On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Johann Hari: Uncovering if Ozempic is a Miracle Drug or Health Hazard & 3 Things They Do Not Want To Tell About Ozempic

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

What motivates your weight loss journey? How do you stay motivated when progress is slow? Today, Jay welcomes Johan Hari. Johan is an acclaimed writer and journalist known for his deep investigative work on topics ranging from addiction to depression. He is the author of best-selling books like "Chasing the Scream" and "Lost Connections," which explore the root causes of addiction and depression, respectively. His latest book, "The Magic Pill," investigates the new generation of weight loss drugs and their impact on individuals and society.  Johan shares the story of how he first learned about these drugs at a Hollywood party and his subsequent journey to understand their true effects. This journey took him across the globe, interviewing leading experts and individuals who have experienced the drugs’ effects firsthand. He candidly shares his own experiences with Ozempic, including the unexpected emotional challenges he faced as his long-standing relationship with food was disrupted. The conversation also explores the broader societal implications of widespread use of weight loss drugs. Johan and Jay discuss the potential for these drugs to change cultural attitudes towards body image and obesity, for better or worse. They consider the economic ramifications, such as the declining market for fast food and medical procedures related to obesity, and what this might mean for the future of public health.   In this interview, you'll learn: How to evaluate benefits versus risks How to navigate social stigmas How to deal with obesity How weight loss drugs could shape future societal norms The psychological reasons behind overeating This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the complexities of modern weight loss solutions, offering a balanced view that considers both the remarkable benefits and the significant risks. This interview took place at Soho Home at Soho Works 55 Water.  With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty You can pre-order Charlamagne’s latest book, Get Honest or Die Lying here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/get-honest-or-die-lying-preorder What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:30 Is the British Accent Authoritative? 04:16 Biggest Misconceptions About Ozempic 08:20 Three Ways to Treat the Magic Pill 11:35 How Obesity Became a Health Crisis 19:42 ‘I Don’t Feel Hungry’ 28:17 The Benefits and Risks of Weight Loss Drugs 34:36 Shame and Cruelty Against Obesity 47:09 Advocating for Body Positivity 54:14 Is the Fast Food Industry Shrinking? 57:26 Big Risks When Taking Ozempic 01:06:34 Varying Clinical Results 01:14:18 The Most Horrific Side Effect Recorded 01:16:11 Is Ozempic Safe for Kids? 01:19:22 Oprah’s Ozempic Challenge 01:22:50 Is It Cheating? 01:26:41 Investing in Weight Loss Drugs Research 01:27:30 How Japan Is Able to Control Obesity 01:37:01 The Cultural Models We Can Learn from Japan 01:40:23 Better Eating Habits is Still Necessary 01:42:52 Johan in Final Five   Episode Resources: Johann Hari | Website Johann Hari | TikTok Johann Hari | Instagram Johann Hari | Facebook Johann Hari | YouTube Johann Hari | Twitter Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Take good care and we'll see you there.

Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there, Amit. People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one.

Listen to A Really Good Cry with Rali Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai and I'm an architect of Cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and

the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll never forget the second day I took a Zempik I woke up. Oh I feel something really weird what is it? I'd woken up and I wasn't hungry. I don't remember that ever happening before. One of the West's most prolific authors. And he has a brand new book. Magic Pill.

Award winning journalist, Johann Hari. 47% of Americans want to take these drugs. They are going to change all our lives for better and for worse. And this is something I think people are not being warned about. There's research that shows that if you want to create a habit, make it easy to access. By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier, healthier and more healed.

This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you and the world. Subscribe right now. The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty. and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose,

the place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. You know that my goal here is to sit down with incredible thinkers, thought leaders, people who are crafting the way our mind works and defining culture to have conversations that truly, truly matter. Today I get to interview one of my favourite authors. I've been wanting him to be on the show for such a long time and I can't believe he's finally, finally

here and this new book is one of the ones that I really hope that you take the time to read because I promise you, you, your friend, a family member, is having to deal with the challenges that come with this theme and concept in their daily, weekly and monthly life. Today's guest is none other than Johan Hari. His new book is called The Magic Pill. The extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. And I can't wait to dive into it with him. If you don't have a copy of the book already,

make sure you go and grab one. We'll put the link in the comments and caption below. Please welcome to On Purpose, Johan Hari. Johan, thank you for being here. Oh, I'm ridiculously happy to be here. Thank you so much. Honestly, I mean it. I was saying this to you offline,

but I'd like to repeat it for my audience. You're one of the most gripping and captivating authors that I've read in a long time in the nonfiction space. I enjoy your work so deeply. I feel completely enthralled when I'm reading your work. I love the way you tell stories. And you effortlessly, with so much grace and kindness, bring people into a universe

that they can understand very complex things and make sense of how to apply them in their life, which is so hard, hard to do. So thank you so much for all the work that you do and the experiments you do on yourself. Oh, cheers, thanks, Jake. And the fact that we're from very similar places. Exactly, we're basically neighbors.

We're basically neighbors. Yeah, exactly. We might go a little bit too British in this podcast, so I'm going to try and remember we are talking to a mostly American audience. Yeah. I was saying to you, I was once in a diner, in fact, in an IHOP in a place called Cactus, Arizona,

and I was trying to order pancakes. I kept saying, can I have some pancakes, please? And she kept going, what, what? And after a while she said to me, do you speak English? I was like, my people invented it. What do you mean? So I'm very conscious that we sound like weird refugees from Downton Abbey.

I'm going to try and Americanize slightly. Well, it's funny because every time I'm in... I live in the United States, but everyone in the United States always tells me that they find the British accent quite authoritative and they see it as a sign of education and knowledge. And for me, when I heard Ted talk in the American accent from a professor or a researcher,

that's when I find that it's authoritative. Do you feel that way or what's your take? Oh, that's so interesting. I think because I live here half the year, I think I'm kind of torn between the value of our accents, but I'm conscious that we get given like, we basically go in with the assumption of 10 added IQ points in any situation, right?

So... Yeah, and I'm like, if you knew me, I'm not from a posh part of England. Like, I'm not posh. Anyway... We sound like hilariously po... Like, I was virtually raised by my grandmother whose job was to clean toilets, but we sound basically like I'm not Posh. Anyway. We sound like hilariously, like I was richly raised by my grandmother whose job was to clean toilets, but we sound basically like the queen.

The queen, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Which we're not, but, yeah, and so I want to dive straight into this and I want to start off by saying, what are some of the biggest misconceptions you've heard about Ozempic? Almost things that people may even be thinking

as they're tuning into this or watching this right now. What are some of the things people already think they know, but you actually believe are misconceptions? I think the biggest misconception is that we should either be, yay, these drugs are amazing or boo, these drugs are evil. The biggest misconception is that we can be certain or confident about these drugs at the moment. I'll never forget, from the moment I learned about these drugs existence, I felt so conflicted. It's why I wrote the book, right? I remember the moment. I'll never forget from the moment I learned about these drugs existence,

I felt so conflicted. It's why I wrote the book, right? I remember the moment so vividly. It was the winter of 2022 and it was that moment when the world was opening up again. And I got invited to a party for the first time in God knows how long and I decided to go and I was in an Uber on the way there and the party was thrown by an Oscar winning actor, I think someone you know actually. And I'm not saying that just to name drop, it's relevant to what happened next. And on the way there, I was feeling kind of gained quite a lot of weight during lockdown,

I was feeling kind of schlubby, I was quite fat. At the start of lockdown, I was fatter then. And I was thinking, oh, this is going to be awkward. And then I suddenly realized that kind of everyone I knew had gained some weight during lockdown. And I thought, oh, this is going to be fascinating to see all these Hollywood stars with a bit of chub on them, right? And I arrived and I started walking around.

And it wasn't just that no one had gained weight, everyone was gaunt. Everyone looked like their own Snapchat filter. They were like clearer and cleaner and sharper. And I was kind of wandering around a bit of a daze. And I bumped into a friend of mine on the dance floor and I said to her, whoa, looks like everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown. And she laughed like, you just said, no, it must have looked puzzled. And she said, well, you know, it's not Pilates, right?

And I had no idea what she was talking about. She pulled up on her phone and a Zempic pen. And that was when I learned, I guess in the next couple of days, that we now have a new form of weight loss drug that works in a completely new way that causes the average person who uses it to lose 15% of their body weight. In fact, with Moonjaro, the next in this class of drugs, you lose 21% of your body weight. And for the next, which will be available next year, Triple G, you lose 24% of your body weight on average.

And I remember as soon as I heard that, just feeling this tremendous division in my own mind between on the one hand, I could obviously see the benefits. I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be. He died when he was 44 of a heart attack. Loads of men in my family get heart problems. My dad had terrible heart problems. My uncle died of a heart attack. My other uncle had a heart attack but survived it.

And I knew that sadly the evidence the scientific evidence is very clear that obesity makes it much more likely you'll have heart problems along with many other medical problems. So I thought, okay, if there's a drug that can reverse or really reduce obesity, that could have really big health benefits. But I also thought, wait a minute, wait a minute. I've seen this story before, right? Every 20 years or so, a new miracle weight loss drug is announced. We're told it's going to save us all. Uh, loads of people take it.

They always discover it has some horrendous side effect that, you know, it means it has to be pulled from the market, leaving a wave of terribly damaged people in its wake. So I thought, are we going to see that again? I also thought, what about the progress we've made with body positivity? What about the, what about people with eating disorders? There were just so many doubts that came into my mind. So to really get to the bottom of this, I ended up going on this big journey all over

the world from Iceland to Minneapolis to Okinawa in the south of Japan to interview the leading experts in the world on it, the biggest defenders of the drugs, the people who made the breakthroughs that made them possible, the biggest critics of the drugs. And I learned a huge amount about the extraordinary benefits of these drugs, the disturbing risks of these drugs, there's 12 quite disturbing risks, how it's going to transform the culture in all sorts of ways that even people who don't want to take these drugs, it's going to change the world around you in really fascinating ways. But at the end of all that, it's a slightly weird feeling.

I still feel quite conflicted about it. So I guess the misconception is that we should be so sure, right? This is complicated and we have to think through the complexity. So Johan, this idea that we have of, or this misconception that you just mentioned that we have of this idea of that it's all good or all bad. I wondered through your research kind of how you felt about that type of thinking. I feel like as humans, we have this very binary thinking

about anything and everything, right? That's a good person, they're a mean person, they're a healthy person, they're an unhealthy person when it comes to drugs. Oh, this one's perfect, this one's going to ruin your life. What did you discover about people's binary types of thinking through the research of this drug? I guess, cause there's, if you think about this drug

and the book is called Magic Pilker, there's three ways we could think about this as magic. And the first two are the kind of binary ways, right? The first way is these drugs could be magic in the sense that they could just solve the problem of obesity. And I've got to tell you, there are days it feels like that. My whole life, I've hugely overeaten because I was screwed up by the food industry and various other things. And now, you know, to do the book, I've been taking Ozempic for a year. There's been lots

of ups and downs, but you know, now that problem has largely gone away. I've lost an enormous amount of weight, 42 pounds, but also I've lost these, a lot of these destructive habits. So, you know, it could be magic in the sense of just like, whoa, the problem is solved. The second way it could be magic. And I think this is a real possibility is it could be like a magic trick. It could be like, you know, the conjurer who shows you a card trick while secretly picking your pocket.

