Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Johann Hari: What They Don't Tell You About Ozempic

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Johann Hari Exposes SHOCKING Secrets About "Magic" Weight Loss Drugs. Discover What They DON’T Tell You About Ozempic.   Johann Hari (bestselling author, author of MAGIC PILL: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs) reveals how his childhood trauma led him to uncover the DARK SIDE of society's obesity epidemic and exposes the 12 RISKS of GLP-1 drugs, from depression and suicidal thoughts, to malnutrition and the startling impact on those with disordered eating. He discusses why he had contradictory feelings when he first learned about the potential benefits of these drugs as he opens up about his prior struggle with obesity and his own experience taking GLP-1 drugs, including why he started feeling worse emotionally and how his relationship with food has changed.   Uncover the hidden agenda behind these drugs—they might save lives, but at what cost? And what impact will this have on the body positivity movement? Johann dives deep into the biological, psychological, and social factors fueling this crisis. It's a wake-up call for society—can we REVERSE the damage before it's too late?   PLUS, find out the surprising impact of these drugs on addiction recovery and the economic fallout of challenging the obesity industrial complex!   Johann Hari explains the cruel reality that it's NOT YOUR FAULT you can't lose weight! Don't miss out on understanding the real causes of obesity and why willpower alone isn't enough. TUNE IN to MBB today!   Johann Hari's latest book, Magic Pill: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743989/magic-pill-by-johann-hari/   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's been this extraordinary scientific breakthrough. We now have a weight loss drug that produces staggering amounts of weight loss. The first time I learned about this, I immediately felt two totally contradictory things. The first thing I thought was, well, this could save my life. The second thing I thought was, wait a minute, this sounds way too good to be true. I ended up going on this big journey all over the world to interview the leading experts, the biggest critics of the drugs, the biggest defenders of the drugs. it had an effect that I really did not see coming.

It was the strangest thing because I was getting what I wanted. I was losing loads of weight. I did feel physically better. But weirdly, I did not feel emotionally better. And if anything, I felt slightly worse. And I remember very consciously a voice in my mind saying, you're just going to have to feel bad now. There it is.

At the moment, people like me have a choice that is really painful. It's between a risky medical condition and a risky set of drugs. That doesn't have a problem. to be the choice. 47% of Americans want to take these new weight loss drugs. How the fuck did we get here? How do we get to the point where half the population want to take a drug to reduce their eating? What's going on? What I would like us to do is skip the bit where we give absolutely everyone who wants it, whether they need it or not, these weight loss drugs, get a massive death toll of young girls who starve themselves to death in a way they would not have been able

to otherwise. And then we go, oh shit, we're going to have to bolt this door, right? I would like us to do it now. Am I skeptical that we'll get there, given the corruption of the American political system, given that the pharmaceutical companies own Washington, D.C. Yes, I am. We don't have to tolerate this. We can fix this. We can put this right. We've got a new tool to deal with this problem, which is exciting and disturbing. And I hope it wakes us up to go, how the fuck did we get to this point? It's my and Bialics breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because, you know, She knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down.

So break down. She's going to break it down. Hi, I'm I. I'm Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. I mean, I'm going to use sarcasm to start this episode.

I'm sure this episode will be completely unrelatable to all of you because it deals with why do we eat? Why do we eat too much? Why do we restrict our eating? Is Ozempic the answer to not only what ails us about how we look, but about how we feel? How are addictions related in terms of alcohol consumption, workaholism, food, even emotional connection?

Relationship issues. Yohan Hari is going to be talking with us about magic pill. his new book, which is about the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. He is someone who takes Ozempic and he writes about his entire journey. If you don't know who Johan Hari is, I'm very excited for you to get to know him. He has written an incredible book called Chasing the Scream about addiction, lost connections, about antidepressants and kind of the failed promise of antidepressants. He's also written Stolen Focus about our addiction to being distracted and all of his books take a similar approach.

He uses storytelling, his personal experience, and he travels all over the world to meet the preeminent scientists and thinkers who are tackling these issues in the ways that actually change the way we not only think about these topics, but also the way we think about legislation and restrictions around the use of things like Ozempic.

He's also an enormous fan of the movie Beaches, which Mind Bialek is in, and he goes fanboy over this. If you like beaches, you're going to want to hear us talk about it. Also, his TED Talks have been viewed over 90 million times. Highly recommend you check him out. He's been praised by everyone from Oprah to Arnold Schwarzenegger. His books have been made into an Oscar-nominated film, an eight-part TV series with Samuel Jackson. he's a really interesting thinker and writer and also just a real delight to talk to.

It is such an honor to welcome to the Breakdown, Johan Hari. Break it down. Can't just say? Between the ages of 9 and 14, I watched the film beaches. I watch the film beaches literally almost every single day. This is not happening. I thought you may have no idea who I am

and I was totally fine with that. So what I want to insist is I'm doing this podcast on one condition, which is that at least two thirds the way through, we reenact the young Barbara Hershey-Bet Middler scenes, in which I will be Hillary and you can be CC Bloom. Otherwise, I'm not doing it. That's my one condition, right? If that's not the cold open, I don't know what is.

You were asking Valerie, who our best or most favorite guest was, I think it's you. I think you just scored that. A, you're eating, which is adorable. and B, you would like to reenact scenes from beaches with me, and I thought you may have no idea who I am, and I'm a huge fan of yours. Oh, I'm so excited.

I'm ludicrously excited for this, like ludicrously. So I had a list of things I was going to tell you to win your favor, but it seems like I'm already in your favor. You have no need. The favor, you could not be more in my favor. As I said, I'm a very big fan of yours, and, you know, have really been very moved, very comforted by your writing. You know, in particular, the, you know, the notion of your journey through antidepressant land,

through depression and kind of out the other side. And I have friends, you know, who say that your writing on addiction is some of the best description of their struggles, that they've ever experienced. And so you have such a special place in my intellectual cold heart. But I think everyone should know who you are. I think everyone should read your books. I think that everyone should get to experience

what you have experienced and the journey that you've been on in so many realms of your life. And our audience might be an audience that does not know very well of your work, your research, your journalism, and sort of your identity. So I feel really excited to have you here because you speak about so many of the things that we try and get at. And, you know, it's kind of grown into, forgive me, you know, the kind of search that you have really dedicated

your life to, meaning what's wrong with us? Why do we keep circling the drain? You know, like, what we keep trying to like plug the hole and another spring opens up and we know we whack this mole and another one comes up and you know for people like me and jonathan who fortunately or unfortunately have a lot of experience with trying to like fill that god-shaped hole you know i talk a lot about it here i'll fill it with food i'll fill it with work i'll fill it with obsession about someone that i'm never going to be with like i will fill it with scotch at eight in the morning if you let me like I'll fill that God-shaped whole. And so, you know, you have this book,

The Extraordinary Magic Pill, the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs, but like all of your work, it's not just about that. But I want you to start by sort of giving us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch into what has been your experience with trying to figure out what's wrong with us,

what ails us. Oh, God, I feel a bit beclamped about what you're saying. so moving. And it makes me want to sing the glory of love, the song that you sing in perhaps the greatest cinematic masterpiece in history beaches. We will sing that before the end of this podcast, I promise you. But wow, God, that's so moving and incredibly touching. I think for me, you know, I grew up in a really crazy family where there was a lot of violence and addiction. And for me, every book I've ever written is an attempt to solve a mystery that I wanted to understand for myself. So like, I wrote a book about addiction called Chasing the Scream because

all my life I've been trying to help the people I love with addictions and I felt that nothing I did had made any difference. And I wanted to figure out, well, what am I meant to do? What's causing this problem. Why does our whole society seem to respond in a way that doesn't work? So, you know, I'm not an expert. I mean, I was trained in the social sciences at Cambridge University, so I know how to read a study and stuff like that. But I went on this big journey all over the world to try to figure that out. And I got to know a crazy mixture of people from, you know, a crack dealer in Brooklyn, a trans crack dealer in Brooklyn, who's one of the wisest people I know, to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel. He's actually not one of the wisest people I know, to, you know, the only country that

decriminalized all drugs with incredible results. So we're at this huge journey there. My second bit lost connections was about depression, because, you know, when I wrote it, I was nearly 40. And every year that I'd been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in the United States, in Britain, where I'm from, as you can tell from my weird downtown Abbey accent. And in fact, across the entire Western world, right? And I was like, what's going? on. Why are we finding it? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us find it harder to get through the day? And most importantly, what can we do to reverse this and get our lives back? My book's Star of Focus was about why we can't pay attention because I noticed my

own attention had gone to shit. Everyone I knew pretty much their attention was going to shit. It was like, what's happening to us? How do we get it back? And for this new book, it was, I just, I remember it so clearly discovering that we now have these drugs that can produce staggering amounts of weight loss and thinking, what is that going to mean for all of us, right? So I think for all of my books, for me, it starts with like, there's this thing I really need to understand for myself. It's actually quite selfish, right?

It's like, I want to, I get this for myself. and I want to go on a journey. Of course, I have ideas in my head at the start. I don't start with thinking nothing about the subject, but I'm pretty open-minded, actually, and going to all these places, and what I hope I do is I bring the readers with me, to go, come on this journey with me, right?

Come on this journey with me, let's go ask these big questions, let's go find the people who've got answers. And sometimes the answers are in the weirdest places, you know, the most drug-addictive corner of Vancouver led to a experiment that completely transformed how we think about addiction all over the world. Or, you know, a housing project in Berlin did a protest that transformed how I understood depression. Or there's so many of these things.

So the answers are not often, often, including in, for Magic Pill, my book about these new weight loss drugs, that's probably the biggest answer I got was in a village in Okinawa in the south of Japan, which is the oldest village in the whole world. has more people who are over 90 years old than anywhere else on earth. So for me it was, yeah, it's always looking for answers to big questions, reckoning with the complexity

and trying to take people with me as we ask these big questions. Miami-Bi Alex's breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water. There's no real data, there's no game plan.

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Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how. you heard about them, make sure to mention my ambiotics breakdown to help support the show. There are so many people who have addiction issues, who also are depressed, who have trouble with attention and distraction, and who want to lose weight. I feel like Magic Pill of all the books that you mentioned, you know, Magic Pill is the one, and I think Ozempic and these conversations, this is the topic that is opening up for, I think, the first time on a larger level, conversations about what addiction really is when we think about food in this arena.

Meaning, a lot of people will push away, you know, the notion of addiction. Like, I'm not a real addict, right? You know, I just enjoy edibles every night because that just makes me feel good, right? Or with depression, and I mean, this, it was revelatory when I read, when I read Lost Connections, because the notion that we're kind of all operating under a placebo concept, some people get assistance from antidepressants, but a lot of people don't, right? So it's like, I have a different kind of depression, right? Or that pill didn't work, so I should either think about killing myself or I give up or let me

find another way to fill it, right? And then with attention and distraction, everyone, nobody wants to give up their phone. No one wants to admit that the reason that they have attention problems and are distracted is that they are constantly scrolling on their phones, right? But with this book and with the conversations around OZempic, a really remarkable thing has started happening in that other addictions and other behavioral features are being impacted by this class of drugs.

can you describe what doctors are seeing, what people are reporting, and how you connect that to a larger understanding of what food is doing for us and what weight is also doing for us? Yeah, I mean, there's so much in what you just said. Probably too much. That's what Jonathan's thinking. No, no, no, not at all. You're totally right.

