I cancel you for eating Sriracha in a time of need? We had a bottle, it was about halfway done. I got another one.

HIP a crit, totally. You're hoarding sriracha. One and a half bottles. Come take them from my cold daddy. So, Michael, I agree. This is unusual for us, but this topic was so big and expansive that you and I both actually

researched this one. And I dug in on sort of the discourse side and the reporting side. And you really dug in on the research side. So can you walk us through just like, what do we know from the research? This is a weird format break for us because ordinarily like one of us researches and one of us listens. But like, it would be odd to pretend that we haven't both been following this, like, obsessively for the last couple months. Yes. I have deliberately avoided the discourse because

I find the discourse annoying, but I have been following the research, and, like, I have a literal spreadsheet of, like, the various studies that have been done, and for these drugs, there's actually a quite finite amount of information. And I just, for the love of God, just want to like walk through what we know and what we can expect from these drugs. Yeah, sounds great. So basically, the trials of somagletide for weight loss

are all grouped under this heading of these step trials, which is the somaglottied treatment effect in people with obesity, which should be step O, but is actually step. Step O, what, the fifth Mark's brother? Yeah. And these are sort of classic pharmaceutical company randomized control trials.

They are global. They comprise 5,000 people. All of them are 68 weeks long. One of them is a little bit longer. We'll get to it. randomized control trials, they are global, they comprise 5,000 people, all of them are 68 weeks long, one of them is a little bit longer, we'll get to it. They are funded by novoinortisque, of course, and the way that they structure these, they sort of do it like moon missions,

you notice there's like Apollo one and Apollo two, these large pharmaceutical trials are like, there's step one, step two, step three, and they break them down into like specific things that they want to know. And step one, step two, step three, are not different phases in the same study, right? They are separate studies. So step one is like the overall, just like we're going to give fat people somagletide for weight loss. Step two is the same thing, but on people with type two diabetes. Step three is somagletide with intensive behavioral therapy. BLTs! And then the rest are kind of

like smaller shading. So step four is they put people on somagletide for a while and then they switch half of them to a placebo. Step five is a two-year trial. Step six and seven are the same thing, but they're done on Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese people. And step eight is testing somagletide versus one of the other GLP1. So it's somagletide versus lyragletide. So when you say, I hate these fucking names, step six and step seven are focusing on East Asian folks. It's worth mentioning that most of these trials for Wigovie in particular are just overwhelmingly white as many diet studies are.

One of the sort of leading meta-analyses of studies involving over 11,000 participants was 80% white, 10% black, and 5% AAPI? Although for diet studies, I mean, we both see diet studies they're like 97% white fairly frequently. So like, it's funny, like 80% white, and I'm like, oh, not bad.

Oh, my God. Bar isn't hell. Yeah, like by the standards of fucking diet research, it's like, oh, very diverse sample. The results of these somagletide trials are quite consistent, remarkably consistent. So roughly 80% of people who take somagletide lose some amount of weight,

roughly 5% of their body weight, and roughly half of people who take somagletide lose 10 to 15% of their body weight. So like a one in two chance of losing like a moderate amount of weight. And then the biggest number and the thing that is like sent the entire like weight loss industry into overdrive on this is that roughly one third of people who take somagletide lose more than 20% of their body weight, which is roughly on par with like bariatric surgery.

And then another thing that is like a pretty big deal about these drugs is that like the result seemed to hold up. So there's one trial where people took some agglatine for two years and like by the end of it, 36% of people had lost more than 20% of their body weight. So for about a third of patients, they're losing maybe three times as much weight and

previous interventions. We should also note that like there are pretty significant health effects of these drugs. So even in the shorter term trials, people have better blood pressure, they have better cholesterol, they have improved A1C levels. We also with the longer term trials, we've seen modest, but also, like, kind of big deal reduction in heart attacks and strokes. So that's really exciting. Yeah. If there is a drug that people can take, and they're less likely to die, yeah, I am pro that drug. I actually look this up, and it's roughly in line with the effect of statins.

So this is genuinely, like, a big deal, like even if you take the weight loss stuff off the table. Yeah. We should also talk about the side effects. The side effects of the drug seem to be almost universal. Some studies find, I think the lowest one I found was like 60% of people have like gastrointestinal symptoms, but then some of them are finding like 93% of people.