It could be that in addition to giving you these benefits, the risks, and there are really significant risks here, are so substantial that they undo the good. I don't rule that out. In fact, I think it's a significant possibility. But the third way is actually the most likely, and I think it's the one that gets us out of that kind of binary thinking. And it's the, think about the stories of magic that we grew

up with as kids, right? Think about, I don't know, Aladdin, right? You find the lamp, you rub it, the genie appears and he grants your wishes. And your wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected, right? You get what you wanted, but always at some weird right angle that you never anticipated. And we're already seeing that with these drugs. You've got to get out the binary of good or bad to think about that. But you know, Barclays Bank commissioned a really interesting sober minded financial analyst

called Emily Field to just look at these drugs to figure out, okay, what's this going to mean for our investment decisions going forward? What should we be investing in? What should we not investing in? And she came back and said, if you want a comparison for the effect of these drugs, you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone, right? So if you and me had been speaking in whatever it was, 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, we would not have been able to game out, you know, door to ash and TikTok and

all these things that have transformed our lives that flowed from that. I think we're already beginning to see outside that kind of narrow binary, such an array of things that are happening as a result of these drugs. 47% of Americans want to take these drugs. They are going to change all our lives for better and for worse in a way that I think we need to take a moment as this extraordinary transformation happens all around us to really think through the benefits the risks And what it's gonna mean for all of us and what we should do about it now Yeah, let's talk about how we got here. You mentioned there that the food industry has screwed us up screwed you up

You mentioned just there. Let's talk about how we got here how we even needed to turn towards these drugs starting with some of the issues that you think the food industry has caused and how we even needed to turn towards these drugs, starting with some of the issues that you think the food industry has caused and how we've been trained to almost eat more, eat worse, eat unhealthier for ourselves. For a long time, I thought when I was researching the book that I was looking at two separate topics. Because I thought, at first, so I was looking at

why did obesity explode in our lifetimes? Massively explode. And how do the drugs work? But actually, I discovered these are not separate topics. The same thing explains both at its core. So I would just urge everyone watching, listening, to just stop for a moment and Google photographs of beaches in the United States or Britain in the year I was born, 1979. Just take a look at them, right? If you look at them, they seem really weird to us because

almost everyone is what we would call skinny or jacked, right? You look at it and you think, that's really weird. Where's everyone else? Was it like a skinny person convention in Atlantic City that day? And then you look at the population figures, no, that's what people looked like in the year I was born. We basically, humans have a bit more than 300,000 years in which obesity is extremely rare. And then essentially in your lifetime and mine, it absolutely blows up between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity doubled in the United States and then in the

next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again. And it seems really weird what's going on. What could possibly explain this unprecedented transformation in our bodies where we got to the point where now 42% of Americans are obese, right? Seems really weird. What happened? We know what happened. This change takes place everywhere where one thing happens.

It's not where people become weak-willed or lack willpower or become lazy or all the other cruel stigmatizing things we say about overweight people. It always happens where people move from mostly eating fresh whole foods that they prepared on the day to mostly eating processed and ultra-processed foods which are constructed in factories out of chemicals, in a process that actually isn't even called cooking, it's called manufacturing food. And it turns out this new kind of food, which never existed before in human history, affects our bodies in a completely different way to the old kind of food that all humans before

us ate. And there's loads of ways, that's true, I go through seven reasons in the book, but there's an experiment that was actually done here in New York that to me just totally distills what happened to us, right? So it's done by a brilliant Irish scientist called Professor Paul Kenny, not just up the road from where we are. So he's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai here in New York. And he grew up in Dublin in Ireland. And when he was in his 20s, he moved to San Diego in California to continue his scientific

research. And he quickly clocked, whoa, Americans don't eat like Irish people did at the time. Much more processed and ultra-processed food, much more sugary, salty food, right? And like many a good immigrant, he quickly assimilated. Within a year, he'd gained like 30 pounds. And he was like, wow, what's going on? And he felt like this new kind of food he was eating wasn't just affecting his gut, it was affecting his brain, it was affecting his brain,

it was changing what he wanted. So he designed this experiment to test it, which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park, it's not the official name of it, it's very simple. He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage. And they had nothing to eat, but the kind of healthy food that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years, right, in pellet form. So when the rats have got the kind of natural food they used to, they would eat when they were hungry and they would stop when they were full. And they never became overweight or obese. Given their kind of natural food, they had a kind of innate nutritional wisdom that meant

they were gonna, I've had enough now. Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some bacon, he bought a load of Snickers bars. Crucially he bought a load of cheesecake. And he put it in the cage alongside the option of the healthy food. And the rats went crazy for the American diet. They would literally hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their way out. Just completely slicked with cheesecake, right?

And they ate and ate and ate and ate. And all that nutritional wisdom they'd had before disappeared. They just rapidly became obese. In fact, the way Professor Kenny put it to me was within a couple of days, they were different animals. And so this nutritional wisdom that they'd had before with their natural food just disappeared. The brakes were off, right?

Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment again in a way that to a lifelong junk food addict seems to me a bit cruel. He took away the American diet and left them with nothing but the healthy food they'd grown up with. And he was pretty sure he knew what would happen, that they would eat more of the healthy food than they had before. And this would prove that junk food expands the number of calories you eat in a day. That is not what happened.

Something much weirder happened. Once they'd had the American diet and it was taken away, they refused to eat anything at all. It was like they no longer recognized the healthy food as food. It was only when they were really starving that they finally went back and ate it. Now, what this tells us, and there's loads of evidence in humans, is the diet we're eating is profoundly undermining our ability to ever feel full. And in fact, the key word here, both in explaining the rise of obesity and how these drugs work is satiety. It's not a word we use that often in everyday English,

but it's the feeling of being sated, the feeling of having had enough and not wanting anymore. And this kind of food we eat profoundly steals our satiety, right? And what these drugs do is they give you back your sense of satiety. They give you back your sense of being full, but with a potential cost, right? Yeah. And that's, it's so fascinating to hear how so much of it has become stigmatized. You don't have enough self-control.

You don't have enough willpower. You're not disciplined enough. And that's why it's leading to these things. And as you're saying, I mean, I've also read different work that talks about how our portion sizes have increased. And I remember the first time I came to the United States, I think I was nine years old with my family. We were coming to Orlando to go to Disney World.

Orlando. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to get you to sing the Ozempic song in a second, but we come to Orlando and I remember like getting one of those, you could get like this jumbo size Coke, like which was refillable at the gas station. And then if you wanted, you could get the double jumbo size Coke,

which is refillable at every gas station. And I couldn't believe it, and that's all I wanted as a kid, right? I was like, that's the coolest thing ever. My parents got it for me and then I was drinking refillable cokes the whole time. That's when you got diabetes the first time, right? Yeah, and I'm predisposed to diabetes because of my genetics. So it's so interesting.

And similarly for me, I grew up as a chocolate addict. So I ate a chocolate bar, a chocolate yogurt, a chocolate biscuit and a chocolate ice cream every day growing up. And I was very overweight growing up. I lost a lot of weight. Were you really? Yeah.

Because you don't look like you've ever been overweight. I've been till age 14, 15. And then at 15, I started playing a lot of sports. I soon after became vegetarian and I lost a ton of weight. And for me, what happened though, was I still had bad habits. So I got through university having a Sprite and a chocolate bar every single day. And it wouldn't show up as fat physically,

but it would show up as, you know, now I see it as glucose spikes. Now I see it as an increase in the chances of having diabetes and heading in that direction. And my wife has been the one to coach me more on the side of self-control and discipline and finding alternatives. And I've seen a huge shift in my life ever since I've stopped refined sugars, ever since

I've switched my diet to whole foods, less processed foods. And I've done it in a very self-controlled way. I know how hard that is. I know how prone I still am to having cravings sometimes. And at the same time, I've lost taste for certain things. Anyway, I'm saying all of that to ask you the question of portion sizes have increased, we're eating fake foods that are making us want them more. We don't feel satiated when we're consuming.

How does the drug actually make you feel satiated? Because I think it's important for people to understand that. What is happening in order for you you feel satiated? Because I think it's important for people to understand that. What is happening in order for you to feel satiated? It's the weirdest thing, I'll tell you how it feels as an individual and then the science of it. I'll never forget the second day I took ozempic, I woke up. And I was lying in bed and I thought, oh, I feel something really weird, what is it?

And I couldn't locate in my body what it was. And it took me about five minutes. And I suddenly realized, I'd woken up and I wasn't hungry. I don't remember that ever happening before, right? From when I was very young, you know, grew up in a working class family, we ate constant processed and junk food. And I was in a bit of a daze and I went to this cafe

just around the corner from where I live. And I went in a bit of a daze and I went to this cafe just around the corner from where I live. And I went in and I ordered what I used to order every morning for breakfast when I'm in London. It was a big brown roll with loads of chicken and loads of mayo in it. And I had like three or four mouthfuls and I just didn't want anymore. I was full.

I was full in a way that I never normally felt full. I thought, that's really weird. And I went for lunch that day. I went to this Turkish cafe next to my office. And I went in and I ordered what I used to order every day when I went there, which was a Mediterranean lamb. Again, I had three or four mouthfuls and I was just full. It was so strange.

It was like kind of shutters had come down on my appetite. I can't think of another way to describe it. Or it was more like when I ate. So imagine you had just had Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner and you were stuffed. And then I came along and said, hey, Jay, great news, I've got you a KFC bucket, right? You'd just be like, oh no.

But you get to that level really, really quickly. So obviously I interviewed the people who made the breakthroughs for these drug scientists who'd worked on key stages of developing the drug. One of the weird things about this drug is we don't actually know how it works, but there's some things we know for sure. There's a big amount of indeterminacy, but there's some things we know for sure. If you ate something now, it doesn't matter what it is, something healthy, unhealthy,

after a little while, your pancreas will produce a hormone called GLP-1. And GLP-1, we now know, is just part of like the natural signaling in your body, saying, hey, Jay, you had enough, stop. It's like the brakes, right? But that natural GLP-1 only stays around in your system for a couple of minutes, and then it's just washed away. So what these drugs do is they inject you

with an artificial copy of GLP-1 that instead of being washed away in a few minutes stays around in your system for a whole week. It's why when I go to the cafe, I only want three or four mouthfuls because I'm already so close to full. My GLP-1 or this artificial boosting of GLP-1 makes me feel full so quickly. So initially it was thought when they were developing these drugs that because this hormone is made in the gut, it has an effect primarily on the gut. This must be a drug that's changing your gut in some way. And it clearly is, right?