These are exactly the questions we need to be asking. So I guess I would start with understanding a Zen pick. I remember the first time I learned about these drugs, right? So for people who don't know, there's been this extraordinary scientific breakthrough. We now have a weight loss drug that produces staggering amounts of weight loss over the long term. So if you take Ozempic or Wagovi, they're the same drug marketed under different names. You lose on average 15% of your body weight within a year. If you take Munjaro, you lose on average, which is the next in this class of drugs.

You lose 21% of your body weight. And if you take Triple G, which will probably be available next year, you lose. to lose 24% of your body weight, which is only slightly below mariatric surgery. And I remember the first time I learned about this, I immediately felt two totally contradictory things. The first thing I thought was, well, this could save my life. I was just about to turn older than my grandfather ever got to be. He died of a heart attack when he was 44.

Loads of the men in my family have heart disease. my dad had terrible heart problems, my uncle died of a heart attack, and I knew that obesity, while we should always and passionately oppose stigma, I also knew the scientific evidence was very clear that obesity massively increases health problems on average, makes you much more likely to have a heart attack and over 200 known diseases and complications. So I thought, wow, if you're telling me there's a drug that can massively reduce or reverse obesity, that could make a huge difference to me, right? The second thing I thought was, wait a minute, this sounds way too good to be true, right?

Can you really have such a thing as a free lunch? I guess with those, I think it would be a smaller free lunch. You know, this just doesn't ring true. So it's why for the book, I ended up going on this big journey all over the world, from Iceland to Minneapolis to Japan, to interview the leading experts, the biggest critics of the drugs, the biggest defenders of the drugs. And to really figure out what this means, what it feels like to take it. I took it myself. What it feels like to take it. What the benefits are, what the risks are, what it's going to do. But you've gone to the one that I actually think the most intrigued and surprised me, mine, which is that what it does to your psychology, because

it had an effect that I really did not see coming and that I think a lot more people need to be aware of and need to think about much more deeply. So when I started taking the drug, It makes you feel very full, very fast. I'm sure we'll go into why and how later, right? Talk us through what that looks like. Because do you feel like sickful or you're just like, I'm dumb, not going to eat anymore? I cannot communicate to you how bizarre it is.

Second day after I took Ozzympic, I was lying in bed, and I woke up and I thought, huh, I feel something really weird. What is it? And I couldn't actually locate in my body what it was. And it took me five minutes to realize I had woken up and I wasn't hungry. Every morning before that I would wake up

with a kind of really intense hunger. It was usually what got me out of bed. I thought, this is weird. And there's a diner up the street from where I live. And I went in and I ordered, I used to order every morning, which I'm slightly embarrassed to say, was a massive chicken sandwich

with loads of mayo in it. And normally I would inhale it and still have some potato chips, right? And I had like three mouthfuls. and I was full. I couldn't eat anymore. I didn't feel sick. I didn't want to eat anymore.

I remember thinking, this is weird. I remember when I left, Tatiana, the woman who runs the cafe shouting after me, Johan, are you okay? Because she'd never seen me leave any food, right? And we know what's happening there. So if either of you guys ate anything now, don't matter what it is,

your pancreas will produce a hormone called GLP1. And GLP1 is just part of your body's natural signals going, hey, guys, you've had enough. Stop eating. It's the breaks, basically. But natural GLP1 only stays around your system for a few minutes and then it goes away. What these drugs do is they inject into you an artificial copy of GLP1 that instead of sticking around for a few minutes, sticks around for a whole week, which is why when I go to eat, I have these three mouthfuls and I feel full. So I went from eating 3,200 calories on a good day to eating 1,800 calories a day. lost 42 pounds in a year, it was a very dramatic effect. Now, most people, you asked about

sickness, most people at the start, a really big majority, about 70% of people initially feel nauseous. And that could be quite unpleasant. For me, it was mild. Like, if I had randomly felt that nauseous one day, I wouldn't have, like, gone home and stayed in bed. But it wasn't very nice. For the vast majority of people, the nausea goes away over time. It can take a couple of months. Some people are nausea never goes away. They have to stop taking it, but they're quite a small minority. If you're getting injected with an artificial copy of GLP1 that lasts for a week, do you ever feel the craving to eat? Or it's more your mind saying, I should probably eat right now because that's the time it is and that's what I'm used to do it. Yeah, it's a really good question. So I go through in the book the 12 big risks associated with these drugs, which is different to the kind of side effects.

We can talk about the side effects, but these are like risks. And one of the risks is malnutrients. because some people, this happened to a very close relative of mine, some people, when they take the drug, it really just kind of seems to amputate their appetite, which suggests to me they're on two higher dose, and they just literally forget to eat. This never happened to me. I would still get hungry. I was just less hungry and more full, more quickly. But you're absolutely right. Some people, it's literally removes their desire to eat. And that's obviously really problematic. was, I'm about your age. And so, you know, I was raised in this generation of like, you know, when Pridikin came out and, you know, everybody was eating whole grains and like heart health and

people got obsessed with fiber for a minute and low fat. And I remember the ads for what was essentially marketed methamphetamine. It was speed that people would take, primarily women, and this is a huge component of this marketing, you know, is obviously, you know, towards this population. That was, you know, it was de rigue. You know, it was just, it's what everybody did. It was acceptable. And with that came, you know, this cultural obsession with thin, right?

Thin, you know, has always been in once we reached the point of, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs being somewhat satisfied, meaning, you know, I'm, my family's Eastern European, you know, were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. If you didn't have a fat baby, something was wrong. Like, something was wrong. Because, like, that's the, you know, that's a very old world survival instinct is that, like, weight is security, weight is protection. You want a plump baby.

You want to, they call them bracelets. You know, you want a baby whose arms are so chunky that, like, it literally looks like they're wearing bracelets of fat. But, you know, culturally, it became so fashionable, you know, to encourage this kind of thinness. And, you know, then we've seen this sort of like, you know, a rejection of fat shaming, which is, I think, extremely important. And we have this sort of body positivity. And maybe BMI is all wrong. And you can be, you know, of a certain BMI and still be healthy. But what's interesting to me, when the conversations around this drug started happening, you know, I'm trained

as a scientist and I actually studied, I studied Prader Willie syndrome, which is the largest cause genetic obesity is Prater Willey syndrome. And at that time, when I was in grad school, we were researching Grellin and we were looking at like, what makes you feel full? Because these individuals never feel full. And they will keep eating, you know, to the point of hurting themselves greatly. But what was so surprising to me is that with this medication, you're not losing weight because, like, it's changing your metabolism, you know, like you're not shifting a mindset. You're literally taking a drug that makes you not eat. And that felt scary to me because as someone who has disordered eating and works a 12-step program surrounding that, you know, for me, like, I have to

believe that learning that it is normal to take in nourishment, to eat three square meals a day, and if permitted by your sponsor, two healthy snacks, you know, this, this really, that's kind of what's scared me. And the way that I found out about OZemphic is I don't, I've stopped going on social media, which is better for everyone's mental health, not just mine, but the people around me. But I saw a link to like an awards show and I was like, I mean, look at the red carpet. Sometimes there's cool dresses and suits, whatever, you know. And I couldn't recognize anybody, meaning I was looking at people and I was looking at the name. And these were very well-known celebrities that I've watched my whole life. And there was something unrecognizable about them.

And it wasn't just that they were very, very thin. Like, their face didn't look like their face. You know, it was like in the Men in Black movie. It was like they were wearing a suit of them. You know, it was like, and I don't want to name names because I don't know who's on what. It's not my business. But to me, that felt astonishing. And when I learned about this drug, and again, I'm not going to say that I know who's on what. It may be. sense. And I'm like, oh, if you stop eating, you get really skinny. Right? It's odd to me, though, that that's the mechanism we're talking about. Yeah. And I think there's so many things what you just said again, which is so important. Remind me to come back to body positivity,

stigma and eating disorders, because those are all hugely important topics that I go into a lot in the book and that I'm really worried about. But let's do eating disorders. So let's do eating Disorder sounds like a horrific health pamphlet, but you know what I mean? That's what my bumper sticker says. So the way I think about these drugs, if I was going to put it in a crazy, slightly over-the-top way, these drugs are so powerful. They're a tool like fire, right? And fire is a really good tool if I use it to warm my house.

And it's a terrible tool if I use it to burn your house down, right? These drugs are so powerful. they're going to have staggeringly positive effects and staggeringly negative effects. So the staggeringly positive effects are kind of obvious. You know, the reason I decided to continue taking them, even though I'm very worried about many of the risks, is because if you take them and you started at obese, which I did, you are 20% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke.

So for me, that outweighs the real concerns I have about the other stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, right? it may well be 20 years from now. Someone in the rubble of the United States finds this podcast and goes, what a fool he was, because we discovered all these, the things he warns about were worse than he should have realized. But so for people, I think for people with heart disease, for people with some kinds of cancer risks, for some people with all sorts of stroke concerns, these drugs, I think they are literally quite possibly saving my life. There are other people where I think these drugs will kill them. and where we should urgently regulate these drugs to minimize that risk.

And the group I'm most worried about is people with eating disorders. So you'll know much better than me. I don't want to eating disorders explain to you. But from my experience with people I've known and loved to have eating disorders, there's a conflict within you, right? There's the biological part of you that wants to live and therefore wants to eat. And there's the psychological part of you that for complex reasons wants to starve yourself. Well, you're speaking about anorexia,

but I'm also talking about compulsive overeating, which is a protective mechanism, meaning it can bounce either way, right? Yeah, and that actually played out for me as well. So let's come back to that. But if we think about it in terms of eating disorders, you're absolutely right. Eating disorders is a broad umbrella term,

but I think about restrictive eating disorders at the moment. Let's come back to the other ones in a minute. But if we think about people with that conflict, right, what these drugs do, like we said before, is if you take them, they can, at a high dose, they can really just cut off your appetite. So as Dr. Kimberly Dennis, who's one of the leading eating disorders experts in the US, you should have her on, by the way, an amazing person.

She said to me, you know, these drugs are rocket fuel for people with eating disorders. And my concern, this is me speaking now, not her, is that there will be really significant numbers of young girls. It is overwhelming young girls, a few boys, who will be able to starve themselves to death using these drugs in a way they would not have been able to do. without them. And that's terrifying.

Now, there's something we can do immediately to reduce that risk, which is at the moment, like I can see both of you, right? Because we're speaking on Riverside. Very visibly, neither of you are eligible for these drugs, right? But I guarantee you,

when we get off this call, you can make an appointment on Zoom and get these drugs delivered to you tomorrow morning. It's been suggested to me as an actor in Hollywood because at a size six, I am larger than most stylists will dress. And I literally had a doctor's appointment for a job. And I definitely had more weight on me than now, but I wouldn't say that I was an unhealthy weight.

And without even asking, he's like, do you want some? And I said, no, no, thank you. Well, it does amazing things, you know. I said, no, no, I'm good, thanks. So, you know, if you live in a place like Los Angeles also, like they're going to start putting it in the water. Yeah. I think you're totally right.

And one of the things we need to do is we need to very tightly restrict these drugs. They should only be given to people have a BMI higher than 27 or people have type 2 diabetes. That's a different use for the drug. And you should only be able to get them from in-person appointments. Johan, it's not going to happen because we said this about antidepressants. Crescence. We said it about, we said it about psilocybin. We said it about all these things that if you do it in a therapeutic way, right? We're talking. This is the thing. I mean, we said it about pot too. And like my kids are like, it's so cool. You could just go to like a candy store of pot, right?