So it's like nausea, constipation, diarrhea, vomiting, the sort of tummy stuff that you would associate with like pretty significantly fucking with your like hunger and satiety hormones. In addition to all of those side effects, there is sort of this whole class of side effects that get covered mostly in like beauty media and like gossip blogs, like ozemic face. Have you heard about ozemic face? From you like 10 minutes ago, right? When we started recording.

It looks, some of us were trying to keep the illusion alive, Michael. So it's basically just the appearance of aging when taking ozemic. And it's just the result of rapid weight loss. However, you did it, it's not unique to ozampic. It's just when you lose a lot of weight really quickly, you end up with loose skin.

And some of that loose skin will be on your face. And that is also the same kind of thing that happens when people age, so you look older. So ozampic faces just like you lost weight face. Yeah, totally. These ones just strike me as we were talking about beforehand. Like, these ones just strike me as so fucking mean. It's also so fucked up because it's like,

our culture is telling you to lose weight all the fucking time and it's like, you finally do lose weight. It's like, what's happening to your face? Yeah, totally. Well, and people treated it as like some kind of like, come up in for like taking a drug or daring to lose weight or being too vain or whatever.

Like it's just steeped in so much judgment. But I'm like, could we just set that one down? There's also a bunch of like very rare side effects. So there's been some worry about pancreatitis. Some trials find that it like increases, but then there's a trial of a ragletide that finds that it actually decreases. There's concern about thyroid cancer, but that's based on rodent studies, and there haven't been any signs of that in the data, but we don't know kind of any longer than

one and a half to two years. There's slightly elevated rates of gallbladder disease, acute kidney injury, there's two cases in Iceland of suicidal ideation, and the European Medicines Agency is now looking into that. And just this week, the FDA updated the label on somagletide to include this thing, Ilius, which is basically when like digested food builds up in your intestine and backs up, and the only way to deal with it is surgery and its fatal. So we have 33 cases of this that have been reported to the adverse events database and two deaths.

But we don't sort of know what to make of those things because the adverse events database is like, as we've discussed on the know what to make of those things because the adverse events database is like, as we've discussed on the show before, is like anyone can submit cases, which basically is like a hotline. Yeah. And so it's something that is like people are looking into more and there's a study out of China last year that shows that this mechanism exists in mice, where it like basically stops bowel function. And there was some kind of warning in that study of like, uh, this might show up in humans and it might show up around the sort of 18 month mark,

meaning like after these studies would have concluded, but that's also like animal studies, super preliminary. We don't know, it's sort of like people don't really know what to make of this yet. Yeah, and you know, two people dying is nothing to... That's a huge deal, that's a huge deal. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. And I think especially in the context of previous diet drugs,

having sort of gone this way. Yeah. But then one thing that really stood out to me was, you know, we have these like near universal side effects. We have these like much more rare, much more severe side effects. But the dropout rates in these studies are really low. Yeah. What you find in most of the studies is almost everybody is getting some side effect or

another. And they typically happen in the first couple weeks of the study when you're up in your dose. It actually takes four months to get up to the 2.4 milligrams weight loss dose. But it typically goes away as people kind of get used to the drugs. And so in the two-year study, there were 150 people who completed the two-year trial and only 10 of them dropped out due to adverse effects, which is only 6%. So like, what this indicates is that like people are getting side effects, but most like the vast majority of people are willing to like push through the side

effects and like complete these trials. Yeah, so what you're saying is folks are more likely to stay in these studies than other studies into sort of like how folks can lose weight. Yes. So, so far I've kind of been presenting like the case for some agglatine, like the way that you read about it in these clinical trials. I've been reading a lot of things from like, people in the weight loss world, and this is how they talk about the drug, right?

Is it it's delivering very significant weight loss? The dropout rates are relatively low, and before we get to complicating that picture a little bit, I think it's important to, first of all, just like acknowledge that that is the data that we have, and I think this new generation of weight loss drugs is like genuinely just a big deal.

At the same time, to me, like the most bizarre thing about the discourse, especially recently, but you know, since the results of these trials started coming out, it's like the weird victory lap that people have been doing. It's like, okay, we know we have something now that works for weight loss, right? We finally have an effective weight loss drug.