And there's all sorts of ways we know that. But from interviewing the cutting edge scientists working on this particular neuroscientist, it's increasingly clear that in fact, these drugs work primarily on your brain. You don't just have GLP-1 receptors in your gut, you've got them in your thyroid, which is important for something else, and your brain. And these drugs are profoundly changing your brain. We know that if you give these drugs to rats and then you kill them and cut their brains open, which obviously you're not allowed to do with humans for very good reasons, what you see is the drug goes everywhere in the rat's brain. Everywhere, right? So I remember when I learned that, and I learned it quite

a while into, you know, a few months into taking the drugs, it's a disconcerting thing to learn. You realize, how would I put it? It's a much more intimate transformation, right? Something that changes your gut. You sort of feel like, oh, okay, that's fine. Something that's changing your brain

and profoundly changing your brain, partly explains why the effect is so powerful, why these are so much more effective than all previous diet drugs. It also potentially raises some other benefits in terms of benefits for addiction. It also raises some other risks around whether it may cause depression because there's a debate about what it's actually doing in your brain. But for me, it just sort of made me realize, oh, this is a, like I say, a much more intimate

change than a lot of people realize, I think, when they start taking it. Yeah, who was it? Was it your nephew who said, where is Joanne Harry and what have you done with him? Was it your nephew? My little godson. Your little godson, yeah. It was a while to take it, I took him to McDonald's. So I've had a long, my relationship with junk food is probably best typified by

what are the low points in my life. I was, I could tell you exactly when it happened. It was 1pm on Christmas Eve 2009 and I went to my local branch of KFC in East London and I went in and I said my standard order, which is so disgusting, I'm not going to repeat it in front of somebody who's got a healthy glow. It was literally a bucket of fried chicken. Trust me, I love a bucket of fried chicken. You look like you've got such a healthy glow you've never eaten a chicken drumstick. I'm plant-based now, but back in the day, that popcorn chicken would have been my jam. The guy behind the counter said to me, Oh, Johan, I'm really glad you're here.

I was like, all right. And he went off behind where they throw the chicken and everything. And he came back with a massive Christmas card in which they'd written to our best customer and everyone had written like personal messages to me. And one of the reasons my heart sank is I thought, this isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the most. How can this be happening to me? It was the second lowest moment in my life as an overweight person.

The worst was the time that I was fat shamed by the Dalai Lama. But no, there was this moment where, it's not even a joke by the way. Yeah, you need to tell us about it. I'm trying to tell you the horror of the Dalai Lama, but no, there was this moment where, it's not even a joke by the way, I'm trying to tell you the horror of the Dalai Lama all the time, but there, so I'd had this very intimate relationship with this food all my life and to have it, there were many good things that flowed from takeo zanpik for me and there are many benefits to it as well as some significant risks. But the weirdest moment for me actually was another moment that happened in KFC.

In fact one of my nephews said to me, a lot of the key moments in your life seem to happen in branches of KFC. I was like, oh that's a good point. But I had a real epiphany about this because what these drugs do is they profoundly interrupt your underlying eating patterns, right? You can't eat the way you did before. And this is something I think people are not being warned about, and I try to take people through in a lot of detail in the book, is you need to be prepared that because of that, a lot of the underlying emotional issues that drive your eating may well come to the surface. I had this moment for me. I was in Vegas.

I was, as you know, I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas that I've been researching for a long time. And I was researching the murder of someone that I knew and loved. And it was obviously very painful, as you can imagine. He was an incredible person. I was working on this and I just, you know, felt bad. And, um, I went to this branch of KFC on West Sahara, which is one of the grimmest KFCs in the world. And believe me, I could write a book about all of them. And I went in and really on autopilot, it's just like seven, eight months into taking the drugs.

I, I went in and I ordered what I would have ordered a year before, right? I ordered a bucket of fried chicken and had had a chicken and I wasn't even really thinking about the eating or anything. I was, and I had a chicken drumstick and I looked at this bucket and I thought, I can't eat this. Right? Like I would throw up if I tried to eat this. And I remember Colonel Sanders was on the wall and it was like he was looking at me

going, Hey, what happened to my best customer? And I'm thinking, Oh, you're just going to have to feel your feelings. Right. And essentially, if you look at the scientific evidence, the scientific evidence for five reasons why we eat, one of them is the obvious one to sustain our bodies. And I would have told you before I started taking this drug, that was why I ate, right? But here I am. Then I ate maybe 3,200 calories a day now I around a hundred thousand eight hundred So all that other eating was doing something else right and I go through the the the the four psychological reasons Why we eat they don't obviously applies differently to different people and those things kind of get surfaced

and I remember going to one of my closest friends when I got back from Vegas and saying to her, I've got to stop taking this. I can't take it. This is too upsetting. And she said to me, Johan, stop taking it if you want to, that's fine. But you need to know these drugs are not causing this issue. This issue was there all along.

In this case, what they're doing is giving you an opportunity to deal with those issues in a better way than drowning your feelings in saturated fats, right? And that's been a bumpy transition, although I'm glad I stuck with it, although lots of people I respect the fact they don't. Walk me through why people don't. Like what was their reasoning?

What were they struggling with so much? There's a lot of things people struggle with the drugs, but in relation to that, I'm sure we're getting to lots of them. But if we think about this specific one, if you want to think about the benefits and risks of these drugs when it comes to obesity, I actually think it's quite helpful to look at a parallel area of science. We've only been giving these drugs to people for obesity for a couple of years, but there's a parallel area of science that can help us to think about the benefits and I think some

of the answer to your question. So, and it's bariatric surgery. Up to now it's been very hard without some kind of external intervention to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it off. Clearly you did it, there are lots of people who do it, but it's actually a surprisingly small percentage of the people who try it succeed. I go through why in the book and that reasons are really important. So actually the most effective way up to now has been bariatric surgery, things like, you know, stomach stapling, gastric sleeves. Bariatric surgery is a horrific operation. It's really

gruelling. You know, one in a thousand people die during operation. It's no joke, right? But the reason people put themselves through that is because of the extraordinary benefits to their health afterwards. If you have, now bear in mind they were severely obese at the start otherwise you wouldn't qualify for the surgery. But if you have this surgery in the seven years that follow you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack, you are 60% less likely to die of cancer, you are 92% less likely to die of diabetes related causes. In, it's so good for your health that you're 40% less likely to die at all in that seven-year period, right? And we know similarly that these drugs are moving in a similar direction. So if you take these drugs and your BMI is higher than 27 at the start,

you are 20% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke, right, in the years that follow. See, that's a very... I was going to say it's close to my heart. It is literally close to my heart, right? But you also, when you look at bariatric surgery, begin to see some of the drawbacks. And I think the key to what you're asking might be there. So one of the things that I think is really shocking is if you have bariatric surgery, your suicide rate quadruples in the years that follow, right? It's still quite a low risk. Most people have bariatric surgery, glad they did it,

but quadrupling, that's a big effect, right? Just think, why would that be? What's going on? I think there's lots of things going on there. Some of it is actually the after-effects of the surgery are pretty onerous. Some of it is you can't comfort it anymore, so that pain comes to the surface. Some of it is a lot of people who are overweight kind of think, well, if only I was thin, my life would be really great. It's that magic pill, yeah. Exactly, and they lose the weight and, you know, your husband's still an asshole and you still hate your job. And I think there's also some...

I'll give an example of a really deep psychological issue that I think is surfaced in some cases by these drugs in bariatric surgery. Something I learned about from a wonderful man who you should have on actually, called Dr Vincent Felitti. It was really hard for me to learn about this. So Dr Felitti was a doctor in San Diego in the early 1980s and he was approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not-for-profit medical provider in California. And they said, look, we've got a problem.

We don't know what to do. Please help us. A problem they had was that obesity was hugely rising. In fact, it was very low by our standards, but it was rising. And they said, look, nothing we do works. We give people diet plans. We give them personal trainers. It's not working.

Can we give you a load of money and just do Blue Skies research, figure out what the hell we should do? So Dr. Filippi took the money and was like, oh, what can I do? So he started working with 200 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had for a long time. And he's like, what could I do?

And he had an idea that sounds, and in fact is, kind of dumb. He said, what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them vitamin C shots so they didn't get scurvy or whatever? Would they just burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight? So with a ton of medical supervision, they did it.

And incredibly, at first it worked. There was a woman who I'll call Susan, not her real name, who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds, staggering transformation. And you know, her family are calling the doctor and saying you saved her life. She's thrilled. And then one day, um, she cracked. She went to KFC or I think it's projection. She went somewhere and, you know, started hugely over eating again and quite quickly got back to a dangerous way. And Dr. Filuti called her in and he said, Susan, what happened? What happened?

And she looked down, she was really ashamed. She said, I don't know. I don't know. He said, well, tell me about the day you cracked. Did anything in particular happen that day that didn't happen some other day? It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and a man hit on her, not in a nasty way, in a nice way, and she felt completely freaked out and went and started eating.

That's when Dr. Felitti asked her something he'd never thought to ask her before. He said, Susan, when did you gain your weight? In her case, it was when she was 11. He said, well, did anything happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were nine or when you were 14? Anything in particular happened that year? And she looked down and she said, well, that's when my grandfather started raping me. Dr. Filiti interviewed everyone in the program.

He discovered that 60% of the women had made their extreme weight gain in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And at first he was like, what's going on? It doesn't make any sense. And Susan explained it to him really well. He discovered that 60% of the women had made their extreme weight gain in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And at first he was like, what's going on? It doesn't make any sense. And Susan explained it to him really well. She said overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be.

Right? Clearly, obesity for women has a protective sexual function. You are somewhat, it can still happen of course, but you are less likely to be sexually assaulted if you gain a lot of weight. And so for Susan, losing a huge amount of weight made her really frightened and feel really vulnerable and brought her back to that terrified place of abuse. Now there's lots of psychological things that go on, that's only one of many, but I think, and of course it can give you an opportunity to deal with those feelings, right? But again, it gives you a sense of like, the incredible psychological complexity

of what's really going on here can kind of come to the surface in complicated ways. Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there! People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy.