We've said this about all these things. Like, that's my fear. And that's why I become this like crazy socially conservative, like put all the fences around it, put all the rules around it. Because no one will protect people, especially not the guy. government of this country. Well, I totally understand where you're coming from, and I basically agree with you, but I would say we do do quite a good job of regulating alcohol, actually. I bet your kids, if they're under 21, can't go into a bar, right? And they can't go into a liquor store and buy alcohol.

So there's some things we do actually do a pretty good job of protecting people from, not like guns, for example, going to be crazy. So I'm not saying we do a great job. No, but it's a great point. It can be done, right? It's a great pain. It can be done. So, and there are lots of things we do actually regulate, you know,

you and I could not go to the doctor and get, you know, all sorts of drugs that are prescribed just by asking for them, right? There are loads of things a doctor would say, no, I'm not going to give you this drug for, you know, whatever it might be because you don't have that illness, right? So we do, we're fairly good. Okay, but a lot of doctors in your 15-minute visit, if you say, gosh, I'm really having trouble sleeping. And I'm really, like, take an SSRI that we have no idea if it's even indicated for you.

Do you have a history of mania? Is there any suicide in your family? That's when SSRIs become a weapon and not a tool, right? So for me, like, I mean, and look, I don't mean to, like, collapse everything onto you, but I do want you to take on, you know, like the FDA next and also the entire, you know, healthcare system. Well, because it's not unrelated. It's not unrelated, you know? No, unrelated. No, you're totally right. And I think when you think about it in relation to eating

disorders, I would beg people to do that regulation. My fear is that what we will end up doing is what we do with opioids, where it will be, now the opioid crisis is actually more complicated than people think. The biggest driver of the opioid addictions was actually despair. We can talk about that more if you want. But clearly, the drug companies gave out opioids far too liberally, far too much, and indeed created financial incentives for doctors to give it out, which was horrendous. Criminal. But what, so my fear is that the pattern will be, so obviously what happened is massive over-prescription

and an underselling of the risks led to horrific catastrophe. Now it's much more restrictive with opioids. What I would like us to do is not repeat that. Because opioid-based painkillers have very good uses as well as, of course, harmful uses. What I would like us to do is skip the bit where we give absolutely everyone who wants it,

whether they need it or not, these weight loss drugs, get a massive death toll of young girls who starve themselves to death in a way they would not have been able to otherwise. And then we go, oh shit, we're going to have to bolt this door, right? I would like us to do that now.

Do I agree with you that, am I skeptical that we'll get there, given the corruption of the American political system, given that the pharmaceutical companies own Washington, D.C.? Yes, I am, but I do think we should argue for it, right? And I do think we should. I want to ask a million other things, but Jonathan has a much better brain for circling back to the other things that we're supposed to talk about.

Also, Jonathan has an excellent beard. I'm very impressed. I tried to grow a beard last year and it looked like a childhood drawer on my face. There's a drug for that, Johan. We'll give you a drug. You can have the longest beer. You could be like a Hasidic rabbi by next week.

Shoot me up. It destroys your memory and your ability to communicate, but no one cares. Who needs a memory? I have facial hair of that quality. I think we should slow down a second and get into the... Because we started hot, which we like to do.

And, you know, I think we started with... Maybe on a something, I'm always hot. Let's say someone doesn't know about this. You know, they've heard the term... Sure. Bring us up to speed if you were talking to someone who they're like, hey, what is this? What's going on? What's happening here? And just give us a little bit of the landscape. It's an injection. It's a pill. Why are people doing this? Give us a little bit of the

context. Yeah, it's a really good point. So like I say, this is a new kind of weight loss drug that works in a totally different way that massively boosts your sense of being full. At the moment, most people take it as an injection, but pills are available. The pills are slightly less effective at the moment, but they're becoming more and more effective. When you say injection, like a syringe, I don't know what it looks like. So I am the most like needlephobic person in the whole world. Whenever they have to take blood from me, I literally look away and recite the names of the presidents backwards, going back to beginning in a desperate attempt to not think about

what's happening to me. So this was the thing that most worried me. And it is a tiny epipen. It's not like a syringe, like a hospital. syringe. And literally, I wish someone had told me this in advance, because I was told you have to inject in the stomach, which feels incredibly viscerally awful. You can in fact inject into your thigh, which feels much less bad. So you inject something in the thigh, and it's like the tiniest mosquito bite. Like it's nothing. You barely feel it. So you inject yourself once a week or the pill you take

every day. And I'm sorry, is like, are they disposable? Is it like a liquid, do you draw the liquid, you get one thing and you throw it out? Yeah, so it's a pen, like an epipem. And each week you screw onto the top a new little needle, and then you inject yourself, then you throw the needle away, and then the next week you put another one and you do it again. So it's incredibly simple, straightforward process. When you start to take it, generally most people do have unpleasant side effects. We already talked about nausea. Most people, get pretty bad constipation. Weirdly, the side effect I had that was most onerous

is a minority side effect, but it does happen to some people, is that it can increase your resting heartbeat. And it's very hard to lie there with your heart racing and not feel like you should be anxious about things. Like, oh shit, what's going on? And they're like, oh no, it's just a side effect. That's just what it feels like to be skinny, which is always alert.

Because someone could hit on you at any time. Joy could just stroll. You just pick up all the happiness off the street. You've got to be very vigilant. Two months since taking the drugs, my neighbor's unbelievably hot gardener hit on me. And I was like, I won, right? This is it.

Like, funny enough, I can actually, I had to say this bit quietly because I can't actually see him from the window. He's literally my neighbor's gun at the moment. So actually, I'm slightly worried. I said that too noisy. But the, although it might encourage him to hit on me again. OZMPIC's going to increase people being Pollyam. It'll be like anyone.

I just want to have sex with anyone who wants me. I'm just so excited to be hot. All the time I used to spend eating. I will have sex with every single one of my neighbors. Yeah, so it's a strange. You're right, Jonathan. It's weirdly, the effect I didn't expect, right? And it comes back to something that you were asking me earlier.

So I had a really weird experience in the first six months I was taking it. So I was losing loads of weight. So over a year, I lost 42 pounds. I went down, I lost, you know, really significant amount of my body weight. And it was the strangest thing because I was getting what I wanted. I was losing loads of weight. But weirdly, I did feel physically better, like my back pain went away, for example. I did not feel emotionally better.

And if anything, I felt slightly worse. And I was trying, what is that? And I thought maybe it's just coincidence, maybe other stuff going on. But then I was looking at the 12 big risks associated with the drugs that I write about in the book. One of them is there are, and I want to stress this as contested, but some doctors and scientists are concerned these drugs may be causing depression or even suicidal thoughts in some people. It's a big debate about if that's happening and if so, why? Some people think it may be because the, and may am you know much more about this than I do, but it may be that these drugs, so we now know these drugs are primarily affecting not just the government. gut but the brain. You have GLP1 receptors in your brain. They're changing your brain from interviewing

cutting edge neuroscientists. That's clearly the case that they are. Well, there's a big debate about how and why. But I actually think for me and for a lot of other people, there's something much more basic going on. And I had an epiphany about it in a branch of KFC. So my nephew said to me the other day, it's really weird how many of your epiphanies in your life happen in KFC. It was a good point. Because the biscuits are so delicious. So delicious. You can't imagine. I'm actually genuinely worried that their stock price must have crashed since I started taking a ZIP because you cannot conceive of how much KFC I've eaten in my lifetime. But in fact, I had a real low point about this once. This is not the story that I'll turn a second about Vegas.

But in the run-up to Christmas in 2009, I lived in East London, and I went to my local branch at KFC to have lunch. And I went in and I said my standard order, which is so gross, I won't repeat it. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johann, I'm really glad you're here. And I was like, all right. And he went off behind where they fry all the chicken. And he came back with every member of staff and a massive Christmas card in which they had all written to our best customer. And they'd all written these like personal messages to me. And one of the reasons why my heart sank is I thought, this isn't the fried chicken shop I come to the most.

How can this be happening to me? Anyway, the epiphany, I had a different epiphany in the Vegas and KFC many years later, which was... You're at KFC or? I'm literally... You give everyone the best of you. If Colonel Sanders could pimp me,

he would be doing it at this very moment. But I remember that... I was in Vegas, and it was seven months into taking the drugs, I think. And I was doing a... I was researching a really difficult thing. For ages, I've been... researching a book about a series of murders that are happening in Vegas.

And I was researching the murder of someone that I knew and really, really loved. And so it was very hard, as you can imagine. Really on autopilot, I went to the KFC on West Sahara. I'm sure you've got lots of listeners in Vegas. They'll know what I'm talking about. This is the skeeziest KFC in the whole world. And believe me, I've been to every brunch. And I went in and I ordered what I would have ordered before I was taking a Zen pic.

I ordered a bucket of fried chicken just to numb myself. and I ate one of the chicken drumsticks and I looked at the bucket and I suddenly thought fuck I can't eat this right like you just can't overeat when you're on a Zempe if you imagine if I came to you after you'd had a massive Thanksgiving dinner and I said great news guys I got you a KFC bucket right

that's basically how you feel right you just can't eat it and I remember very consciously a voice in my mind saying you're just going to have to feel bad now there it is and and I really realized you know, what these drugs do is they radically interrupt your underlying eating patterns. Obviously, that's a good thing in many ways. It's why I lost a huge amount of weight. But I write in the book about the five psychological reasons why we eat. Only one of them is like to sustain your body, right?

The rest are psychological factors. So for me, I realized in the environment I grew up in with all this addiction, all this craziness, you have very little agency over that when you're a kid. And I had some awareness about this before. I don't want to act like it was a sudden blinding revelation, but I realized so much at that moment, I realized how much I used food to numb myself and soothe myself and calm myself down. And I couldn't do that when I was taking these drugs.

And I think that's why I had this rocky transition. Now, that ended up being a good thing. Bringing them to the surface means you can deal with them better, right? It turns out there's better ways to deal with your distress than a bucket of fried chicken. But that was a difficult and bumpy adjustment for me. I want to touch this point a little bit harder because, you know, Jonathan is really into like, don't people understand the dangerous things that Johan Hari is talking about, about Ozympic? And like, don't they care about the side effects?

And I was like, no, no one cares. Meaning people want to be skinny. They really, really want to be skinny so bad that, like, they don't care. It's like, you know, cigarettes also increase your metabolism and, you know, models and young people everywhere have figured that out. People don't care if the reward is great enough, if the societal reward is great enough. But for me, this is the most interesting part of this conversation is that what if you thought that if you looked a certain way and pick a number, and for those of us with disordered eating,

sometimes that number is insane, pick a number, pick an outfit, pick what you think you want to look like, and then you'll be happy. Well, guess what? What if you get to that size, that number, that face in the mirror, and you are still stuck with the God-shaped hole that you were trying to fill with your desire to be skinny, right? That's the problem. That's the problem. It's like, you know, what if two drinks doesn't do it, then you have three?