And then there's this weird sort of second order thing where they're like, what are the fat activists gonna do now? Like this ruined body positivity and there's all this weird shit of like, well, now we have a cure for obesity, right? And I feel like just to sort of take these results as we've been presented with them, right? Like the quote unquote best possible version

of these events, right? All of the weight loss, all of the benefits, everything. It's like, we're talking about a drug that 50% of people who take it will lose 15% of their body weight. And like, that is not a world without fat people. This is like the aspect of the drug that drives me absolutely fucking nuts. It's not going to end the quote unquote obesity epidemic.

It just isn't. We still, as a society, need to work on like, stigma against fat people, improving medical care for fat people, all of the things we say on this show are still fucking true if every single person in America loses 15% of their body weight. And that is a dramatic overestimation of what's even about to happen, right? Even if, as you say, even if they work exactly as they are projected to, even if the data

doesn't change one bit with future trials, someone my size goes from being 330 pounds to being 280 pounds. That would take me from being a person with an obese BMI to being a person with an obese BMI. This whole thing about, is this the end of the obesity epidemic? like, you know, is this the end of the obesity epidemic? Like, A, no, it's not, as you've pointed out. But B, that is the meanest fucking thing to say. We currently have this fucking nightmare bullshit, which is like the whole fucking show is dedicated to this, where it's like a fat person goes into the doctor for a migraine,

and they're like, I have a migraine. And the doctor's like, you should go on a diet. Yeah, and then it's like, you haven't asked me what I do, you haven't asked me if I eat fast food, you haven't asked me fucking anything. You're giving me this bullshit ass advice when all I want is fucking advice from my migraine, right? Yeah.

We're now going into a scenario where you go into the doctor with a migraine. They're like, you should go on ozemic. Yeah. And you're like, well, I've already been on ozemic three times. And I was, I was one of the half of people who lost less than 10% of my body weight. I was costing me more than my fucking rent.

I was having weird side effects. People report like not enjoying food anymore, which is like really sad to think about. Yeah. And then the minute I went off of it, I gained all the fucking weight back and I've done that four times. And when I'm going in,

you're giving me this generic bullshit fucking advice to go on Ozempic, you haven't asked me whether I've been on it before. You haven't asked me about weight cycling. You haven't asked me whether I tolerate the drug or if it intersects with some like antidepressant that I'm taking. You're just redoing the same fucking thing, except instead of going on a diet, it's

go on ozempic. Yeah. And like, in the same way that it's not possible for everyone to go on a fucking diet or they've been on a million already, it's not possible for everyone to go on fucking ozempic and it's not gonna work for everybody. I mean, I told you this off mic, but I think this is the darkest episode that I have researched for us. Yeah, it's really bad. It is really upsetting.

And I will say, not just on an individual level, but also, like, systemically, like, I stopped seeing doctors for like eight years. I've written about this a bunch of times. And that was at the height of like, the bariatric surgery craze. And that really fucking fueled how doctors would talk to me and what treatments they would offer me. And it was a very frequent conversation of me being like, Hey, I'm 24 and I have an entry level position at a non-profit

where I feel fortunate to have health coverage at all, no, I don't have 25 grand for a weight loss. But that still became a thing amongst healthcare providers who we already know are more likely to think of fat patients as non-compliant, as slavently, as unattractive, as weak-willed, as all of these things. This becomes another reason for that group of people also to stop listening to fat people.

Like, yeah, it's going to get harder for me to get healthcare. Right. That's part of what's about to happen. This is why I wanted to go out of my way to like, insufferably present the results of these trials as if they will hold up, because even in a world in which that happens, that doesn't call anything into question

about the need for equal treatment. And at the same time, the results of these trials are extremely unlikely to pan out in the real world. Yeah, totally. So I have three reasons why these drugs are very unlikely to pan out and deliver like that and of obesity or all the stuff that the inseparable discourse has been telling us. We're tucking into the debunk bed.