Yeah. And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life. I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great, you see me too. We'll laugh together, we'll cry together and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget, it's OK to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to A Really Good Cry with Radhie Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something that makes me crazy is when people say,

well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes, that it's not a waste that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is She Pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them. Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, every Wednesday on She Pivots, as I sit down with inspiring women like Misty Copeland, Brooke Shields, Vanessa Hudgens, and so many more.

We dive into how these women made their pivot and their mindset shifts that happened as a result. It's a podcast about women, their stories, and how their pivot became their success. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you find that bright spot to help you get through your day, it's powerful. That's where the bright side comes in,

a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that's bringing you a daily dose of joy. I'm Danielle Robay. And I'm Simone Boyce. Listen, both Danielle and I are reporters. We've covered the news and we know the world can feel heavy. But the Bright Side podcast is a space to have a little fun, to learn something new, and get into some friendly debates.

That's right. Join us five days a week to see how life can look from the bright side. We'll hear from celebrities, authors, experts, and listeners like you. Whether it's relationships, friend advice, or figuring out how to navigate life's transitions, we'll talk through it all together. Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine every weekday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and what's interesting about that is, no matter what the psychological reason may be,

you're almost dealing with that feeling for the first time in three or four decades. So it almost feels like a new feeling. Would that be fair enough to say? It almost feels like, what I mean by that is there are certain feelings and thoughts that we've had since we were young and we found ways to cope with them. But if this is something that you've been able to kind of put aside for 10, 20, 30 years and all of a sudden now that this is blocking something

which is giving rise to that, it almost feels like, wow, I haven't learned how to deal with this for a long time. I think that's really right. I think you're right. It's even worse than a new feeling. It's a buried feeling, right? And obesity is so laden with shame and the cruelty in this culture towards, you know, which I've experienced to some degree, but women get it much, much worse.

If you have a BMI higher than 35 and you're a woman, 42% of those women get insulted literally every day, right? And I really wanted to think this through because I was very conscious that we've made so much progress in this culture. I mean, we were nowhere near where we need to be, but we've made some progress. I think about this, and one of the things I really worry about in relation to these drugs, I think it's really distilled in a moment, probably the worst moment in the whole writing

of the book for me. So I've got a niece called Erin, who's 19 now, but in my head she's fixed as a six-year-old. Like, she's the baby of my family, she's the only girl, she's the youngest of my brother's and sister's children. But one day I was FaceTiming with her after we'd taken the drug for a while. And she was sort of praising me in a teasing way. She was like, Oh, I never knew you had

a jaw, I never knew you had a neck. And I was kind of preening. And then she looked down and she said, will you buy me some ozempic? And I laughed because I thought she was kidding. And I realized she wasn't and she's like a perfectly healthy weight, she always has been. And I thought I've undone all the messages I've ever tried to give her, right? About valuing yourself, about... And I thought, you know, she's grown up seeing a broader range of body types in female celebrities than we ever grew up with. And now all of those women pretty much are bone thin.

And I really wanted to think this through because I think there's two categories here which are quite different. There's overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to get down to a healthy weight. Now, they're still incurring the 12 big risks that I write about in Magic Pill. There's still a lot to discuss there, but I think there's a lot to defend there. Then you've got people who are already a healthy weight or indeed skinny, who are taking them to be super skinny.

Now I don't judge those people. We live in a culture that makes women feel shit about their bodies, whatever they do. And there are tremendous pressures on them. And I don't judge where those women are coming from at all. But they're incurring all the physical, all the 12 risks for none of the benefits, right? I mean, well, rather for aesthetic benefits but not health benefits. And in fact, they're endangering their own health in all sorts of complicated ways. To give an obvious example, as you age, you naturally lose muscle

mass. Muscle mass is the total amount of soft tissue in your body that you need to like get out of a chair, walk up the stairs, whatever it might be. So as you age, you naturally lose muscle mass. From the age of 30, depressingly. So if you're going into the aging process already with quite low muscle mass, which people who've taken the drugs to be super skinny likely will be, it could cause you real problems when you're older. You know, you'll be much less mobile, you'll find it harder to walk up the stairs, you're at risk of a condition less mobile, you'll find it harder to walk up the stairs, you're at risk of a condition called sarcopenia, which means poverty of the flesh. It's where

basically you just can't do much because you're quite physically weak. So I think we've got to distinguish between those two things. And then we've got to think about also what this means for body positivity and how we think about it in relation to that was a particular person who helped me to think about that. I could tell her, tell you a bit about her if you like. Yeah, please. So this is woman you probably remember her Jay, because we're from the same place. So That was a particular person who helped me to think about that. I could tell her, tell you a bit about her if you like. Yeah, please. So this is woman, you probably remember her Jay, cause we're from the same place. Um, so when we were kids, you only ever saw fat people on television as the butt of a joke, right?

Particularly overweight women, right? It was vicious. And the first person I ever saw challenge that, I remember it blew my mind. It was on Kilroy, which people don't know. It's like a, if you imagine a kind of dollar store version of Ricky Lake, right? The first person I ever saw challenge it was this woman called Shelly Bovy, who basically introduced body positivity to Britain. She was the first person to ever talk about this and write about it in Britain on a big

public stage. So I went and tracked her down because I really wanted to think this through with her. She's 76 now. And her story, I think, really helps us to think through the complexity of this. So she grew up in a kind of big working class town in Britain called Port Talbot. I guess the equivalent in the US would be like Scranton. She was, as she would put it, the only fat girl at her school. This was the 1960s.

And one day after class, her teacher said to her, Bovy, stay behind, I need to talk to you. So she's sort of sitting there thinking, hey, what did I do? And she goes up to the teacher and the teacher said, you're much too fat, it's disgusting. Go see the school nurse, she'll sort you out. So completely thrown, she goes to see the school nurse. And the nurse says, why are you here? She said, well, the teacher says I'm too fat.

And the nurse said, take off your clothes, I'm gonna look at you. And the nurse looked to her are you here? She said, well, the teacher says I'm too fat. And the nurse said, take off your clothes, I'm gonna look at you. And the nurse looked to her and said, oh, disgusting, you're too fat. And just berated her, said, you're greedy, you're a pig, eat less. And Shelley completely throwing kind of leaves. She was soaking up this kind of abuse the whole time, right?

Girls were constantly saying to her, thank God I don't look like you. And really, her whole life, she's soaked up this abuse. When she got pregnant, she went to the doctor. First thing the doctor said was, shouldn't be pregnant when you're as fat as you are. When she gave birth, she had a very painful birth, difficult birth. She's lying there covered in blood and the midwife said to her, you know, you really need to lose some weight. And when her baby wouldn't attach, he wasn't feeding properly. She went

to the doctor. The doctor said, what are you trying to do? Make the baby as fat as you are. Over-wet and obese people are soaking this up all the time. And most of them just internalize it. Shelley told me she had never looked at her body naked. Even in the shower, she would sort of wash herself but not look because she felt such hatred for her own body. And one day she learned in the US there was this movement which at the time called itself Fat Pride, there's still some people who use that term now, we would probably call it more

body positivity, who just said, why are we taking it? This is like, this is just cruelty. This is like racism or homophobia or sexism. Just no, we're not going to be treated like this. You're not going to get to talk to us like that. And so she wrote the first ever book, advocating for body positivity, still stands up now, brilliant book called The Forbidden Body, in which she argued against the stigma. And when I tracked Shirley down, she stressed to me she's really proud of everything

she said about stigma. And I think she's 100% right to be. Stigma, A, is just a form of bullying and B, makes the problem much worse, Lindy West is a brilliant body positivity advocate said, people don't take good care of a thing they hate. If you make people hate their bodies, it doesn't make them take better care of them. But something happened to Shelley next. I think if we're going to be truthful and compassionate, we have to talk about. Shelley was very overweight. Shelly was very overweight, she was not yet 50, and she was losing the ability to walk. And so she had to be in a wheelchair

and she went to a doctor and a doctor said, well, because of your weight, because of the strain that's putting, you've got problems with your heart. And Shelly felt this profound dilemma because she was so proud of everything she said about stigma. But first she thought, well, I want to talk about these health challenges, but is this contradictory? There was at the time a newsletter in Britain called Fat News, which was like a body positivity newsletter. And she wanted to write about this.

And they said, no, no, that's not what we want. We're here to tell the positive news. And she said, but don't, if we love ourselves, don't we want to tell the whole truth? And she felt really conflicted about this. And for a long time, she felt like it was either or. Either you're against stigma or you're in favour of reducing obesity where you can. But you know, she then, and she's the first to acknowledge this is extremely hard to do, but she lost a lot of weight through dieting.

She went from being unable to walk to being able to run. Her health massively improved, her heart problems went away, which tends to happen when you reverse obesity like when we talked about with the bariatric surgery. And Shelley, I thought, put it to me in a really wise way. She said, it's not either or, it's both and. If you love someone who's obese, as everyone watching will, I'm pretty sure you want to protect them from two things. You want to protect them from cruelty and bullying and you want to protect them if you possibly can from the more than 200 diseases and health complications that are made much more likely by being overweight or obese.

And I was kind of shocked when I looked at the science of this with an open mind. I'm very happy to challenge scientific consensus. I've done it before in my previous books, but when you look at the scientific evidence and I was trained to challenge scientific consensus. I've done it before in my previous books. But when you look at the scientific evidence, and I was trained to assess scientific evidence at Cambridge University, I was kind of taken aback by how bad obesity is for your health on average. Of course, there are exceptions. My mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. She's alive and well at the age of 78, but she's an outlier.

I mean, even think about something as simple as diabetes, right? I'm really embarrassed to say this, but I thought if you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I knew that obesity makes diabetes much more likely. If you're obese when you're 18, you have a 70% chance of becoming diabetic in your life. But I thought, okay, that's not good. But as long as you've got good health insurance and you get insulin, you're basically like everyone else. A diabetic with insulin is like me or you. That's not true at all. When I interviewed the leading, you know, doctors who are leading people who treat

diabetics, when you look at the scientific evidence, you know, diabetes knocks 15 years off your life on average. It's the biggest preventable cause of blindness in this country. More people have to have a limb or extremity amputated because of diabetes in the U S than because they got shot. And you will have noticed a lot of us get shot, right? And in fact, the effects are so bad that one of the leading doctors in Britain who treats diabetics, Dr. Max Pemberton, said to me, if you gave me a choice between becoming diabetic or becoming HIV positive,

I would choose to become HIV positive. Because if you're HIV positive and you get treatment, you live as long as everyone else. That is not true of diabetics, type 2 diabetics. You have a shorter life and you're much more likely to have a terrible last few years where you're blind or you're horribly, you know, your body is mutilated. And I found that so frightening to take on and I'm conscious that loads of people hearing that will experience that and it's very painful. It is extremely painful to hear and it's an extremely painful truth and we have to communicate

it with great compassion and love and not as concern trolling or... and I hate even saying it because you can see how it gives ammunition to the bullies in a way because they use that as like, oh babe, I'm just worried about your health. I get that but Shelley really taught me, yeah, she put it, we have to live in reality and we have to be as compassionate as we can within that reality. We have to do both, right? And I'm conscious this is a long answer, but I'll just give you an example. One other person helped me to think about this.