What if you have 10 drinks? What if you drink all night? You still wake up you. right? That's the problem. And I would argue, and I hope you would agree because you've written all these books, that's the problem with all of these things. We think we found the thing to fix it, but it's not fixed. I think there's so much in what you just said that's so important. So the way I put it is, everyone knows they have natural physical needs, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble, real fast. But there's equally

strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for a long time. Especially for underserved populations. These are not the, this is not the privileged class. This is not the privileged class. set of psychological needs. Every child needs to feel this. Every adult needs to feel this. And it's harder to get to the communities that needed, I would argue. But sorry, go ahead. No, that's a really,

really important point. And you're completely right. And I think you're right that when your needs are not met, you can often fixate on fantasy solutions saying, if only I get to X, then I'll be okay, right? So thinking about in relation to what you're saying about people who go, if only I get to this weight, I'll be okay. And again, you know this much better than I do, but we live in a culture that makes women feel like shit about their bodies no matter

what they do. There's nothing any woman in the world can do with their body that will not mean that she gets shit for it, right? And I think if we want to think about what you were just saying about that thing about, if only I get to my target weight, life would be great. One of the ways it helps us to think about that and also helps us to think about both the benefits and the risks of these drugs, both. It's actually to look for a moment at a parallel area of science. So up to now, it's been very hard to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it off. Some people can do it just through calorie restriction and exercise. It is possible,

but the vast majority of people can't do that. I go through why in the book we can talk about it. But up to now, the most reliable way of doing that has been bariatric surgery, things like gastric band, gastric sleeve, and so on. So what do we know about bariatric surgery? It's very relevant to what you were just saying in a really important way. So bariatric surgery is a fucking horrible operation, right? One in a thousand people die in the operation. It's no joke. But the reason people put themselves through that is for a very simple reason, which is that the scientific evidence is overwhelming that if you reverse obesity, you dramatically, or reduce it, you dramatically improve your health. So if you have bariatric surgery, in the seven years that follow, you are 56% less likely

to die of a heart attack. 60% less likely to die of a stroke and incredibly 92% less likely to die of diabetes-related causes, right? In fact, it's so good for your health, you're 40% less likely to die at all in those seven years. And we know that these drugs are producing similar health benefits for people who are overweight or obese, which is very different to people who are not overweight or obese, who shouldn't be taking them and we'll come back to that unless they're diabetic. we know that if you take these drugs, it reduces your heart attack or stroke risk by 20%. So there's these huge health benefits, but as you were saying what you just said, ma'am, I was thinking about, there's another thing about bariatric surgery, which is really interesting.

If you have bariatric surgery in the years that follow your suicide risk quadruples, almost quadruples, it's really interesting, it's still quite low. I don't want to overstate it, but quadrupling is a big increase, right? And you think, well, why would that be? What's going on? Now, some of that might be the after effects of the surgery, which can be pretty grim. But I actually think it's what you were talking about. And for example, Professor Karell Leroux, who works with people with bariatric surgery,

said to me, you know, a lot of people tell themselves, if only I wasn't fat, I'd be happy. And then you have the surgery and your husband's still a fucking asshole and your job still sucks. And actually, your life is not perfect. And while your health will be better, which is certainly worth doing, it will not be the magic solution that we are told it is in this culture. So I think you're totally right that, you know, we imagine that thinness will solve everything, right? Also, we venerate a body shape, which is actually super thinness, which is, in fact, not itself also not healthy. Can you describe that a little bit? Yeah. The worst moment for me in the whole writing of the book,

by far was, I've got a niece called Erin, who she's the baby of my family. She's 19 now, but in my head she's fixed as a six-year-old. So she's the only girl in her generation. And whenever she has a boyfriend, I'm always like, get away from her, you pedophile. And then I'm like, oh no, they're both the same age. She's an adult.

But the, and a few months, a while into taking the drugs, we were FaceTiming. And she was sort of teasing me as the way our family interacts. You know, she was like, oh, Johan, I never knew you had a jaw before, never knew you had a neck, right? And I was sort of preening and, you know, showing off. And she looked down and she said, will you buy me some o Zen pick? And she's a totally healthy weight she always has been. And I laughed.

I thought she was kidding. And then I suddenly realized she wasn't kidding. And I thought, fuck, I've undermined every message I've ever been trying to give her since she was a little. girl here. And as I tried to tease it out, I realized there's two quite distinct categories here. There's people who are overweight or obese who are using these drugs to get down to a healthy weight. There's still those 12 risks that I'm sure we'll go into and I'm still worried about them, including for myself. But that to me is totally defensible. And indeed, I would recommend it to many people, but although certainly not everyone. Then you've got people who are already a healthy

weight or indeed skinny, who were taking it to be super skinny. And I don't judge anyone doing that. We make women feel like shit about their bodies the whole time. I understand why it happens, and I'm not judgmental of it. But I'm very worried about it, partly because of the eating disorders component that we talked about before, but also because, you know, I think about when my niece was growing up, it was better than when we were growing up. There were some women who had a slightly larger body size in the public eye. And in the last two years, pretty much every single one of those women

has become really skinny. And I think about, and again, I'm not judging those people, and I don't know, maybe they're not Takeo Zemphic, maybe there's been an outbreak of dysentery in Malibu, who knows. But the, the, the, I really worry that we create, we are, and we plainly are creating

a renewed norm. You know, it's my friend Elise Lohnen, who I think maybe you know her, that, you know, who's based in LA, the former chief content officer for Goop, who quit and has become a really interesting critic of this sort of thing, said to me, you know, dieting is out,

elimination is in. She won't go out for dinner with people in LA anymore because there's no point because no one eats anything. She's like, why the fact did we come for dinner? Yeah, and none of you eat anything. You know, so I'm, again, it comes back to, this is such a powerful tool. It can be used for great good for people who are obese.

And it is definitely having these. other negative effects. It's partly why I wrote the book so that we can pause and have this moment to think about it. And the book is called Magic Pill because there's three ways these drugs could be magic. The first is the most obvious. They could just solve the problem, right? And I've got to tell you, there are days for me when it feels like that. My whole life I have overeaten. I've pretty much been obese my whole life. Now I inject myself once a week in the leg. I don't overeat anymore. I'm not obese anymore. It feels like magic. The second way it could be magic is more disturbing. It could be like a magic trick. It could be like the conjurer who shows you a card trick while picking your pocket.

It could be that over time, the 12 big risks that I describe in the book outweigh the benefits. That is a real possibility. But the third way it could be magic is I actually think the most likely. If you think about the stories of magic that we grew up with, I think we were eight or nine when Al-Addin came out, right? You find the lamp, you rub it, the junior, and he grants your wish and your wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected, right? There's always these unpredictable effects. We're already seeing a lot of those unpredictable effects. One of them, I fear, will be a renewed culture of hyper-thinness among girls. A, girls who already have eating disorders, it will, as Dr. Kimberly Dennis puts it, will act as rocket

fuel for those eating disorders. But B, it will create a renewed cult of thinness. You know, if you look at Cindy Crawford now, you know. She looks like Marilyn Monroe looked to us when we were in the 90s. Exactly. Totally. She looks like, I mean, this sounds like a crazy and insane thing to say, and I want a caveat. But she looks fleshy compared to any of the models that would be venerated now. And, you know, we might have looked at glossy fashion magazines. They're looking at girls, they look at Instagram six hours a day. So, you know, so I'm very,

very worried about that. shift in that was that, you know, at least for my generation, we knew those were models. So even if you would say, like, they, I wish I could look like them. I'll never look like that. We were looking at magazines, you know, when George Michael's video, Freedom came out, which is unbelievable, it was like all these models. Like, they were celebrities. The thing that is scary to me now, and I have boys and I worry about this, you know, I have a 15 and an 18-year-old, they're looking at real people. So to them, why isn't that me? That could just be me.

It's not even like a, it's not unattainable in terms of like, oh, they have like a celebrity status. It's just, it's a phone's worth of regular people that, why wouldn't you want to be like them, right? We've so normalized that celebrity culture. I think you're so right, but it's even worse than that. It's airbrushed photos of real people. So it's like the worst possible combo. They're real. They sort of feel like they're in your world, but you're looking at these sort of artificial

enhanced images of them. It's, yeah, totally agree with you. Johan, not to make you speak for all of culture, but there was a renaissance of body positivity in the last, I don't know how many years, five, ten years, maybe five, seven years, healthy at any weight. Everyone was once thick bodies or legs, backsides.

That was like, everyone wants that. You don't want to be skinny anymore. Have we lost that? Is that gone now? Yes, it's so, so important. And this is something I've thought about. It's one of the things I most wrestled with in the book and about. One of the people who really helped me to think about this was an amazing woman called Shelley Bovi.

So when we were kids, the only fat people you saw on television, particularly fat women, were the butt of the joke, right? They were presented as inherently ridiculous. It was incredibly cruel. It's really shocking when you look back now on this. even like not just when we were kids, I think about friends, right? Some of the storylines in friends just seem really viscerally shocking now, the Fat Monika storyline and so on.

And the first person I ever saw challenged that was this woman, Shelley Bovia, must have been about 10 years old when one of her books came out. And she really introduced the idea of, or popularized the idea of body positivity in Britain. I don't think we use that term then, but basically the concept, right? And she just said this is a form of bigotry and cruelty and stigma, and we need to challenge it. And I'd never heard anyone speak that way. And she was presented like she was a kind of mad woman, but, you know, she inspired a movement in Britain. When I was trying to think through these drugs, I went to interview her, and it was, she's an amazing woman.

She's 76 now, must be 77. Oh, she wrote, being fat is not a sin, is that right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's the title of it. Yeah, and she also wrote a wonderful book called The Forbidden Body that I recommend to people. And so went to see her. So Shelly grew up in a working-class town

in Britain called Port Talba. I guess the American equivalent would be somewhere like Pittsburgh. It's a kind of, you know, working-class town. I had the biggest steelworks in the whole of Europe at the time. And she was, as she describes herself, the only fat girl in her school. And one day when she was 10 or 11, her teacher said to her, Bovi, stay behind after class.

So she stayed behind thinking, what have I done wrong? And the teacher said, Bovi, you're much too fat. It's disgusting. You need to stop this. Go see the school nurse. She'll sort you out. So completely thrown, she went to see the school nurse. The school nurse said, why are you here?

She said, the teacher says, I'm too fat. She said, take off your clothes, I'll inspect you. And the school nurse looked her, pinched her flesh and said, ah, disgusting. You're much too fat. You're a greedy pig. stop eating and just berated her and shamed her and sent her off sobbing. That was how Shelley was treated her whole childhood, right? She was constantly being told she was disgusting, vile. The other girls

were saying, thank God I'm not like you. And it continued, you know, she was a very smart, working class girl. She was offered a place at Cambridge, or she was encouraged to apply to Cambridge and offered a university place. And she just didn't go because she was like, I'm just, they're going to be so cruel to me about my way, I can't do this. When she got pregnant, she went to the doctor, and the doctor said, God, first thing he said, well, God, you shouldn't be so, you shouldn't be pregnant when you're as fat as you are. She had a very difficult birth. She was lying there covered in blood, and the midwife looked to her and said, you know, you really need to lose some weight. This was just all through her life. And then she learned there was this movement at the time

called Fat Pride, which is the terms some people still use. And she writes this book, and she makes the case that this is just cruelty. And she pointed out absolutely, correctly, that stigma is, A, just a form of hateful bullying, and B, completely counterproductive when it comes to promoting weight loss. In fact, there's lots of scientific evidence that go through in the book. If you stigmatize people, they eat more, they gain more weight. You know, partly because of comfort eating, partly because as Lindy West, a very powerful body positivity advocate puts it, you, it, I'm trying to explain exactly how she said it, she put it better than this, but she said, you don't take good care of a thing you hate.

