Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Ozempic’s Unknowns

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Nearly half of Americans say they’re willing to pay for weight-loss drugs. But what are the downsides to these so-called “miracle drugs”? Johann Hari is the author of the book, “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.” Ricky Mulvey caught up with Hari for a conversation about: The medical magic that makes GLPs so effective Whether online pharmacies can responsibly prescribe these drugs Why there’s a much larger market for these in the US than in other parts of the world To see where you can get a copy of “Magic Pill,” head to: www.magicpillbook.com Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Johann Hari Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Tim Sparks Companies discussed: NVO, LLY, ZM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's really important for people to understand this is not a fad, this is not a new diet drug craze, I've heard it described that way. This is a profound medical breakthrough that will have remarkable effects and whether it'll be better or worse, it's a really important question and disturbingly, the answer is I don't know, despite all the research I did. I'm Mary Long and that's Johan Hari, author of the new book, Magic Pill, The Extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. My colleague, Ricky Moldy, caught up with Hari for a conversation about how these drugs work, the problems they solve, and the problems

they create. All right, the book is Magic Pill, the Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs. I'll write it at the top to all of our listeners. It's part memoir, part explainer, part investigative journalism. I found it beautifully written and it dramatically affected the way I view obesity, increased my empathy toward it, and then also gave me a greater understanding of these drugs. So, Johan, thanks for coming on the show and thanks for the book. Oh, I'm really moved by what you just said, Ricky. Thanks. So, you've described these weight loss drugs as an artificial solution to an artificial problem. Can you break down the artificial problem for people who are less familiar with it?

Maybe have healthy eating habits. Yeah, I would just say to anyone listening to the podcast, stop for a moment, pause the podcast and Google something for me. I was born in 1979. Just Google photographs of beaches in the United States in the year I was born, 1979. Just go away and do that and then come back. So if you've come back, you will have noticed something a bit strange when you look at those photos.

the vast majority of people in them look to us to be skinny or jacked, right? You look at it and go, huh, where was everyone else on the beach in Miami that day? Where was everyone else on the beach in Provincetown, right? And then you look at the figures. So in the year I was born, obesity was very low all over the world. Between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity doubled in the United States. Then in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again. So there's been a staggering explosion of obesity in my lifetime. So you basically have 300,000 years where human beings exist and obesity was very rare. Then it ticks up a little bit during the 20th century and then it goes supersonic in the 45 years I've been on earth, right? Why?

What happened? We know the answer broadly. Obesity explodes everywhere, every country that makes one specific change. It's not where people suddenly become lazy or greedy or lack willpower. It's where people move from mostly eating fresh, healthy foods that are prepared on the day, whole foods, to mostly eating processed and ultra-processed foods, which are constructed out of chemicals in factories in a process that isn't even called cooking, it's called manufacturing food. 67% of the calories the average American child eats in a day now are from ultra processed foods. And it turns out this new kind of food affects our bodies really differently to the old kind of food that human beings ate for literally hundreds of

thousands of years before us. And there's loads of ways that's the case, but there's an experiment I describe in the book that to me just totally nailed my understanding of this. I've nicknamed it Cheesecake Park. It's not the official name. It was carried out by Dr. Paul Kenny, who's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New York, a brilliant scientist. He explained to me, he raised a load of rats 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 just stop when they were full they never overate they never became overweight or obese when they had the natural food they'd evolved for it seemed they

had some kind of innate nutritional wisdom that just told them when they'd had enough then professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet, the kind of thing I've been eating all my life. He fried up some bacon. He bought a load of Snickers bars. He bought a cheesecake and he put it in the cage alongside the healthy food. And the rats went wild for the American diet. They would literally dive their way into the cheesecake and eat their way out and just emerge completely slicked with the cheesecake. And they ate and ate and ate and ate. The way