There's a brilliant guy I interviewed called Jeff Parke. He's a 67 year old retired lighting engineer in San Francisco. And Jeff, a couple of years ago was very severely overweight. He was finding it painful to walk. He had gout, he had liver problems, kidney problems. He was taking fistfuls of pills every day. And he started to take Minjaro, which is one of the new weight loss drugs. And he lost a lot of weight.

All his health problems went into remission. he was, the doctor almost took him off the pills. Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate Bridge every day, he said, you know, I feel like I'm going to enjoy my retirement now. I don't think we can say to someone like Jeff that that improvement is not meaningful. Right? There are many, maybe the risks of the drugs will outweigh that benefit to him and for others. That's a real possibility. It's why I put a lot of weight on the 12 risks of these drugs in the book. But I do think we have to acknowledge that a lot of people who do successfully reverse their obesity, which is much easier to do now than it's been before, do experience a massive improvement in the quality of their life. I do think we're

not being honest with people if we don't explain that as well. Thank you for going into that actually. It wasn't, it was a very thoughtful answer and those stories give us an entryway into the psychology and the mind of so many of us and what we're all struggling with. With Shelley, I'm intrigued. How is she now perceived by her community that she was the face for, having now dieted, lost weight it sounds like, and may appear different visually? How is she now perceived and how does she feel about reconnecting with that community and talking about it with them? So as she would say, there's a, as she speaks for herself much better than I can, so I don't

want to too much ventriloquise her, but she's a very articulate person. I think it's really complicated, and I understand why it's complicated. Some people saw her as a sellout, and I think Shelley's attitude was, what kind of body positivity would it be that would shame me for keeping my body alive? And there's a big division going on now

among body positivity advocates, where they have many good arguments arguments and it's worth stressing So if we think about the history of diet drugs Think about the 70s, right? One of the things that one the first things the fat pride movement did was point out So there were diet drugs in the 70s that were amphetamines, right? They're hugely popular. There were staggering figures like more than 10 million amphetamine prescriptions were written in 1970 in this country for weight loss, right? And it turns out taking loads of speed to lose weight, not a good idea.

Who knew? And they had to be taken off the market because it screws you up, right? Partly because you develop tolerance to these drugs. You have to take higher and higher doses to get the same effect. And if you're taking really high doses of speed, as anyone who knows any recreational drug users will know, don't end so well for you. Skinny but psychotic is not a great trade off. Definitely not.

Maybe for some people it is, but not for me. And so a lot of the fat pride movement, very presciently warned at the time, you know, this is really going to screw people up. Don't do it. Right. And they've been entirely vindicated by that. And it may be, and I think there's a significant chance of this, I don't think it's the most likely option but I do think it's a significant chance, that they'll be vindicated on these drugs as well, going, look, this is a big risk, right? For me, especially with the history in my own family, what I felt I had to do was weigh two risks. And I think that's what most people watching and listening will, this will be the position they're in. Realistically, I was going to remain obese. I tried dieting many times. I always ended up fatter than I was at the

start. I tried insane and intense diets. I've gone to diet camps in Austria where they give you tea for a week. I've done it all, right? Realistically I was going to carry on being obese to some level. So for me, the choice was what are the risks of continuing to be obese versus what are the risks of these drugs? That is not an easy calculation. There's a lot we don't know. We're learning more and more.

There's a lot of detail in the book that I think people don't know about. It's a hard calculation and I don't know if I've made the right choice for myself. So it may well be, there's a significant chance that they will, that their caution about this will be vindicated. And they're right that they're also right to say, it's clearly not the case that we're only taking this to deal with health problems, right? And that's true of me as well. There's a significant amount of just relief from the stigma of being fat.

Vanity. I like being thinner, right? Because of the culture we live in. Some of that is the health benefits and the risks to my heart, of course. But some of that isn't. A big part of it isn't. We've got a level with people about that. So it's possible that they'll, they'll be vindicated. And even if they aren't, we've really got to understand where it comes from. If you are soaking up

abuse your whole life, that cruelty, that bullying, I totally get. You know, there's an analogy I always think of, which is, I'm gay. The height of the AIDS crisis, when doctors explain to gay men, look, because of the nature of anal sex and because gay men tend to have a lot more sexual partners than other sexual combinations, this is going to affect gay men much worse than other communities. So they wanted to, you know, shut down the bath houses in San Francisco, really warn people, say, while we don't know, you shouldn't have sex, right? And a lot of gay men were like, our whole lives we've been told our sexuality is disgusting,

we're diseased, we're evil. And now you come along and tell us this as well. We're going to carry on going to the bathhouses. We're going to carry on. And I get where they're coming from. I might well have been like that myself at the time. But now we realize looking back, well, you have to separate the stigma from the scientific advice, right? There was, I'm sure there were lots of homophobes picking up those arguments and bullying gay

people. Exactly. But equally there was the scientific reality, which is it was much more likely to affect gay people. And lots of those people who refused that advice tragically are not here now because they refused it. So I think, and that doesn't mean that I stand over those people and go, what fools?

I totally get it. But I do think we have to, as Shelley says, we have to separate out two things. We have to separate out the stigmatizing, cruel things that I said from things that are just physical. Think about, think about cancer, right? The leading cancer group in Europe, Cancer Research UK, explain if you carry excess weight in your body, it doesn't just sit there, it's not inert, it's active, right? It sends signals through your body. And one of those signals is for your cells to divide more rapidly, which can cause cancer. This is why obesity

is one of the biggest causes of cancer in, in the developed world. Right. That's true. Even if we got rid of all the stigma in the world, which we passionately should fight to do. It's still going to make you more likely to get cancer. Right. We can't, that's not something we can undo with an argument.

And therefore we do need to think about this. Also though, I'm very conscious. The most important thing we've got to do. So people like me are in a shitty trap, right? You've got to choose risky medical condition, risky drug. But that is not inevitable. And we should not tolerate that being the choice for our children, right? Japan, for example, right? I can explain how they did it, but the key thing to understand is the way one expert put it for me, a brilliant man named Professor Michael Lowe at Drexel university in Philly is processed and ultra processed foods dug this hole. They stole our

satiety and the drugs fill it in the way he put it was. So you've got to see that these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem. Right? So we've got to pull back in addition to the dilemma about the drugs for people like me, we've got to pull back and go, how did we get here and how do we make sure the next generation of kids are not in that position? And absolutely, we, this is the dilemma a lot of us face, but it doesn't have to be the dilemma for our children and grandchildren. And I went to places that have solved this dilemma that show us the way out.

So that's the kind of broader argument, which I think is so important to stress as well. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get to Japan and before we get to those. So the Berkeley's bank produced a report to guide investors and it told them to get out of investing in fast food and ice cream because those markets are going to tank. Financial advisors are also expecting a decline in the demand for knee and hip replacement. But when you look at investment, I found that fascinating. I'm like, do I believe that fast food is growing

or is shrinking? And while I see the rise of organic vegetables, while I see, but still expensive, while I see the rise in people proposing a largely plant-based diet, if not, not full, but a larger plant-based diet, if not not full, but a larger plant-based diet, again, more expensive, harder to access, maybe difficult to know what to do. I don't see fast food shrinking as an industry. Did you see that?

Are you seeing that through your research? Were you seeing investment shift and redirect or is that a myth as well? Krispy Kreme stock is down. The head of Nestle, Mark Schneider, has been making very nervous noises about their ice cream and confectionery market. So we've got to look at the longer term trend. 47% of Americans say they want to take these drugs.

And there's a big access question at the moment. But eight years from now, Ozempic goes out of patent. At that point, it will be a daily pill and it will cost about $1 a day. I would anticipate 47% is an underestimate for how many people will take it, provided some of the 12 big risks that I wrote about in the book don't blow up, which is a real problem. Think about Jeff Parker, the guy I just talked about in San Francisco. Everyone like Jeff becomes a walking advertisement for the drug. Everyone goes, what happened to Jeff? He looks

completely different. My God, he's so much healthier. So you can see how it creates a huge growth, growth effect. So you're right at the moment, we've got two trends. We've got the ongoing explosion of fast food, which is, you know, blowing up and blowing up and is implanted in us from the moment we're born. More three year old children in this country know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name. More people, yeah, more people in the world recognize the McDonald's M as a symbol of McDonald's,

than recognize the cross as a symbol of Christianity. Right? So this is really deep in our consciousness. So you've got that huge explosion in fast food, which is growing and growing and growing. And you've got huge numbers of people who want to take these drugs. Now, one of those trends is going to win, right? So as more and more people take the drugs, we're already seeing the effects. And I think in a way, some of the best predictors are the financial markets. Jeffery's Financial just did a big report for the US airlines

saying you're going to have to spend a lot less money on jet fuel pretty soon because a lighter population takes less jet fuel to fly. There's even just like crazy little things. There's been a huge run on jewelers in Los Angeles because people's fingers have shrunk so much that they need their wedding bands refitted. Or think about you mentioned the hip and knee replacements. Companies that manufacture knee and hip replacements, the joints for them, their stock is going down because the main driver of knee and hip replacements is obesity. And if there's a lot less obesity, there's going to be a lot fewer knee and hip replacement operations.

So I do think we're... You're right, the trend you're seeing, which is the growth of fast food, which is only more and more. Thank God when I was a child, you couldn't just push a button on a device and they'd bring McDonald's to you, right? You had to actually leave your house at least. Imagine how overwhelmed I would have become if that had been the case. That trend is driving the other trend as well, right? So they're densely interconnected. I'm Elliot Conney and this is Family Therapy.

In my best hopes. I guess identify the life that I want and work towards it. I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true? That's true. And I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for the limits. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So, how'd we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't understand what the big fat ones are. You don't put those inside of you, do you? I mean, you do? Yes. This is a show about women. Okay, so I just reapplied my lip gloss after eating a delicious lunch. We are headed back now to the European Political Systems class at Baruch College. Woo! Finally, a show about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. That's it, that's actually the name of the show. It's not hosted, not narrated, we're just dropping into a woman's world.