If we make people hate their bodies, it doesn't make them treat their bodies better. Shelly told me she had never looked at her body naked, literally never, because she was so hated her body. So she wrote this amazing book about stigma, I had this huge effect. It inspired a movement in Britain, and she remains rightly, incredibly proud of what she wrote.

But then something else happened to Shelly. She was not yet 50. She weighed over 200 pounds. And she was having a lot of health problems as a result of being so overweight. She had heart problems, which her doctor told her were connected to her weight. She was losing the ability to walk.

And she felt really conflicted. She was like, is it a betrayal of my anti-stigma work for me to try to lose weight? At that time, there was a body positivity publication called Fat News in Britain. And she wanted to write about this dilemma. And they said, no, you can't write about that. We're here to tell the good news about it.

And she was like, but shouldn't we be telling the complex truth? They're like, no, that's not what we want to hear. So Shelly, and she's the first person to point out how hard this is, she lost a huge amount of weight through calorie restriction. She went to a group. She lost a huge amount of weight. Her heart problems went away. She went from barely being able to walk to being able to run.

Her health massively improved. And for a long time, she really felt this as a dilemma, right? A dilemma that's become much renewed by these drugs, the rise of the new way. lost drugs. And then she said to me, for so long I thought it was either or. Either you're opposed to stigma or you're in favor of reducing obesity where possible. She said, why is that the choice? Obviously, it's both and.

Anyone listening who is obese, as I have been most of my life, or who loves someone who's obese, I bet you want to protect the person you love from two things. You want to protect them from cruelty and bullying, and there's a hell of a lot of it, 42% of overweight women get insulted every single day. You want to protect them from that. And you want to protect them from diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, all the things that I made, I'm afraid the science is absolutely overwhelmingly clear by being obese. Of course there are exceptions. My mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. She's alive and well at the age of 78. But most smokers don't get that far. And sadly, you know, I looked at this very carefully. There are some

people who dispute that obesity causes these health problems. I'm afraid the science is absolutely overwhelming that that is not the case. Obesity, on average, makes over 200 known diseases and complications. Either causes them, makes them more likely or makes them severe. One of my closest friends, one of the people I most love died in her 40s of complications related to obesity. As Shelley puts it to me, put it to me, we have to live in reality. We have to deal with that reality with a deep sense of compassion. I passionately want body positivity to survive and to continue, even if we overcome the factors that have made us obese,

and I hope we get to discuss them because they're not your fault and they're not my fault. They're in the environment. But even if we overcome those, there'll still be a huge variety of body shapes. I'm never going to look like Timothy Chalemay, right? Or Brad Pitt, right? Or Idris Elba. Sorry, even picturing Idriselba sent me into a little reverie there, but I'll try to override that in my head. I'm never going to look like them, right?

We want people to feel good about their bodies and we want there will always be a natural range of body shapes. If the body positivity movement is based around that insight, an opposing stigma and opposing bullying, it will be as essential as it's ever been. If part of it is built around denying the obesity harms health, I don't think it will survive. because pretty soon everyone is going to know someone like Jeff Parker, who's a guy I interviewed. He's a retired lighting engineer in San Francisco. He was 67. He was very severely overweight. He had a lot of back pain. He was finding it hard to walk. He had liver and kidney problems, if I remember right. Every morning he had to take fistfuls of pills. He started to take Munjarro, one of the new weight-loss drugs.

He lost an enormous amount of weight. His doctor's taking him off all his pills. His gout is gone. Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate Bridge every day. told me, I feel like I'm going to enjoy my retirement now. I don't think we can say to Jeff that obesity didn't harm his health and ending his obesity didn't boost his health. The science on that is overwhelming. Pretty soon everyone listening and watching is going to know someone like Jeff. We want body positivity passionately to survive. If it's based on denying that Jeff was in a bad way when he was obese or that I was in a bad way when I was obese, that is not going to be tenable. If it's based on opposing stigma, cruelty and bullying, it will be desperately

needed then as it's desperately needed now. So well said and, you know, this is something we weren't even sure we wanted to kind of talk about because it's, you know, it also, it varies culturally, you know, the celebration of different types of bodies, you know, varies depending on, you know, where your family's from and what your culture sort of, you know, appreciates. It's super complicated. And, you know, as you were talking, like, that's, you know, I hear, I don't know why, I hear my mother's voice, you know, saying like, but are they healthy, you know? And I hate to kind of come at it from that view because I also don't want us to get into, you know, a game of competition metrics of if your BMI is 26.9, it's okay. But if it's 27.1, it's not, you know? Or, you know, You know, I don't, I'm going to let this lead into a conversation about the government because

what I don't want is to have some abstract entity, whatever that entity is, maybe it's the government, you know, saying this is the blood sugar level we're comfortable with to prescribe this. And this is the level we're not comfortable with. You know, one of Jonathan and my, you know, sort of unifying love languages is talking about processed food. And, you know, this is something you've alluded to, and it's something you talk about in the book. You know, more specifically, you know, I and I think Jonathan also,

you know, we lay a tremendous amount of this burden at the feet of a government that incentivizes people to eat poorly, to eat, you know, food that is inexpensive, which also is incredibly high in calories, fat, salt, and sugar. And, you know, for Jonathan, we have a very different approach. Jonathan is very, very disciplined about food. He's one of the cleanest eaters I've ever met in my whole life. I think he's one of the cleanest eaters I will ever meet in my whole life.

I also find him very pedantic, restrictive, and it annoys me a lot. And on the other side of that, on the other side of that is the fact that, you know, I'm a vegan person who has in particular, over the last 20 years, been sold a lot of highly processed foods that I did not know were really not good for me. And it was people like Jonathan and even vegans who like, you know, Jonathan is not a vegan, but there were even vegans who said, don't eat any of that stuff. just keep eating whole foods, keep eating foods the way the earth produced them. And, you know, I'm terrified at what my children, you know, what I've given my children to inherit. But, you know, there was recently this enormous study about ultra-processed food. And, you know, what it revealed is what most people kind of already had a hunch about. It's not good for you to eat food that is so far removed from any nutritional or, you know, kind of, kind of, you know, kind of

conceptual food that exists that, you know, the good earth has created. I mean, it was just published recently after this bombshell report saying that ultra-processed food is known to cause cancer, is known to cause obesity, is known to cause all these health problems. The response by the government's top diet advisor says ultra-processed food does not cause obesity. So maybe you can speak about the state and the incentive structure that creates the environment that promotes this misinformation and really poor health choices and food choices for most people. I had to just say, when you said, man, when you said, you know, my mother says this, I was picturing the mother from beaches. We go, what are you? A camel skedaddle, right? So I know that

that's not your actual mother. That is not. My mother, no, my mother is, no, does not share a lot of features. But no, and I think it's just, you know, I think it's a, it's a universal sort of mother voice of like, you know, kind of that, that, you know, hypercritical, hyper, you know, vigilant, like, I want you to be like me. I want you to agree with the way that I'm doing things. And, you know, yeah. Yeah, totally, totally. So this is, you've both brought up such such an important question because when I started working the book, right, so 47, 17% of Americans want to take these new weight loss drugs. And given the eight years from now, it'll be a daily pill and it'll be a dollar a day.

Actually, that's an underestimate of how many people are going to be taking these drugs. And you sort of hear that and think, how the fuck did we get here? How did we get to the point where half the population want to take a drug to reduce their eating? What's going on? So I was really exploring why did obesity rise? And it's really important people to understand. I just urge everyone listening and watching to just do something for me for just one second, right? Pause this podcast and Google photographs of beaches in the United States in the 1970s,

so the decade we were all born, right? Just stop for a second and look at them and then come back, right? If you've just done that, you will have noticed something really weird. Pretty much everyone in those photos looks to us to be either skinny or jacked, right? And you look at it and go, huh, that's weird. Where was everyone else? on Miami Beach that day. Were they having a skinny convention? Right? What's going on?

And then you look at the figures. That's what people look like in the United States in the 1970s, not a million years ago, when we were born, right? So you have 300,000 years where human beings exist and obesity exists, but it's like really, really rare. You would have had people like with Prada Vili syndrome, which you studied. You put very rare, like a tiny number of people. Or with all due respect, my grandparents who also came from a very different culture and diet.

Yeah, but it was like a tiny percentage population, not nothing like my grandmother as well, but like a tiny, tiny number of people, right? And then between the year I was born and the year I turned 20, obesity more than doubled in the United States. And then in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again, right? You think, what happened, right? Why did we, you know, in our lifetimes, according to World Health Organization, obesity is more than tripled, right?

that's weird. What happened, right? And we know what happened. This change, this explosion in obesity happens everywhere that makes one change. It's not where people suddenly become lazy or lack willpower or the other stigmatizing things we say. It's where people move from mostly eating a diet of whole fresh foods that they prepared on the day to mostly eating a diet of processed and ultra-processed foods which are constructed out of chemicals in factories. And it turns out of this new kind of food that never existed before and now dominates our diets, 67% of the calories the average American child eats in a day are ultra-processed foods. They affect our bodies in a totally different way to the food that all humans before us ate.

And there's an experiment that to me, I go through the seven reasons why it does this to us in the book, but there's an experiment that to me just totally nailed what it does to us and what it did to me. I've nicknamed it Cheesecake Park. That's not the official title. It's carried out by Dr. Paul Kenney, who's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New York. Very simple experiment. He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage. And all they had to eat was the kind of healthy, natural food that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years.

And when that's all they had, the rats would eat when they were hungry and then they would stop, right? They seemed to have some natural signal that went, hey, guys, you're full. Quit eating, right? They had some innate nutritional wisdom. None of them became overweight, none of them became obese. Then Dr. Kenny introduced them to the American diet. Get ready to salivate everyone. He fried up some bacon.

He bought a load of Snickers bars. He bought a massive load of cheesecake. And he put it in the cage alongside the healthy food. And the rats went apeshire. I don't know if rats can go apeshire. The rats went crazy for the American diet. They would literally dive into the cheesecake and eat their way out, completely like slicked with cheesecake,

all over them. That's how I eat cheesecake. That's stuff in my life until, is that thing, right? The way Dr. Kenny put it is within a couple of days, they were different animals. All that nutritional wisdom they'd have before when they had the food they evolved for vanished. And they all, within about six weeks, became severely obese, right? Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment in a way that to me, as a former KFC addict, felt a little bit cruel. He took away all the American food and left them with nothing but the healthy food they'd evolved for. And he was pretty sure he knew what would happen. They would eat more of the healthy food than they had before. And this would prove that this kind of diet expands the number of calories you eat in a day. That is not what happened.

What happened is much weirder. Once they'd had this food and it was taken away, they refused to eat the healthy food at all. It was like they no longer recognized it as food. They literally starved. It was only when they were literally wasting away that they finally started eating that food again. Now, I would argue we are all living in a version of Cheesecake Park, right? The food we eat, the food I have been eating since I was born, basically, since I was weeing from the breast. It's been profoundly undermining our ability to know when to stop eating, to feel full, to feel sated. And what these drugs do is they give you back your sense of being sated, but at a cost. This is why Professor Michael Lowe, who's at Drexel University in Philly,

an amazing expert on hunger who's been studying this for 40 years, said to me, these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem, right? That these drugs dug the whole of hunger in us and then the processed food dug this whole of hunger in us and then these drugs fill that whole but at a cost. This is really upsetting to me. This is terribly upsetting. I'm going to upset you more. Let's break her. Let's break her down. Mine will tease and she'll talk to me about restrictive eating.