Yeah, you're this is much more comfortable space for us. The first is that the populations that are being studied in these trials are actually relatively narrow. So step one, which is the trial that's kind of the overall, like, just normal weight-loss drugs being given to people, I'm going to read you the exclusion criteria. People were not able to participate in step one if they have a history of major depressive disorder. They have a diagnosis of a severe psychiatric disorder. They fill out the patient health questionnaire with a score of over 15. This is one of those questionnaires

that has like, I have feelings of hopelessness, like rank from like every day to like never. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's basically a measure of like how depressed you are. It's like, are you feeling tired? One of them is, do you have poor appetite or overeating? It's like a funny exclusion criteria to include in this. They're also excluding people with a lifetime history

of a suicide attempt. Any history of myocardial infarction, stroke, hospitalization, any kind of existing cardiovascular stuff, known or suspected abuse of alcohol or recreational drugs, and female who is pregnant, breastfeeding, intends to become pregnant, or is of child-bearing age and not using a highly effective contraceptive method.

Holy shit, that cuts out so many people, Michael. Well, the thing is, I mean, with these studies, like I sort of get why people who design studies do this stuff, because they want to start with a kind of baseline of like, quote unquote, normal people without a bunch of like pre-existing conditions, which I get for the purpose of a trial. I get why you want to have like a clean quote unquote sample. However, once these drugs get out into the real world, they're going to be taken by people with depression. Like when you're designing

a trial like this, I imagine you're walking a real line, right? You want the trial itself to be safe for the people who participate in it. So you want to eliminate things like existing heart conditions, like anything existing, pinkriatic conditions, anything sort of related to the mechanisms involved in this drug, I totally get that, right? And you don't want it to make anything worse for anybody,

like just on like a human level. That totally makes sense to me. The trick is all of that gets translated into an assumption that this is how it will play out for all people who are not being monitored in a study and provided the drug for free. And all people who have all of these other conditions that are extremely prevalent in the US, right?

And also, I mean, I probably should have started with this, but the second reason why it's unlikely that these are going to deliver on their results that we're seeing in the trials is because there are real world studies of somagletide and they don't find the same results. So there's a study in the US that followed like people who went to weight loss clinics and got these drugs for one year.

If you remember in the trials of these drugs, the average weight loss was around 15%. Yeah. In the real world trial, people are losing 7.5% of their body weight. And there are other real world trials. It's quite remarkable actually that find almost the same thing that like the weight loss, you know, 80% of people lose 5% of their body weight or more.

In the real world, that tends to be around 40%. So almost all of the numbers that we're seeing in these randomized control trials are half once we get to the real world. They're not zero, right? So this still is going to be, again, a big deal, but we're not seeing in the real world those results continue to show up.

Yeah. It's not totally clear why this is happening. One of them appears to be that in the randomized controlled trials, people aren't just taking the drug. They're also getting like dietary counseling. So one of the trials is super intensive behavioral therapy where they're meeting with dieticians once a week, but in all of the other trials,

they're doing monthly check-ins with counselors and they're having all of these bio-markers taken. And I think there's something about people just being in a study, you really want to finish, because you're like, oh, I'm part of this project, and it's experimental and super cool. And the adherence rates for these randomized controlled trials are significantly higher

than we have in the real world. When you look at the real world trials, even among people who have type two diabetes and who really need these drugs, a lot of them are finding 50% dropout rates after two years. And some of them, one of them finds 70% dropout rates. You can already see as we're sort of like walking through this research, the gap between the popular claims that are being made about these drugs and what the research actually says.

That's where we got to with FENFEN, that's where we got to with Ally, that's where we got to with like, this is sort of a pattern with weightless drugs, is that we get out over our skis culturally with like this kind of magical thinking excitement stuff. We then make a bunch of policy decisions based on the excitement and not the data. And then we're kind of stuck with these sort of adjusted systems that were, again, changed based on what we thought was possible, not what we were actually seeing.

Exactly. And the other thing that, again, we have very good data on is that people tend to regain all of the weight the second they stop taking these drugs. So one of the step studies switched people from somagletide to a placebo at 20 weeks. There's also a trial of another GLB1 tearsepatide, these fucking tides, that did the same thing after 36 weeks, they switched people to a placebo.