It's like reality TV on the radio. I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10, we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway listening to the B-52s. And looking back, I should have said, this is gay. This is already all gay. Listen to finally a show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For all the parents out there, picture that it's bedtime. You and the kids have been busy all day. You know they're tired, but with all that anxious energy, they just won't go to sleep. This was my kids every night. But I did find that stories calmed their mind and gave them something to focus on. So six years ago, I created the kids podcast Bedtime History to help solve that problem. Bedtime History is a series of relaxing history stories that end with an inspirational message. We have episodes about Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, Maya Angelou, and Sokka Jowaya. Episodes also include topics like space exploration, engineering, the rise and fall of civilizations, and major

events like the Civil Rights Movement and the Transcontinental Railroad. With over 2,000 positive parent reviews, Bedtime History is one of the top education podcasts. This week join me and listen to Bedtime History every Monday and Thursday on iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's also a big question comes out as, and like you keep saying, we don't know enough. And I want to talk about the risks now because we've talked about somewhat of how we've got here, the challenges that we're facing mentally, psychologically, societally,

into why we're in this situation in the first place. But what's fascinating to me is, are a lot of the big 12, which I want to dive into, the big 12 risks and the issues with the drugs, are a lot of them more long-term than short-term. And based on your own personal experience, are the short-term ones tolerable and the long-term ones, the ones that we would consider intolerable and complicated? So I would distinguish between the well-known side effects and these 12 big risks.

So things like nausea. Almost everyone who takes these drugs feels nauseous at first. Throughout the day. No. Different people have different experiences. So some people have horrible experiences. I interviewed someone called Sunny Newton in Vermont who, you know, she had like, she said it was like there was an alien living inside her and it was like thrashing about and she just wanted to vomit the whole time.

That's rare, but not unheard of. I mean, in the clinical trials, about 5% of people did just stop because the nausea was so bad. For me, it was like, it was mild. It was like when I would get on the bus or something, I would get a little bit of exaggerated travel sickness. But like, if I'd got that feeling just randomly

on a normal day, it wouldn't have stopped me going about my day. It just would have been a bit unpleasant. And after a few months, generally you get it worse the day you take it or the day after, and then you're okay for the rest of the week. And then again, you inject yourself and it gets... And the regularity of injecting yourself, is it the same for everyone or can you accelerate the dose?

Is there a slower version? Yeah, I mean, I should just say because cause a lot of people get horrified by injection and I am a complete wuss. I'm the kind of person who when you give me a blood test, I like, I don't want to look at it. I literally look away and sing like, you know, do Katy Perry songs to pretend it's not happening. But, um, and my singing is not pleasant. Um, but this is an EpiPen. It's the tiny, and I wish someone had told me at the start, I didn't know this at first, you can inject yourself in the leg or the stomach.

And for some reason, the idea of injecting in your stomach seems to be so horrifying. For the first month, I was injecting in my stomach, it was like, oh, and actually the leg is just the same. No, I mean, it's literally like the tiniest scratch. It's like a mosquito bite. But are there different doses in terms of... Yeah, so everyone starts at 0.25 milligrams. It's to get you used to the nausea.

And the effect is quite mild. And most people go up and up and up. So generally, you go up to one milligram. You can go as high as 2.4 milligrams. It would depend on your level of obesity. I think a lot of people are on too high a dose. And who's advising you on that dose? I mean, the official guidance from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly,

the companies who own it, is build up to one milligram milligram and then you can go higher if you need greater effects. But... Because you're self-medicating. You're not self-medicating. I mean, part of the problem is people are buying it online and not actually getting it from a doctor. And that's a really big problem. And that particularly relates to probably my single biggest worry about these drugs.

There's a lot, but the thing I'm most concerned about, not for myself but for the society, is eating disorders. We went into the pandemic with an unprecedentedly high level of eating disorders, probably because of social media and what it's doing to young girls. You'll interview my friend Jonathan Haidt, he can tell you much more about that and everyone should read his brilliant amazing work. Then during the pandemic eating disorders went up even further, which is mind blowing. And what these drugs do is they give you an unprecedented tool to amputate your appetite. Right? And anyone who knows anyone who's got eating disorders, imagine I'm sure you do, pretty much everyone does.

They're in a conflict. There's the psychological part of them that wants to starve themselves for complex reasons, created by the sick culture we have, mostly. And then there's the biological part of them that wants to live and wants to eat. And what these drugs do is they, you know, if you take them and you're in that position, they massively empower the part of you that wants to starve yourself. So I am, and people like Dr. Kimberly Dennis, who's one of the leading eating disorders experts in Britain, another person you should interview, very wise and brilliant person,

are really worried about this. But my biggest fear is that we could have an opioid-like death toll of huge numbers of young girls. And unfortunately these disorders do mostly affect young girls or there are of course some young men and boys. I mean, I'm really, really worried about that. Now there are things we could do right now. As Dr. Dennis says, we need to, I got them on zoom, you know, when I, when I got them in Britain initially in Vegas, I had to go in person. They're meant to check

your BMI on zoom. I mean, good luck with that. Yeah. Basically you are very visibly not eligible for these drugs, right? You clearly have a BMI lower than 27. And yet I have no doubt you could go on Zoom. Literally your lovely team here could arrange in half an hour, we get a Zoom call and you would get it delivered in the, you know, biked over to you today, right? We need to stop that. As Dr. Dennis says, we should only have in-person prescription

and the in-person prescription should be done by doctors who are given clear guidance about how to spot eating disorders and how to prevent the prescription of these things to eating disorders. It's not perfect. People might still buy it online, but it would, it would put at least some barrier that between these drugs and people who should not be getting them. At the moment, there is basically no barrier. Is that one of the big risks?

Yeah. Massive. I mean, if you said to me, what are the risks that most, that's the risk that most worries me for the society. The one that most worries me for myself is quite different. So how would I put it? Weird, I feel a wave of anxiety as I say it. We don't know the long-term effects of these drugs at all.

No one knows. We know they're chronically activating key parts of your brain. So a brilliant expert called Dr. Greg Stanwood, who works on these drugs at Florida State University said to me, and he stressed to me, he's broadly in favor of these drugs. He's considering taking them himself. But as a responsible scientist, he has to warn people. So he gave an analogy. I want to be clear, he's not suggesting these drugs will have this effect, but it's an analogy

that helps us to think about it. If you look at antipsychotic drugs, if you go back to when they were first given to people in the late 1950s, at the time doctors judged that the benefits outweighed the risks. It's always been controversial, but they judged that the benefits outweighed the risk. It's always been controversial, but they judged that. So loads of people were given antipsychotics for really long periods of time, and it was only what 40, 50 years later that they discovered if you take these drugs for decade after decade, you are much more likely to get dementia or some, in fact all forms of dementia are much more likely. It's not that the doctors were being negligent in the 1950s. You couldn't know that, right?

You had to have people take it for a really long time to know that. What could these drugs do over the long term? We don't know, right? Now, against that, Dr. Sean Allevi, a brilliant obesity specialist at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans said to me, well, look, we don't know the long-term effects of these drugs. We do know the long-term effects of obesity, and they are very serious. But you know, I'm 45, right?

If you stop taking the drugs, for almost everyone, you just go back to where you were before, and there's a big debate about that, but for most people that seems to be happening. So I'm assuming I'm going to be taking these drugs for 40 years. That's anxiety provoking. I asked Dr. Clemence Bleuet, who's one of the leading obesity specialists at Cambridge University. So what brain areas do these drugs activate? And she talked me through it, the hindbrain and so on.

I said, well, what else do those areas of the brain do? She said, oh, well, they memory processing, taste processing, gut motility, like not, this is me speaking now, but not trivial things, right? So for me, that was of the 12, that was the one where I thought, shit. So I'm trying to think of a more eloquent way to say shit, but that was, yeah. What's the debate you were saying there about the idea of if you stop taking these drugs, you go back to the same way you were.

What's the debate? So we don't have that much research on it. What the drug companies say is these drugs are like statins. You take statins, it lowers your cholesterol. If you stop taking statins, your cholesterol goes back to what it was. The drugs are not a cure, they're a treatment, an ongoing treatment, right? So they say these drugs are like that. Now, they have a vested interest in saying that. They want you to carry on buying the drugs forever. It would not be good news for them if they discovered

that actually you can take the drugs for a short time, stop, and then you'd stay at the lower weight. Some people, this is anecdotal because we don't have any research on it yet. Other people are studying it, we'll know in a while. Like, I'll give you an example, someone I know took Manjaro, lost loads of weight, interrupted their relationship with junk food, started exercising a lot in a way they felt too embarrassed to do when they were obese, and has now stopped and seems to be maintaining that lower weight. So how many people will there be like that? We don't know. I mean, the early studies we have, we're just looking at if you take it and then stop. But what about motivated people who change, use it as a tool to promote change?

We just don't know. How long does it take to measure for us to realize how long do you need to be on it for to have those long-term implications? Like how long will we have to study, research and measure? I mean when you talk about the medium-term effects, we have to study, research and measure. I mean, when you talk about the medium term effects, and it gets important to be balanced about this because it's a complicated truth. So a lot of people, a lot of the experts will say,

and these are really good scientists and it's a good point, actually we know loads about the medium term effects of these drugs because diabetics have been taking them for 18, nearly 19 years, right? So for people who don't know, these drugs in addition to having this effect on your appetite also stimulate the creation of insulin, which is what diabetics, both type 1 and type 2 diabetics are lacking, is why it's a diabetes treatment.

And so actually we've got 18 years of data on diabetics, so they're, I mean, I'm putting it more crudely than they would, but if the drugs made you grow horns, the diabetics would have grown horns by now, right? And that's a good and important point, and it should give people some degree of security. But some other people say, some other leading experts say, well hang on, if we're going to base a lot of our confidence on these drugs on the diabetics, let's dig a bit deeper into the diabetics. So, give an example, there's a brilliant scientist called Professor Jean-Luc Fayet,

who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France. And he was commissioned by the French Medicines Agency to look at the safety of these drugs for the French market. And so he started looking at what's called the preclinical research, which is on animals. And something really took him aback, which is, if you give these drugs to rats, they're much more likely to get thyroid cancer. And he's like, huh, okay, let's do some digging. So what he did is they have very, very good medical databases in France.

He compared a large number of diabetics who'd been taking these drugs between, I think, 2006 and 2012, with a large number of diabetics who were similar in every other way but hadn't taken these drugs. And what he calculated with his colleagues was if he's right, and it's highly contested, these drugs increase your thyroid cancer risk by between 50 to 75%. And he said to me, well, you've got to understand what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean if you take the drugs, you have a 50 to 75% chance of getting thyroid cancer. If that was the case, we'd be having bonfires of Ozempic all over the world. What it means is, if he's right, whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, these drugs increase it by 50 to 75%. Now, thyroid cancer is an overall low risk. 1.2% of people get it in their lives, 82% of them

survive. So it's a relatively, but it's a big increase in a small risk, right? And I'm very conscious, A, that you've got to weigh that against just the cancer risk of continuing to be obese, but also, one of the things that really worries me about that, is you think about the history of diet drugs. Very often, they began to unravel based on small warnings. So if you think about there was a diet drug in the 90s called Fenfen, the most popular diet drug ever before Azempic.