But the only reason I got to where I am right now, and I don't think I'm the healthiest eater that she's ever seen, I think there are people who are doing far better. I said you're the cleanest eater. I was an intense, intense sugar addicts growing up. I, like, Halloween for me was not a holiday. It was a work day. that was when I would go get my loot and I would like pick the best neighborhoods and I would start early and I had pillowcases and I like I was targeted.

It was planned out for months in advance. And then I would ration the candy. All my effort was to get money to get candy. I played competitive hockey as a kid and I would plan how I could get to the vending machines without my parents knowing and get to the concession stands. and I would eat till I had sores in my mouth. I was so extreme. I also ate an enormous amount of cheese. I had pizza.

All I wanted to eat was pizza. And eventually, as I grew up, like, I stopped. I didn't feel good. And I began to be aware over many, many years that the more I ate highly processed food, the more I craved it, the less control I had on it, the less I would be hungry for other things. And it was a very long process of recognizing

and training myself to be, to see, if I have a French fry, I will want more French fries. If I have chips, I want more chips. I have no self-control. If you give me a bag of cookies, they're gone. Like, I don't have one cookie. And what I'm concerned about is that in the effort to not shame people because it's extremely hard, it really is, labor-intensive, time-intensive, financial costs, the food planning required in order to not eat, highly processed food is so difficult that we tell people it's not so bad for you. In moderation, eat intuitively and don't be extreme in one version or another because that creates setbacks. But fundamentally what we're doing is we're putting these chemicals into our body that are changing our hunger signals.

And why are we depressed? Our microbiomes are messed up. Our attention, yes, it's electronics, but also we don't have the general nutrients and variety of food to help us feel okay on a regular basis. We don't move our bodies. We're not getting outside. And so we've created a world for ourselves and then are lying to ourselves about the impact of the world that we're living in and then finding solutions elsewhere. At least we should be starting to say, yes, these are the environmental factors and the influences and these are the real impacts that are affecting us. you're totally right. It's funny that you've just told a Halloween story

more disturbing than the film Halloween. If you had merely gone and murdered some babysitters, it would have been less freaky than that story. But Jason Voorhees didn't have wounds in his mouth. Apart from my guess, in the final one where Jamie Lee Curtis does in fact stab him. So you think about this, I'm just thinking there's so much in what you said that's so true. So in this environment that we have created, you have to have tremendous amounts of control

and put in place tremendous guardrails to resist these problems, right? Now, you've done that, and a huge credit to you for that, right? That's a genuine achievement. The way I think about willpower in this environment is willpower is like an umbrella in a really bad storm. Some people, if you give them that umbrella,

they'll be able to get across the street and stay dry. You're one of those people. But for most people, the storm is so great, it's just going to break the willpower, the umbrella, and you're going to just get drenched, right? I'll do 30 other things rather than do what he did, like, literally, meaning everything he says makes total sense. And A, I didn't have enough somatic awareness to understand quote.

Like when he says, like, oh, I didn't feel good. I didn't even know what that meant. I don't know what that means I don't feel good when I eat something. Like, I literally don't. And I will understand what he's saying for a week, and then it will leave. It will leave. And then it's like, oh, is that the difference between willpower and not?

Is the difference between like, and that's the thing. And that's why I said it's so, it's terrifying to me. And that's why I understand the people that you talk about in your book because it doesn't stick for a lot of people. Like you have a whole chapter on like, why not diet and exercise? Because it doesn't stick. You know, one of the most depressing conversations I've ever had in my life was with a guy called Professor.

This is so awful. I have to laugh, as I say. It's so depressing. I went to interview this guy called Professor Roy Baumeister, who is at the University of Queensland in Australia. And he is the leading expert in the world on willpower, right? He's done the most important experiments over like, I think 40 years over willpower. If you've ever heard of the marshmallow test, a very famous experiment,

he's the guy who did that, right? And so this is when I was writing my book, Stolen Focus, about why we can't pay attention. I thought, I'll go see him. He'll be a good person to talk to. So I went to see him. he wrote a book called willpower, to give a sense of why he was the right person to talk to.

And I went to see him and I said, you know, I'm writing this book about why we can't pay attention. I seem to be looking at my phone all the fucking time. What can I do? What, you know, tell, and he said, the exact words are in the book. I'm, you know, do this from memory. But he says something like, you know,

it's really interesting you say that because I've noticed, I just play Candy Crush a lot now. I look at my phone all the time. I just, yeah, I just don't seem to have much willpower. I was like, wait. What? A two boutet? You're the guy.

Wait, you wrote a book called Willpower. Are you telling me you play cat? It was like the moment at the end of the body snatches where you're like, oh, they fucking body snatched everyone. It was just, it was so depressing. But what I would say is, the way I think about it, right, for obesity for any of these factors that we're talking about. And indeed, the subjects of my other books, for depression, attention, attention problems. addiction. There's three factors, three kinds of cause that drive these problems. The fancy way

of talking about it, and it sounds complicated, but bear with me, it's not, I don't know you guys know this, it's the biopsychosocial model, right? It's very simple. There's three kinds of cause of these problems. There's biological causes, right? Things like your genes, real changes that happen in your brain as you become addicted or depressed or obese that can make. it harder to go back. So biological causes. There's psychological causes like trauma or shame or more positively willpower. Those are psychological things that you can bring to it. And then there's social factors like the food supply, also that affects your biology, but you know, the food environment we grow up in. We would all eat very differently if we'd grown up in rural Japan compared to,

you know, if we grew up where I used to live two blocks away from Times Square, right? So, bio-psychosocial, they're all true, they're all real. You were able to use one sliver of the psychological component, willpower, to overcome these other factors. Huge credit to you. For me, I think the biological, I think the social component was a huge factor, but I was fatter than most of the people around me, so it can't just have been that. I think the psychological components about I grew up in a family where there was a lot. a lot of violence and, as I say, a lot of lunacy. And so, you know, I ate to steady myself and calm myself.

For me, that overwhelmed, I'm someone with quite a lot of willpower, right? I work really, really hard. If willpower is the own, and I know you're not saying this, I'm not saying this to argue against you, you know, it's hard to think of anyone in our society who has more willpower than firefighters. They run into burning buildings for a job, right? I could not do that. And yet firefighters are significantly more obese than the rest of the population.

So if willpower was all it took to not be obese, that wouldn't compute, right? So there's these other factors going on. And we've got to deal with those factors. And we can deal with those factors. So these new weight loss drugs give us some way of dealing with it. The way I think about it is we were raised in a trap and these drugs are a trap door. They are a risky, rusty trap door. Some of us should go through them and some of them shouldn't.

and I hope my book is a guide to how people think about that. But also, we can, much more importantly, we need to make sure our kids don't grow up in that trap and our grandchildren don't grow up in that trap. And that can sound high in the sky, but I went to places that have begun to do it. And just before I mention those places, you want to say, because you're going to think,

yeah, yeah, good luck with that. We can't do that. I would just get to think a bit about smoking. I think if we could take your kids or my nephews, my niece, my godson's, back to when we were eight years old, I think the thing that would most shock them is that people smoked bucket everywhere.

On airplanes. On the subway. On planes. I remember my doctor, my family doctor, used to smoke while he inspected me. There's a photograph of me and my mother when I'm six months old.

She's breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach. And when I discovered this photo a few years ago, I thought she'd feel guilty. I showed it to her. She said, you were a fucking difficult baby. I needed that cigarette, right?

Completely unrepented. That is what, that's the way. Now, now if you saw someone breastfeeding and resting the ashtra of the stomach, you would literally call the cops, right? That transformation happened as a result of completely concerted government policy demanded by ordinary people that has dramatically reduced the amount of people. I think the figure was something that's in the book, saying like 55% of Americans smoked when we were like eight or nine.

It's now like 12%. That's a, and that's why we have much less lung cancer. Staggering. And wasn't that change also precipitated on we stopped lying to ourselves in the general public about what the effects of that substance and the action was? And that's where I'm agreeing with you and I want to make sure that it's clear that I'm not saying everyone should just have willpower. I'm saying people are being lied to actively about just how harmful the, you.

types of foods that we're consuming are. I think you're totally right, but I think it goes even deeper than that. Even before we're lied to, more three-year-old children in the United States know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name. From when we are so small... Well, your last name doesn't give you a toy. That's the thing. Your last name doesn't give you a toy with your fried food. I mean, that's really what it is. You know, I have a memo in the book. It was a leaked memo from a food industry exec, talking about These are not the exact words, but we need to shape children's tastes when they're pre-rational. If we get them when they're young, we've got them forever. So, you know, it's even before it's like, because lying to almost implies a rational debate,

they get as long before we even have any rational thoughts about it, right? Even before we think about it in any way that would mean that we could think about truth or lies or, but I think you're right, we leveled with people about quite how bad for them smoking was. having had a long period of profound disinformation, right? You know, cigarette companies literally, like, I mean, my mother, well, the reason my mother smoked when she was pregnant with me because they were told it was good for you

because you'd have a smaller baby and it'd be less painful, right? Can you speak a little bit to what people are observing both anecdotally and also, you know, increasingly in clinical numbers, of other addictions getting better or going away from Ozmpic? What's happening? Is this the mechanism of the drug? Is it that, oh, if I feel better because I look better, I stop doing other bad things? What's going on? Of all the subjects that I researched

and wrote about in Magic Pill, this is the most contested, so I want to just flag that up to people. But there's a few things we know for sure. I'll give you an example of a brilliant scientist I interviewed called Professor Elizabeth Yarl Haag, who's at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. So you take rats and you get them to drink a shitload of alcohol. Turns out rats really like alcohol like humans do. You get to drink alcohol over a long period of time until eventually their rat cage looks like a dive bar in North Vegas. And then you come along and you inject them with a GLP1 agonist,

the active components in these drugs. If you do that, the rats massively reduce the amount of alcohol they consume. And the more heavily they were drinkers, the more they cut back. You think, wow. But at first when those experiments were done, they thought, well, maybe it's just that because alcohol has calories in it, obviously. Maybe it's just what's happening is obviously we know these drugs reduce your desire for calories. Maybe that's what's going on. So, Professor Patricia Grigsen at Penn State University, who I also interviewed a brilliant scientist as well, got rats to use heroin and fentanyl pretty heavily.

Again, you inject them with GLP1 agonists, massive reduction in their use of the drug. then Dr. Greg Stanward, who I interviewed who's at Florida State University, got loads of mice to use a shitload of cocaine over a long period of time. I don't know why the thought of mice using cocaine is so funny to me, but it is. I sort of picture them as the Al Pacino mouse

being the Alperchino character in Scarface. But I don't know. But anyway, again, massive reduction in cocaine use. Hugely encouraging. So we know that in animals, it massively reduces drug use across all categories of drugs, which is extremely unusual. In fact, there's no other drug, no other substance that does that. No, that's indicating that there's a larger system that's being hijacked. Exactly. Right.

Exactly. The second thing we know is anecdotally, so this is much more impressionistic, lots of people who've been given a Zempick for weight loss seem to also be quitting other were addictive behaviors. For example, I interviewed a mental health nurse in Canada called Tracy. It had a bad breakup and in the aftermath was obsessively shopping all the time. And I mean like spending the whole of her mortgage payment every month on like buying books she'd never read, clothes she'd never, where she started taking her Zem Pickett just went away. There's lots of people anecdotally reporting reductions in addictive behaviors. And we now have some very small human trials, which are a bit of a mixed bag.