And basically it's like people start regaining the weight very quickly. And like within a year, they've regained almost all of the weight. These drugs seem to put people in the same cycle as fat diets, but just with like more dramatic and like longer results. Well, and the people that I have heard

talk about taking these drugs are like, I'm just gonna take it until I get down to X weight and then I'm gonna stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And that is people's plan for how this is gonna happen. And that's not how these drugs work. I'm seeing this discourse among weight loss clinicians too, where they're like, well, ultimately it comes down

to diet and exercise. And so we need to get building drugs and then teach them the diet and exercise stuff. And the rest they know that we can take them off the drugs. But this trial of kersepatide, the other drug, had people on an intensive behavioral therapy program when they went off the drug. So people took it for a while,

then they switched to a placebo while still doing like exercise and like cooking classes and all this stuff that everybody says is so fucking effective, and they can eat all the way back. This is another case of pump the brakes and ask a fat person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does anybody try to teach you how to cook?

Does anybody offer you a gym membership? Has anybody told you that your form was wrong while you were working out? This is every day. The reason that people think that in part is that it reinforces our existing beliefs about fat people, right? Which is just that they're too lazy or they're too unintelligent or they're too uninformed

to just do it for themselves. So they need a thin person to teach them how. This is going on my Aubrey Gordon Soundboard. Yes, definitely ask a fat person. I mean, genuinely, that's gonna be my advice. Like 80% of the time is like, have you even talked to a fat person about this? This is another like super fucking familiar pattern

where it's like, okay, everyone should go on Atkins because the low fat diets work and then like, or low carb diets work. And then of course, after like six months, everyone gains the weight, you know, and then it's like, it's like, well, if you stayed on it, you would've kept the weight off, which is true. Fine, if you can stay on it.

But no one can fucking stay on it. Yeah. Right, we know, in the real world, no one can stay on these extreme low carb diets for very long. Yeah. So let's move forward on that basis that no one can fucking stay on them, right?

And with this, it's gonna be the same thing of like, well, Othemic does work if you can stay on it. Yeah, okay, but people aren't staying on it. We know from real world data that even when it's fucking free, people are not staying on it. Well, and if you do stay on it, people characterize it as the easy way out. Yeah, and then you have this bullshit, right?

Like Oprah was just saying the other day, like it's the easy way out, so I'm not gonna do it. And I'm like, Oprah, you were in your 60s. How hard do you think you need to have appeared to have tried? Yeah. And then like, listen, the discourse makes it worse because in the discourse is like, a bunch of the reporting is like,

we really need to tamp down on the stigma facing people who take ozampic. And I'm like, is that the stigma that we need to clamp down on? What's so fucking annoying to me about this discourse? You have like successfully radicalized me on this in like the last 72 hours. Oh, okay.

As I've been, as I've been reading this, it's like this shows up everywhere. Like, what about the stigma of taking the drugs? But the stigma of taking ozempic is fat phobia. It's the same fucking stigma that fat people are facing. But just like, oh, you're taking the easy way out by using a weight loss drug. That's the connection between fatness and virtue.

You should lose weight in the virtuous way. Take the stairs. Yeah, take the fucking stairs. It's like, well, you should lose weight in the virtuous way. Take the stairs. Yeah, take the fucking stairs. It's like, well, you might look thin, but you're really a fat person. Yeah. You cannot muster any fucking gumption from anybody to like give a shit about stigma against fat people,

but they're super chill to invoke fat phobia against people who stop being fat. And they still do the fucking stigma against fat people. And they still do the fucking stick them against fat people. And they still do it. It's also been fascinating, I'll say, on the discourse end, that like, there have been all of these bizarre, hand-wringing pieces from thin people being like, was body positivity for nothing?

I know, it was all a lie. The vast majority of fat people were under no illusions about broader social acceptance. At best, people said fewer unwanted things about our bodies. It never stopped. We were never lifted up. We were never centered. We got one Lizzo out of it.

Right? And we don't even have that anymore. And we don't even have that anymore. I don't even have that anymore. Like, right, like, the degree to which this discourse is thin people telling themselves stories that they want to hear. It's funny to me that like, we like, meticulously like outline this and plan that out, but neither one of us can resist talking about the discourse.

I mean, it's so much. Like, it's fast-forwarding. It's like that. I hate it. Okay, Michael, we've talked about the drug. Let's talk about the manufacturer of the drug. Yeah. Ozempic and Wigovie are both made by Novo Nordisk. It's a big pharmaceutical company from Denmark.

From Denmark. And their marketing practices have really set the template for all the discourse we've been seeing since. Okay. Wait, are there ads for Wigovie and Ozanpec? You haven't seen the O-O-O-Ozanpec? That's like the cover songs that are in all the fucking trailers now.