So if you look at how it was a combination of two drugs, it was an appetite suppressant called Flexfluramine and a Fetamine called Fentramine. And it really worked. People who took it got the same level of weight loss as people get on Azempic. And people talked about it in a very similar way. Front page of Time magazine was the new Miracle Weight Loss drug, right? Very similar.

In 1995, there were 18 million FemFem prescriptions in this country. It was huge. And then it was discovered a small group of doctors in a practice in Fargo in North Dakota noticed her. A lot of people using this drug in our practice seem to be having trouble breathing. And so they raised what's called a safety signal. It was then investigated. It turned out these drugs caused in a lot of people something called primary pulmonary hypertension, a horrific condition where the blood vessels in your lungs contract and you can't breathe it.

It kills you. It can kill you. If not, you're on oxygen the rest of your life. It's horrendous. So it obviously got withdrawn from the market, led to the biggest payout in history. The pharmaceutical industry, 12 billion dollars actually emerged. The drug companies had known about this risk all along. You look at the stuff the drug companies, you know, one of the documents that was presented

at the civil case was just someone saying, one of the people at the drug company saying, oh, am I going to have to spend my retirement writing compensation checks for silly fat women with lung, who can't breathe? I mean, horrendous, right? Now I want to stress Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. I'm very happy to criticize drug companies. I do it a lot, but they are not shysters like those people were. They are reputable drug companies.

There's no reason to believe that they're like that. But I'm conscious that small things could lead to the whole thing unraveling. We need to be vigilant. I'm alert to that. Um, it's why if you have thyroid cancer in your family, I mean, I was going to say, I recommend it. Don't really matter why I recommend the FDA recommends don't take the drugs. It's not a good idea.

Um, are there any others in that line? Oh, loads. I mean, yeah. I mean, I would say there's all sorts of things, all sorts of categories of people I would say shouldn't take it. If your BMI is lower than 27, don't take it. You're incurring all the risks for none of the benefits. If you have thyroid cancer in your family, if you have history of eating disorders, there's

a whole array of people who should not be taking it, who currently are taking it. Another big one, which obviously doesn't apply to me, is if you think you might get pregnant. So one of the things that really worries me is we have really no data on what it does to people who are pregnant. Obviously you're told to not take it if you think you might get pregnant, but people get pregnant in all sorts of ways you don't expect. So we know rats, when they're given some agglutin, the active component, are much more likely to have children with birth deformities, fetuses with birth deformities.

Dr. Stanwood, who I mentioned before at Florida State, said to me, again, stressed, he's broadly confident, but has to alert people to potential concerns, because he's a very responsible scientist. He said, to think about this, you might want to look at the long-term research on mothers who are exposed to contaminants when they're pregnant. So think about, for example, mothers who are exposed to lead. This happens scandalously frequently in this country, because a lot of poor people still

live in housing that still has lead in it. And still get water from, we know about Flint, Michigan, but actually in lots of places get water from pipes that are made of lead. It's insane that in the richest country in the world we allow that, the poisoning of children. But anyway, if you look at the, if you look at mothers who are pregnant and get exposed to lead during pregnancy, actually their babies look like all the other babies. There's no, it seems like there's no difference. But when those kids get to be 12, 13, we know that they have less impulse control.

They're more likely to have attention problems. So it seems to have affected their developmental trajectory, even though that wasn't immediately obvious at first. Could that happen with these drugs? Yes. I mean, it might not. It might affect their trajectory in a positive way. We don't know.

Maybe they'll be less likely to become obese. It could have a protective effect on that. But it's just disturbing when you, when you look, it's a really weird feeling to go all around the world, interviewing these leading experts, sit with them and to realize, oh, this is an experiment on millions of people and I'm one of the guinea pigs. Shit, right? It's a weird feeling, right?

Yeah. And it makes me angry that we've been put in the position where we have to make these choices. Like I say, there are countries that don't have to make these choices because they didn't allow their population to be fucked up with processed and ultra-processed food in the first place. And that pissed me off. Yeah.

Yeah. What has been the most horrific Ozempic story so far? Most horrific Ozempic story? Well, I interviewed people who've gone through rough experiences. There's a, I want to stress this is very rare, but there's a condition called pancreatitis, which is excruciatingly painful. It's basically where your pancreas doesn't work properly. Doctors compare the pain of pancreatitis to being stabbed, and it makes you nine times

more likely to get pancreatitis when you take these drugs. So pancreatitis is very rare, but it's obviously a huge increase in this very rare thing. I interviewed a woman called Michelle Stesak, who lives in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, which is a place I only thought existed in country songs until I interviewed her. And Michelle said to me, you know, she went for a Zempik for weight loss. The doctor said, oh, this is rare side effects. One of them is pancreatitis. She said, no, my luck, I'll probably get it.

And she started taking it, lost loads of weight. Six weeks later, she went to visit her daughter in Pittsburgh and she woke up, she said, in the most excruciating agony she'd ever been in. She felt like she was being stabbed all over her body and she was rushed to hospital and they identified pancreatitis. And the first thing they said was, are you an alcoholic? She said, no. Then they said, are you taking a Zempik? She was like, yes. So, so that was probably the person. Michelle said to me, you know, I've had children, it was much worse than the pain of childbirth. Right. So, which thank God you and I will never have to go through, but, um, unless you've got something you want to announce, Jay, but

the, um, there's some real horror stories and most people are not having these horror stories. Most people are having, I want to be responsible, most people's experience is more like Jeff Parker or Oprah than it is like, you know, Michelle. But that's now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now. We don't know what the picture will be, which puts us in this difficult position. So we've got some questions from the team that I wanted to refer to. Hello team. This is the team.

So what is your view on when Azempics should be used for kids, if at all? For me, the debate about Azempic for kids threw open the whole thing for me because for so many reasons, because it's when you look at kids that you realize how this is a crisis created by the fast food industry, right? And by processed food industry and by the fact that we as a society have allowed that industry to poison our kids, right? Think about where we are in Brooklyn. Try walking around Brooklyn with a kid and them not seeing ads the whole time

saying you don't feel good? Hey, stuff your face with our shit, right? The first thing I want to say is this is a crisis created by them and we need to stop them doing that and we can do that. And I went to places that have done it. But given that's where we are, I think people are in a really tough position because there's, so I'm very sympathetic to both sides of that debate. So for example, I interviewed a really tough position because there's, so I'm very sympathetic to both sides of that debate. So for example, I interviewed a really lovely woman called Deborah Tyler, who's a nurse in Connecticut.

Her daughter was very severely obese from when she was very young. And she took her daughter to the doctor when I think she was eight and the doctor said she had liver problems and she's like, can you imagine when you're being told your child has liver problems at the age of eight? And she faced this agonizing decision about whether to put her daughter on ozempic. And in the end she decided to do it and her daughter's liver problems have gone away. So I have, and she's still very agonized about it. All the problems are accentuated when it comes to children.

I mean there are benefits. Dr. Giles Yeoh, who's one of the leading experts at Cambridge University on obesity, explained to me, if you are obese when you're a child, it is very hard to become unobese. I mean you're unusual, right? It happens. You'll prove that. There are other people who prove that, but most people don't, right? It's really, partly because as you become obese, all sorts of changes happen in your brain that make it very hard to go back that I go through in the book.

So there's a case for dealing with it early, right? And we know childhood obesity has really devastating impacts on your health throughout your life and radically shortens your life on average. There are other people who have a lot of sympathy for, like Professor Dan Cooper who's at UC Irvine, who say, well, A, and I can't believe anyone would disagree with this, we need to deal with the underlying causes, but the environmental factors, but B, children are not miniature adults, right? This could affect children in different ways. For example, one of the things children use calories for is bone mineralization.

And if you don't have enough calories, maybe your bones don't form properly. Maybe they'll become osteoporotic as they get older. So it's really complicated. Novo Nordisk is currently doing a trial on giving these drugs to children as young as six years old. It turns my stomach. It's a sign of a sick society that we've reached this point. We need to fix the society. But if you're trapped in the choice that Deborah Tyler is trapped in,

honestly, I think I would probably do what she's done and I would feel as anguished as she does about it. So this came up with what you just mentioned now, like what is your view on Oprah's Zempic special and what were the benefits and some of the challenges that came from it on people's perspectives? So, I can't think dispassionately about Oprah, right? Like, I know everyone loves Oprah and kind of, oh, we love Oprah.

Oprah is one of the two or three humans alive who has most influenced me. Like, when I was a kid, you remember this from when we were kids. Remember it so vividly, the Oprah show we were on at 5 p.m. on Channel 4, right? And no one in Britain when we were kids spoke like Oprah. Right, no one spoke about their emotions, no one spoke about, in this extraordinary and profound way that Oprah does.

And I really think one of the reasons I get on well with Oprah I think is because I've so internalised her voice that I sort of, I mean clearly as a British person you can't talk like Oprah, but like, well clearly no one can talk like Oprah, but you know what I mean, clearly as a British person, you can't talk like Oprah, but like, well, and clearly no one can talk like Oprah, but you know what I mean? So I can't think dispassionately about it because I love her so much and I'm weirdly friends with her, which is like still to me the most surreal. Whenever she emails me or texts me and my friend, I was like, shut up everyone, Oprah needs us, be quiet! But I thought her special was incredible.

I cried a lot. For the minute it started, I cried and my friend said, thank God Oprah has not brought her show back because if you had this emotional reaction every day, you'd be in a psychiatric hospital because just seeing Oprah in front of an audience made me emotional. But I thought it was amazing. And I think part of it made me really sad because you think about how much Oprah has given us, right? How much she's given to the culture. People forget, you know, I mean, even just think about the incredible work she did on breaking the taboos around sexual

abuse, right? Where what she's done is incredible. And I could list like 15 things like that that Oprah's done that have transformed the culture. And you think all that time she was doing that and rising, she was being bullied in the most hateful ways. I really recommend people watch, and this is someone else who I admire and was a damaged person, so I don't wanna say this in a spirit of judgment, but you can watch it on YouTube.

It's an interview between Oprah and Joan Rivers from I think 1985. And I'll preface this by saying A, Joan Rivers was the funniest comedian I've ever seen. And B, Joan Rivers was someone who hated her own body and was at war with her own body. So she's externalizing something that's an internal horrifying battle.

But it's viscerally shocking when you watch it now. She says to Oprah something like, I haven't watched it in a long time, so I'm gonna get the exact wording wrong, but she says something like, you can't be this fat. You need to lose weight. And it's not said as a joke. It's not framed as like, I mean, it would be acceptable as a joke, but it's not even framed as a joke. And you can see Oprah just looks really thrown and makes some joke about herself because what else could she do? You think, God, that's the Tonight Show.