We know that it does significantly reduce cigarette smoking, but only if you combine it with a nicotine patch, go figure. We know that it does reduce alcohol use, but only if you had an alcohol problem. There are now loads of these trials going on, so we're going to know a lot more soon. So I would say watch this space. It's encouraging.

The most wildly optimistic interpretation of these drugs, I want to stress, I think this isn't likely, but I don't think it's crazy to talk about it, is that actually this isn't a weight loss drug. This is a self-control drug. It's possible. I'm just going to give me one shot. I've just got to close this window

because my neighbors, very nice kids are playing outside and I'm going to start hearing it. Hang on a second. The hot gardener is gone and it's been replaced by children. I thought it was the gardener. I thought it was the gardener and you needed him to sneak a peek. I know.

It was just like, wait. It's not hot enough for him to be shirtless. So it wasn't, it's not that much in it for me. This is kind of a two-part question. If it is a self-control drug, that would be a phase two. But let's just start with,

the impact on the economy of changing the obesity industrial complex, which is actually a multi-billion dollar industry with everything from kidney dialysis to joint replacement to like, is Coca-Cola stock going to plummet? Is McDonald's stock going to plummet if people aren't eating? You know, KFC has already taken a hit with you. What are we can expect? that's part one. And then part two, what are people going to do besides go out for dinner? Like, how are we going to spend our time? So much of our time is consumed by thinking about food,

getting food, planning food. If you remove that from society, it's a strange freedom of increased time that we may not know what to do with. In terms of the economy, Barclays Bank commissioned a very sober-minded financial analyst called Emily Field, go away, look at these drugs and figure out how will this guide our investment decisions and advice. She came back and said, if you want a comparison, you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone, right, in terms of how explosive this is. Like I say, I think more, at least more than,

at least half of Americans will be taking these drugs. Eight years from now, assuming that the 12 big risks I write about don't turn out to be worse than they seem to be at the moment, which is possible, right? But if that doesn't happen, that's enormously transformative. We've been having this conversation in 2007, the day that Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

I think we'd be like, oh, what? It's just a phone you can carry around with you. We would not have been able to game out TikTok and Me Too and DoorDash and all these things that have transformed our lives, right? But, Johan, there's a big difference in the smartphone comparison,

which I've heard in the past. The smartphone was a platform that launched and gave the possibility for all these auxiliary businesses, this is just actually crumbling existing businesses without providing an opportunity to ladder on things and deliver new economic opportunity. Yeah, it's a really good point.

I mean, it's a really, really important point. And I think you're right. There's certain businesses where if I was in them, Jesus, I'd get out of them. Crispy Cream stock took a big fall in October. Analyst downgraded it. if I was a bariatric surgeon, I would be retraining right now. There's a company that makes hinges for knee and hip replacements.

Stock is right down because main causes knee and hip replacements is obesity, and there's going to be a lot less obesity. Jeffrey's Financial just did a big report for the airlines, the US airline, and saying, you know, get ready to spend a lot less money on jet fuel because it's going to cost a lot less to fly a thinner population. Even thinking about in LA, where I was just recently, it's been a big run on jewelers refitting wedding rings

because so many people are taking a Zempe that their hands have shrunk. Stop it right now. Seriously. So there's just there's so many unpredictable effects on the economy. I mean, I don't think we should all stay fat so that the economy doesn't take a hit.

I'm not going to sit here and be 42 pounds bigger and die of a heart attack so that, you know, so that KFC stock can stay up. But yeah, I think you're right. It will have massive economic boost as well. I mean, you think about Denmark, so Nova Nordisk can make by Zempic. The entire Danish economy has had a massive boost to its GDP. Before this, they were just making licorice.

They just had a lot of licorice. They literally, Lego and licorice. That was it. Sometimes they got them mixed up, a child choked. It was very sad. But yeah, that's basically it, right? I mean, and also being hot because they are like one of the hottest nations in the world. So the, if I was that hot, I wouldn't even bother with the Lego and the licorice, frankly,

but the, or the O-Zem pic, I just lie around looking at people in the mirror, but look at myself in the mirror. But the, yeah, so I think you're totally right. The economy stuff is going to be huge. The second part of your question is also really important. And I'm a bit unusual about this. I'll tell you one in a second, but so a lot of people, the worst thing about these drugs for them is they lose their pleasure in food.

this seems to be quite a common thing that people are reporting. And there's one of the scientists who was involved in developing these drugs for Novo Nordisk, Jens Jules Halsd, said in an interview with Wired magazine that that's going to kill the drugs because after a year or two life is just so boring, you can't live without the pleasure of food, right? Weirdly, I actually had the opposite effect, but I know I'm unusual. after I've been taking the drugs for, I forget how long, a few months, I went out for dinner with one of my oldest friends. She said to me, you know, it's always been a bit weird going out for dinner with you

because you eat so much, so quickly, but you never seem to enjoy it, right? You just sort of inhale it. And she said, now you actually look like you taste your food. And for me, I was then picked so dramatically slowed down how much I eat. Before, I used to eat to stuff myself, to calm myself. I don't really, the taste and texture of the food was very much a secondary concern to me. I'm not saying I've got nothing from it, but it was very little.

And now I eat so much more slowly because you can't stuff yourself on a Zembek. I actually enjoy food much more than I did before. I don't want to overstate it. I'm not some great foodie. But it's better than it was, right? So again, I think that's going to be unpredictable. I think there'll be quite a lot of people like me, but there's going to be more people like that. And I think you're right, the most primal and ancient bonding rituals are around.

We eat together. I also want to say, though, you don't not eat when you're on a Zen pic, right? I mean, I know at least Loney was saying in L.A., these people are, but those are people who are taking too high a dose. We don't want a population that doesn't eat. We want a population that eats an appropriate amount of calories. I think that can be a little bit oversold. I don't eat one bowl of dust once a week, right?

I eat. When I finish with you guys, I'm going to a nice Japanese restaurant with two of my oldest friends. But yeah, so, you know, we're going to go out and have a lovely dinner. And I'll enjoy the dinner. And they'll enjoy the dinner. So it's not like on a Zempe. I mean, they're not on an Olympic, but you know what I mean? It's like on Zempe, you don't eat at all. You just don't eat enormous amounts. There's so many other things I want to ask you about. But I wonder if we can, as we kind of end our time together, which is sad. I'd like to keep talking to you forever. But I wonder if you could kind of wrap things up here with some of the risks that you talk about.

And I don't just mean like, what are the risks of the drug? I mean, you know, kind of the larger risks. It's kind of like risks with a capital R. Can you just highlight a little bit what you would like to wring your hands about regarding these drugs? Well, I guess if you talk to experts about the risks of these drugs, generally what they say, and it's an important point, and they're good scientists, and there's a lot of truth in this, is they say, actually, we've got quite a lot of medium-term data. So for people who don't know, in addition to making you lose weight, these drugs also stimulate the creation of insulin in type 2 diabetics, which is what they need.

So diabetics have been taking a ZemPEC for nearly 19 years now, right? And so I'm putting it a bit more crudely than the scientists were, but they basically say, look, if the drugs made you grow horns, the diabetics would have horns by now, right? And that's a good and important point and should give us some confidence. But some other scientists said, okay, well, if we're going to base our confidence so largely on the diabetics, let's do some more digging on the diabetics. So, for example, there's a brilliant French scientist called Professor Jean-Luc Fayy, who was commissioned by the French, who I interviewed,

It was commissioned by the French government to look at the safety of these drugs for the French market. So he starts looking at the evidence. And he was really alarmed by something in the animal studies. If you give the active component of these drugs to rats, they are much more likely to get thyroid cancer. So he thought, how that's a bit alarming. So he looked at a huge database in France of diabetics who've been type two diabetics, have been taking these drugs for ages. And he compared them to very similar diabetics who'd not been taking these drugs.

and what him and his team calculated if they're right, and this is highly disputed, is these drugs increase your thyroid cancer risk by between 50 to 75%. Now, it's important to understand what that doesn't mean. Can you first say that? You're like, what? It doesn't mean if you take the drug, you've got a 50 to 75% chance of getting thyroid cancer. No, but it does mean that if you have a family history of thyroid tumors or thyroid cancer, they say it's medullary thyroid carcinoma,

you are not supposed to take OZempic. And I wonder how many people have a family history who would be like, fuck it, I don't care. It won't happen to me. Yeah, that would be extremely alarming. So you're exactly right. So what it means is that whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start,

if Dr. Fai and others are correct, which is disputed, then that risk will go up by 50 to 75%. Now, thyroid cancer is relatively rare. 1.2% of people get it in their lives, 84% of them survive. But nonetheless, it's a pretty big increase in a small risk, right? And that's just one of many risks that I go through in the book. So, yeah, there's a lot that I'm worried about. We know that if you give these drugs to rats and the rats get pregnant,

they're much more likely to have babies with birth deformities. So I would say if you're, not just if you're planning to get pregnant, but if you're at risk of getting pregnant, don't take these drugs. There's a whole array. I think you talk you of being a wrist. Skip your legs closed, ladies. What's the line in absolutely fabulous? My mother didn't give birth. She had something removed.

But the, yeah, you know, if there's, yeah, it's funny. It's funny she'd say that because, as you can probably tell, I'm gay. And I only have had sex with two girls in my life when I was 15. And not very long ago, I bumped into one of them for the first time in all this time. And she had a baby in her arms. And literally my first thought was, it's my child! And then I was like, oh, no, wait, unless she had a very long pregnancy, this is unlikely. Well, I think that should be on your book jackets, that you are at very low risk of getting anyone pregnant.

Exactly. It's exceptionally low, I think, is the benefit there. But yeah, so in terms of what I want to get off my chest, obviously, I go through a lot of the risk in the book. But for me, the thing I most want to thump at the table and say is at the moment, people like me have a choice that is really painful. It's between a risky medical condition and a risky set of drugs, right? And I hope my book is a guide so people can think through those risks for themselves and make their own decisions in consultation with their doctor. But the main thing I want to say is that doesn't have to be the choice. I went to Japan.

Japan is the third richest country in the world. right? Japan has almost no obesity at all. 42.5% of Americans are obese. In Japan, it's 4%. That childhood obesity rate is almost literally zero. It is really weird to go to Japanese schools with 1,000 kids and walk around and say to the teachers, where are your overweight children? And they say, we don't have any overweight children, right? And the reason they do it is because they protect their children.

children from processed and ultra-processed foods, and they educate them to love and enjoy healthy, fresh foods that feed their bodies and make them well. We can do that too. Just like we change the culture around smoking profoundly, very few 16-year-old Americans smoke now compared to when we were that age. Okay, we've got issues around vaping, and that's a real thing, but vaping is, if you had a choice between vaping and smoking cigarettes, we choose vaping every time, right? So we don't have to tolerate this. We can fix this, we can put this right. We absolutely need to do that.

Now though, for someone like me, it's too late. I've had a life on KFC, right? I can't go back in time and undo that environment. I've made the difficult choice I've made. Other people will have to make a difficult choice. Even just knowing about the environmental factors has reduced my shame. I felt like such a failure for being fat. I was in fact an entirely typical product of the environment I grew up in, right?