The very slow, brooding cover of like, I went my hair back and forth. I'm blue, Bado, D-D-D-O-Di. You think it's like super dark? Yeah. I'm blue, Badoodidadudine. You got it, like, super dark. Yeah. No, as we've discussed many times, we're on very different, like, Instagram experiences

and, like, algorithms. And, like, I've never seen an ad for weight loss anything. I'll tell you what, Mike, I might give you homework at one point and be like, okay, so watch a half an hour of TV and tell me what you notice about the ad. Dude, no! Hahaha!

Absolutely not. I watched a restaurant TV like once a fucking year when I'm like visiting my grandma and I'm like, this is like, this is like actively making me stupider. It's like shocking how bad it is. So, we're gonna talk a little bit about the marketing practices at Novo Nordisk. Okay, there is a lot here that leaves me feeling icky.

A very good example of this is a campaign called It's Bigger Than Me. Have you seen this campaign at all? Is it like billboards? There are ads, there are billboards, there are branded segments on TV shows, there are so many things. The slogan is, obesity, it's bigger than me.

Okay. The idea behind the campaign is, obesity, it's bigger than me. Okay. The idea behind the campaign is, it's not your fault, your fat, followed immediately by, it's because you have a disease, and that disease requires medical treatment. Right. And that medical treatment can only be provided by one company.

It's bigger than me. It's $15,000 per year. Yeah, that's right. That's right. As part of this campaign, Nova and Ordesk has specifically courted black public figures and particularly black women as spokespeople. Their first spokesperson was Queen Latifa.

Their next was Ivett Nicole Brown, who was on community. Their third was Roland Martin from CNN, who ran an hour-long segment on fatness in black communities that was listed as quote unquote, powered by Novo Nordisk. That's like when influencers say like, I've partnered with Nike or whatever. It's like, it's just them paying you to say words. Well, and on top of that,

the reporting around the, quote unquote, it's bigger than me campaign is just rife with like the most garbage messages about vatness and body positivity and all kinds of stuff. So I read an interview with a Vettnickel Brown with the Grio in that interview. She said, quote, being focused on your health does not mean that you're not body positive.

I think it's actually the most exemplary way that you can be body positive because you need your body to continue to live. Aubrey, were you just like losing your mind? You made this body positivity stuff already. This is like, this is reifying everything you've said about the whole body positivity, thing that it's all just like they're repackaging

the same shit and selling it back to you. The article goes on to say that quote, Brown said somewhere down the line, society at large developed the idea that if your body positive, you can't care about physical health. Oh. In my notes, I wrote in all caps,

who is saying this? Who fucking said this? Oh all caps, who is saying this? Who fucking said this? Who is saying this? And it's like trolls, right? It's like it's seeding a bad faith argument. To be like, we don't think that's true. Look at what all those nutty people are saying. They're wrong.

This is like when conservatives are like, feminists don't even want you to get married and have kids. It's the phenomenon that has built Michael Hobbs Twitter feed. Eeeeeeeh! Hey! You're familiar with my work. So, our third section, Michael, discourse,

is the part that I have realized is most troubling to me, and that is, that is course. There's been a lot of garbage media about this in the last year. Here are three actual fucking headlines from coverage of this. Ooh, one. Will Ozempic change how we think of being fat and thin?

Question mark? Okay. Life after food? Question mark? Yeah. And Ozempic settles the obesity debate. Oh, it is just bad faith proclamations and bullshit question mark headlines,

like as far as the eye can see, what I am worried about is that when we see a wave of media, like we have seen around ozempic, we also tend to see a wave of increased antifat bias, right? And the reporting that I have seen so far, the think pieces that I have seen so far, none of them are grappling with that. Right, very few people are asking fat people

what they need in this moment, and nobody is asking diabetic people what they need in this moment. Like a thing that I experientially know in every bone in my body is that when people I know start to lose weight, the vast majority of them start to see themselves as more virtuous, whether they want to or not, whether they mean to or not, whether or not they would say it out loud. Yeah. It's very common for people to expect social reinforcement for weight loss.