It was not my fault. So I would say know that this was done to you, not something you did to yourself, and know that it doesn't have to keep happening to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. And we can put this right if we want to. We've got a new tool to deal with this problem, which is exciting and disturbing. And I hope it wakes us up to go,

How the fuck did we get to this point? Well, I mean, I never in a million years did I think I'd get to speak to you. And I insist, or I will literally hang myself, that we end this podcast with the last lines from beaches, which are, I remember the line you say, which is, well, sure, we're friends, aren't we? That's the line that she says before that? She says, hold on. Valerie, can you pull this up? So for people who don't know, for being, people are listening and they don't know this, if you have not watched beaches,

you must just immediately stop and your life will never be the same again. You just literally need to, whatever you're doing, I don't care if your child is about to die and you need to go to the hospice, abandon the child and watch beaches because it is the greatest film of made.

But the, I mean, I do care if your child is dying. Don't get to be wrong, but priorities here. So there is a flashback at the end of beaches. This is a slight spoiler, but where Hillary and C.C., who meet when their little children in Atlantic City, go into those things that no longer exist, photo booths that take photos of you.

And this is the day they meet, and they say something like, we're going to say the line. And then at the very end of the film, after they've gone through many travails and many things have happened, which I will not ruin to you. Tell us, tell me the line.

Okay, okay, Valerie found it. I'll be you. I was going to say, Bobb Hershey. I'll be me. So your line is, be sure to keep in touch, Cici, okay? That's it.

That's it. Okay, ready? Again, she says, she's meant to be like a little posh girl as well. Yes, well, your accent is working for me. Yes. Okay, okay. Yeah. Be sure to keep in touch, Cece.

You have to say okay. Oh, sorry. Be sure to keep in touch, C.C. Okay. Well, sure. We're friends, aren't we? Could I just say this is the greatest moment of my life? This is nothing better will ever.

My life has now peaked and nothing better will ever happen to me again. So this is this is it. Johan Hari, you are delightful. You are such a gift with your writing and your journalism and your research. And it has just been so much fun and so helpful to talk this out with you. We're so grateful to you. Oh, hooray. And I meant to say on my publishers tased me, they're giving me this fucking thing to say,

if you'd like to know where to get my books, you can go to J-O-H-A-N-H-R-I-com. You can get them as audiobooks, e-book, e-book. or physical books. You can also see where to follow me on social media. And you can also get them, it's my meant to say you can get them from all good bookshops, but you can also get them from shitty bookshops. It doesn't really, we have no quality test, right? We've talked about magic pill, but, you know, I cannot recommend highly enough really all of Johan's books. So please go to his website, check him out. There's so much here to be mined. And we're just so grateful to even scratch the surface of everything that you have to offer. So thank you so much. Some of the things that we didn't

get to talk about with Johan were some of the other side effects, which I just sort of feel like because we've talked so much about Ozympic in this episode and these kinds of drugs, I do want to mention that besides the gastrointestinal stuff that we talked about, you know, some people do, like a side effects, one of the side effects is like pancreas issues, like inflammation of the pancreas. Some people have changes in vision, you know, related to like diabetic retinopathy stuff. One of the side effects is kidney issues, risk for kidney failure. Obviously, blood sugar issues are going to come up, as Johan talked about, because this is, you know, a manipulation of the insulin system. Some people do have allergic reactions. We talked about thyroid cancer,

and those are things that, these are things that OZemPEC has to tell people about. Like, these are things. And people might be like, acetamenephine can cause problems. You know, so like, it's true. Everything can cause things. But I did want to just mention it. And he mentioned the depression risk, which I think is really interesting. He also talks about people's faces changing. It's known as kind of a deflated face. And I think that's what I was referencing when I looked at all these celebrities, male and female. And I was like, it's like they look like they're wearing a skin of themselves. So, yeah. And malnutrition is a real concern. You know, when I've experienced people who, you know, are on these drugs and have said, I'm on this medicine,

it's like they don't, they said, they just like, I don't want to eat. They don't eat. So like, yeah, eating is important. And obviously, you're going to get loss of muscle mass, you know, from that as well. That was a very interesting conversation. I mean, honestly, I could talk to him about each of his books for hours and hours because I just, I love the way that he writes. I love the way that he goes about his research. I think that's what's so interesting about this book. It's not just about like, I took this drug and here's what happened. It's about what is the culture? What did he say?

The bio-sico-social environment that we're all, you know, having to navigate. And he really, he finds people doing research about, you know, things that previously we would have considered esoteric, which are now really at the forefront of understanding the underlying mechanisms of these kinds of drugs and what it does not only to our bodies but to our brains. And as you and I would argue, it's all connected. when he talked about biopsychos, I was like, how do you tell the difference? Everything psychological has a physiological component,

has like the gut, the mind, it's all related. I totally agree. I want to also be careful that I'm not underplaying the need for many people to be on these drugs. I am concerned that we don't talk about the interrelated nature that you just mentioned. I'm concerned that we just jump so quickly,

without thinking about the side effects, you know, the loss of muscle mass can have real serious implications for longer life. And I would say most people, especially women, would say, like, I'd rather be skinny than have muscle mass. And if you try and explain to them, well, it's actually not good for your bones. Like, it's not good for the, like, this is where, this is where we're in a really difficult place. And I would say it's because of decades and decades of indoctrination. nation. It is. And it's very, very hard to undo that stuff. And, you know, the fact is, we are not the kind of podcast that talks about, let's say, muscle mass, you know, that's not

kind of a place that we go. But I know that it is, it's in the soup of podcasts. It's in the soup of these conversations by what I say is usually male hosts talking about like, let's all take creatine and like, let's, you know, like, let's eat 8,000 grams of protein every meal. that's the American way. I talk about it. You just don't let me record it. I was trying to be vague and not say this is what you want to talk about all day.

But I do think that what I kept thinking, and this might sound dumb, you know what I kept thinking? I'm like, the country's too big. Everything feels impossible to do when the country's so big. And this isn't me arguing for provinces,

although I have argued for that before. But I got this feeling of like, how does a country with so many people have like one president and one this and one FDA. Like there's too much that we're trying to control with one centralized entity when our needs are so variable. And our needs are so like I feel like I don't want to have to have Michelle Obama telling me to garden because people laughed at her.

But the fact is communities need gardens. It's like a real thing. It's a thing that we could actually mobilize around to increase the available. Like, I'm being totally honest. I'm not just saying, like, me and my little, you know, shovel in a corner of San Francisco. I'm saying that, like, there are larger scale things that we could be doing to work towards helping people. I mean, the fact that, like, schools started, you know, introducing healthier meals, like some public schools are introducing meditation, right? It's not impossible.

to me, it feels impossible. Like I said, my five-year-old assessment is like, the country's too big, there's too many people. I don't know how you regulate anything. And forget about all the people who don't want any regulation at all, which is another factor. Yeah, because left to their own devices, I guess people will just figure it out.

And you know what, Jonathan? I know you were saying that kind of in passing, but those people, I've heard the way they talk about people who carry extra weight. It's not loving, you know? It's not. We talked earlier in an episode many, many moons ago about do our hunger cues change when we don't touch the food that we eat? When we're not preparing it, for example, it's not only that our hunger cues tell us to be hungry and then we go to Uber eats or DoorDash and we type in what we want and then we go down to the front door, pick it up, open the paper.

packaging and eat it. That's only part of how we feel satiated. And in fact, some of the times I feel the least satiated and where my cravings are the highest is when I'm just eating on the go without any thought about it, without any real preparation, without planning or interacting with the ingredients versus, huh, I know I'm going to be hungry at some point. I chop an onion. I chop a carrot. My mind starts thinking about that. We smell the food. That starts playing into our hunger cues. We cook the food. We wait for it. There's anticipation involved. We're a part of the process. There's more smells. We're using our hands that we are interacting with it. Then we eat the food and then we have a very dear. And then we clean a dish. There's a ritual that is much more than the very, very

mechanical nature of calories in I no longer feel hungry than I go about something else. And my concern is that the further we go away from a relationship with our food, whether that be shopping, planning for it, doing other things, we then get more

calories that do not fulfill us and down the rabbit hole we go. Yeah. I mean, I think, and I can't separate that, and I think especially coming from, you know, sort of a feminist lens,

I cannot separate that from the fact that the bulk of food prep, child care, and cleaning of the place that you live falls on women historically. And it was seen as a tremendous advance when they created the TV dinner. And when they created, you know, all of these ways to make your life easier, faster, the microwave, right?

All these things were marketed as ways to remove women from the prison of what you were told your identity was as a woman, which was to cook and say. to clean and to prepare. So I think it's a little bit, like, it's hard for me. It's a luxury when we make a meal together and like, it's fun and it's nice. But like on average, yeah, when I have worked a whole day and my kids have come home from school and they've finished their homework, I rely mostly on at least one process thing to use to make a meal for them. And if I were a person of leisure, right? If I had the time that I had, let's say, when I was finishing grad school, you know, and I didn't have coursework and my schedule was more my own, I cooked a lot and I cooked

a lot more healthily, you know, because I had that time. If you own a crock pot, preferably metal one, so you don't have forever chemicals coating the inside. And this is like a $60 item that lasts forever for the most part. you can put lentils, carrots, onions, and a handful of spices in there in literally 10 minutes. Put it in there, walk away. Or if you eat meat and you're not a vegan or vegetarian, you can put a frozen chicken breast in there. You can put rice on a stove under half an hour. You can have six or seven servings of food that last you many.

days. One of the ways that I changed the way I eat is that I'm okay eating the same thing over and over again. I believe we need variety, but there's a simplicity. I don't think people need an hour and a half cooking. Yes, it can be time consuming. Yes, it requires some planning, but there are simpler ways to do it to get healthy food and just even if it's not all every meal, even if it's not all the time, don't be absolutist about it. But there are ways to batch cook. to bring healthy food into your diet in a regular way and a consistent way that doesn't have to be totally time-consuming. Thank you for your nutritional 30 seconds, Jonathan.

We appreciate it. Well, this goes to also your garden. What I was talking about with the food prep also goes to your garden. And if people want to have private conversations about muscle mass and creatine, we can do that off air. It will be an Instagram conversation. But I think it's important. Like there's literally an entire chapter, you know, devoted to diet and exercise.

it's not enough and it's not getting at, you know, the deeper issues that we're talking about, which in some cases have to do with what we're putting in our body, but in other cases have to do with what role food is serving for us. You know, he said there's five reasons that we eat, and only one of them is actually, you know, specifically for sustenance. So that's the biggest part and I want to be clear that I'm not saying exercise your way out of whatever situation you're in Because it's impossible. I was listening to something recently and a doctor was saying, you know, you go to a movie, you have a bucket of popcorn, you may have a soda, you know, it could be a thousand calories. Most people aren't even physically capable of burning a thousand

calories because they're not in good enough shape to do that. Like actually burning off a thousand calories is a misnomer that you can exercise your way into being thin. Exercise is actually not the greatest. Like there are amazing benefits of exercise well outside of weight loss, but changing what you're consuming is the biggest factor for weight loss. And as you said, looking at what's driving our food consumption, most likely, and most of the time, it is not only for nutritional reasons. It has the psychological and emotional components. Those are much bigger factors. Please make sure to share this episode. Like us. Subscribe if you haven't already.

We love your comments. They're important to us. And we love what we do because of conversations like this, honestly. Really, really fantastic to have you all get to hear this conversation we had. So from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's My and Beaulix Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction.

And now she's going to break down. She's going to break it down.