Right. And I would say now, as I have said, for years now, which is you have got to get people's consent to do that. The best case scenario is that you're sending a message that you're like not a very good friend to a fat person, right? And the worst case scenario is that you're increasing the stigma that they face and potentially also like triggering people's eating disorders. Yeah. Like this shit is not unthorny and the fact that you're hearing it everywhere doesn't make it less urgent. I would argue it makes it more urgent to like double up on those boundaries. Like you have got to give fat people

an out for this conversation and like got to stop presuming that this is like a good and exciting conversation for everybody. I am like not all that invested in like the drugs themselves, the drugs are the drugs. Yeah, it seems to me. I mean, maybe they'll be effective way lost drugs,

maybe they won't, I don't know. But like, given what we know now, the most likely scenario is that like, they're going to be prescribed to millions, potentially tens of millions of people. And like, what you said to me the other day, is that like, you can see the number of people who lost like 15 fucking pounds. And then all of a sudden are like really mean to fat people, just like exponentially increasing. The other thing that I will say about the discourse around this is that every like celebratory story about Ozentvik

that comes out now, that's all going to be mirrored by future panicky think pieces on the rising costs of obesity and the fat people are bankrupting us once again, right? This is an unbelievably expensive medication and all of that is going to come back to scapegoating fat people once again, right? That like right now we're saying it's frivolous housewives and whatever when we get into the insurance conversations, we're not gonna be scapegoating rich people. We generally don't do that. We scapecoat poor people, bipock, fat people, queer people.

You know what I mean? We've got a list of people we scapegoat. We're also setting ourselves up for another round of excruciating discourse in another couple of years when people look around and they're like, wait a minute, there's still fat people. Yeah. All the magazines told me a couple of years ago

that this was the end of obesity and yet, people are still fat. We should also say, like, listen, you will face serious, serious fucking stigma as a person who stays fat. To trust me, a person who has stayed fat through all the interventions, right? Like, I've already started shifting socially, you know,

I'm already a very homebody, indoorsy kind of lady. And I'm already restricting who I socialize with pretty dramatically, because of this kind of talk and because I'm unwilling to be in spaces where the shit will come up. And for me, that means functionally like a vast majority of people I know who are not fat and some people I know who are. Right. I just want people to understand like the stakes of this as a fat person

are I feel like I don't belong in the world. Right. When people talk about how great it's gonna be when I'm not around, it's that's not me being too sensitive, that's not fat people taking it too hard, that's you saying plainly. Right.

Everything will be better when you're gone. Right. And then fat people like taking that message, that's horrible. The fact that you have been through so many rounds of this, it's like, why aren't you on FENFEN? Why aren't you on Bury Antrim surgery? Why aren't you clean eating? Why aren't like all this is, is just new packaging.

For like, why aren't you thin? Yeah. And like, that is just new packaging. For like, why aren't you thin? Yeah. And like, that is worth listening to. This isn't like a paranoid fantasy on the part of fat people. This is something that they've been through no more as times over the course of their lifetimes now. We're just doing the same thing again, even when the data does not remotely indicate

that we're not gonna have fat people anymore. It never has. We're always gonna have fat people and there's always going to be people whatever the medical intervention is that can't use it or it doesn't work for them or they've tried it already. That's always gonna be the case.

The fact that people are so obsessed with asking the question, is this the end of obesity? Like really early. Yeah. Is this gonna be the reason we don't have fat people around anymore? It's like it's so fucking telling. Yeah. Like, is this gonna be the reason we don't have fat people around anymore? It's like it's so fucking telling. So moving forward, we're gonna continue to get these drugs.

We're gonna continue to get this sort of quote-unquote gold rush. And in that time, I think it is worth being extra skeptical and returning to the voices of fat people and diabetic people when media isn't doing that for us, right? To actually return to the people who are most impacted by this debate and to spend way the fuck less time

speculating about Elon, Musk, and Courtney Kardashian and making celebrities defend themselves and trying to think through. How do we get these drugs to people who need them? How do we design a better discourse that isn't so wildly dehumanizing to fat people and again to diabetic people, right? And like how do we just show up for people a little bit more around this stuff and interrupt some of this like, dance in the street kind of energy

that is like really upsetting to see as a rapper. Right. Okay, we've done enough table setting. Let's start the stage. You ready? It's been two hours and 45 minutes. This is pretty good. Ready, go.

Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Thank you.

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