They're on the Tonight Show, right? That's because Joan was the guest host. How many people watched that? 25 million people? That's being brutally shamed in front of 25 million people. You think Oprah's carrying that the whole time. She's torturing herself. You know, that famous, the famous image of her with the, you know, the thing that represents

as much fat as she's lost. And you think, God, I feel so sad. Even if you're Oprah, you get tortured about it, right? You just realize. So to see her overcome that and see her looking so well and to see her given a space beyond that stigma, I found it incredibly moving. But that's tied up for me with so many other feelings about Oprah that I can't really, you know.

No, for sure. And do you feel like some of that stigma is now going the other way too, right? Oh, you lost weight because of Ozempic. So then that stigma creeping in, have you? I think what's happening is a complicated thing. Just like the drugs interrupt the way we eat and bring to the surface these emotional feelings we didn't know were there. I think culturally, Ozempic is leeching out some deep underlying ideas about obesity. So for example, I'm a feeling experienced to myself. When I was

taking the drug, I kept thinking I'm cheating. I'm doing something wrong. I think that's really weird. One of my best friends takes statins, right, to lower his cholesterol. I've never once thought cheating to get lower cholesterol than me. You'd think I was crazy if I said that, right? It's really weird what's going on here. And I think it lies with, it looks a lot into the history of obesity and how we talk and think about it. So if you look back in the sixth century, the Pope, Pope Gregory I, was the first one to lay out the seven deadly sins. And one of them is gluttony and it's always depicted with like some hugely fat person pegging out. It's very deep in our kind of psyches to think of obesity as a sin, right? And one of the ways you know

that is what are the forms of weight loss we admire? There's basically only one form and it follows the classic Catholic pattern of like the sinner. You're a sinner, you've got to be tormented, you've got to go through hell and purgatory and then we'll forgive you. So think about that game show the world is called The Biggest Loser, repulsive and wicked show in my view. But it's where people haven't seen it, people are very unwell, very seriously overweight, are humiliated, made to take part in very extreme and in fact dangerous forms of exercise and starve themselves. And whoever loses the most weight is the biggest loser

and therefore wins. It's like, oh yeah, if you torture yourself and go through agony, then we'll forgive you for your sin. Then we'll go, well done, good job, Joe, right? But I think one of the things that's weird with those, because it's so easy. Right. So it's like, I think a lot of people look at it and go, well, you haven't paid for your sin, right. You haven't suffered. If you suffer, we might forgive you. You suffer with bariatric surgery. I also think it underlies, can you

think about cheating, right? In this culture, which makes it so easy to overeat and be obese and so hard to be healthy, lots of people are making daily sacrifices to not gain weight, particularly women. They're starving themselves, they're denying themselves, they're going hungry, they're doing extreme forms of exercise. And I think to them, people like me must look a bit like Lance Armstrong looks to a cyclist. It's what you, you bastard. I work so hard for this and you just inject yourself once in the Lego eek and you get the same benefit as me. Screw you.

I can see where that impulse comes from. And I think we have to acknowledge those feelings are there. They were there in me. They're there in everyone, I think. You can't live in this culture and not absorb those ideas at some level. But then we have to say, okay, well, A, I don't think obese people are sinners. I think we're typical products of this environment. And I'd hope we can move beyond the ideas of a sixth century pope. But also in terms of being in a race and competing against each

other, well, we are competing, but it's not me against you. It's all of us against the forces driving up obesity, which are the processed food industry. If we reframe it that way, we can get out of... Look, we live in, as you know very well, a toxic age where every conversation turns toxic very quickly, partly because of social media algorithms, which prioritise negativity, all sorts of factors that are going on. partly because of social media algorithms, which prioritise negativity, all sorts of factors that are going on. If we want to have a non-toxic conversation about obesity and about a Zempik,

I think we've got to acknowledge that those ideas about sin and cheating are there, and then we've got to move beyond them. Well said. Well said, yeah. I wonder whether you saw... Did you dive into any research on investors in fast foods and weight loss drugs? Did you find any patterns between... I didn't, but I'd be surprised if... And there was some reporting in the Washington Post, which I only read briefly, so I don't want to get it wrong.

But if I remember rightly, I suspect, I don't know this, but I suspect the fast food industry will soon be funding anti-Azempic propaganda, just like the tobacco industry used to fund, you know, claims that smoking isn't bad for you, did for years and years, or like the oil industry still funds claims that global warming isn't happening or is actually a good thing or, you know, I would be amazed if that isn't, I mean, they're going to lose a lot of money and they are some of the most profitable companies in the whole world. So I'd be, I suspect they're already doing it, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

No, it's an interesting to think about because I feel like we, part of our, part of the environment we all live in is somewhat of an illusion and ignorance of not understanding who's behind the narrative, storytelling, you know, when fast food first came around, how did everyone not go, wait a minute, this is going to ruin the world.

Like, how did we not do that? Or when, as you said, we're trying to find artificial solutions to artificial problems. And now that we're living in an artificial world, it's like, well, where did we allow that to happen? And I want to talk about Japan in that vein, because that was a place where you found that, at least tried to deal with this in a much healthier,

smarter way. This completely blew my... Have you been to Japan by the way? So that's number one on my list right now. Okay, if there's one thing you take away from this conversation... Go to Japan. Go to Japan. I expected it to be great and it massively exceeded my expectations, but it's completely

amazing. I'll give you a list of things to do. Please. So Japan is really important because some people say about these drugs, look, if a country gets to be rich, people are going to have more food than they can eat, obesity is just inevitable, right? And therefore these drugs become inevitable. But actually Japan is the third richest country in the world in the history of the world,

now is the third richest country in the world, and they have almost no obesity at all. 42.5% of Americans are obese. It is 4% of people in Japan, right? There's almost no childhood obesity in Japan. I went to a school in Tokyo, typical middle class school, went to several schools. It's the weirdest thing, walking around a school with a thousand children and there being not one overweight child anywhere. It's weird it's, it's, it's weird if you're used to going to British and American schools. So I wanted to understand how did Japan do it? Cause I remember first I read about, you know, a Zempik has been approved in Japan and there ain't any sales cause there's no one to take it, right? Almost nobody. It's

a tiny, tiny market for it. And it's kind of weird that we expect Japanese people to look like sumo wrestlers. It would be like expecting an American to look like a bald eagle. And at first I thought it must just be that Japanese people won the genetic lottery, right? But that's not true. We know that because in the late 19th century, lots of Japanese people moved to Hawaii. I was just there. And they've been there ever since. And Japanese Hawaiians are almost as overweight as other Hawaiians, so it's not that their

genes suddenly mutated in the 120 years since. So something else is going on, right? There's something in the environment that's driving up obesity in our societies and hasn't in Japan. And there's so many fascinating things about this. I went to a... The most important to understand is Japan deliberately created an environment in which it is hard to get fat and hard to eat badly. If you go back to the 1920s, Japanese people had one of the worst diets in the world. They

only ate protein on average once a week, right? They were quite unwell. They had poor life expectancy and the Japanese government at the time deliberately transformed the society. Not for a good reason. It's because they were, they wanted to have an army to go and invade the rest of Asia. So we all got our motives for weight loss, not the best one. Uh, but you know, whatever it worked, right. And they, and they deliberately created this new, new diet and this new way of being, which has now continued in policy in Japan.

Um, so I went to school, like I say in Tokyo, to see how does it begin. There's lots of layers at which they do this. And I was greeted at the door by a woman called Harumi Tatebe, who's the nutritionist at this school, Koenji School. Every school by law in Japan has to employ a professional nutritionist. It's a difficult qualification to get. It's three years on top of your teaching qualification. Your job is to design the food that the kids eat.

By law, the kids can't bring packed lunches. They have to eat what's prepared there. And they can only, that food has to be fresh, prepared on the day and have no processed ingredients at all. And then they use this healthy food, which has to contain all the food groups every day, to educate the kids about how to make their bodies healthy. So, you know, they're eating this food and Japanese people love food. It's not a place where people deny themselves food. They love

it, right? So I'm with this group of kids. They're eating the school lunch, which literally is more like something from Nobu than like anything we ever ate at school, right? And they're eating it. And I said to these kids, through my translator, Chie, I said to these kids, I'll never forget it, the class I think of in particular, there were nine, 10 year olds. I said, what's your favorite food? The first kid said broccoli. I love broccoli. I was like, okay, little freak. So to the next kid, what's your favorite food? She said white fish. I said to the next kid, and she said, oh, boiled white rice. And I turned to kid, and she said, I boiled white rice. And I turned to Chie and I said,

are these kids trolling me? Their favorite foods are broccoli and what? And Chie, like all Japanese people could not understand why I was puzzled and said, well, what do you mean? We teach our kids to eat healthy food. Don't you do that? And every food group they have, they have a rope, a colored rope.

So they like, when they're eating the calcium, she holds up the white rope, she goes, this is calcium. What does it do? And someone yells out, it makes your bones strong. And she goes, the red rope, this is carbs. What do they do? Give you energy. And she ties the ropes together in every lesson. And that's a rounded meal that you should have in every meal, right? So they teach kids from a very young age, how to nurture their bodies. And I was with these kids and I couldn't help, I couldn't resist the temptation. I pulled up on my phone videos

of British and American school meals. And these kids reacted like I had shown them an ISIS beheading video. They like screamed, they were like, what are they said to me? Where are the vegetables? I said, there are no vegetables. They said, where's the salad?

I said, there is no salad. They were just completely, one, it was very touching. One little girl put her hand on my shoulder and said, there are no vegetables. They said, where's the salad? I said, there is no salad. They were just completely, and one, it was very touching. One little girl put her hand on my shoulder and said, I'm worried about you. It was completely adorable, right? It begins there, and then all through the society, there are measures taken to make processed food. You can buy it if you want to,

but it's very much a minority pursuit. It exists, but it's a tiny part of the Japanese diet, overwhelmingly fish, fresh food, vegetables. Most people eat fresh food that's prepared on the day. And I think probably the most moving conversation I had for the whole book was in Okinawa, which is an archipelago of islands in the south of Japan. Well, I really saw what you win if you get this right. So Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Women live to be 88, men I think it's 82. But not just that they have the healthiest lifespan in the world.

So the average British person is in poor health. I think it's 16 years before they die in Japan. It's like a few years. So it's a very different relationship. And so I went to this place that sounds almost mythical. It's called Ogimi. It's the oldest village in the whole world. It has 215 houses and 192 have someone older than the age of 90 living there. And I went there and I went to, they've got this little community center. And the first person I met, the first woman who walked through the door was a 102 year

old woman called Matsu Fukuchi, who walked there on her own from her home down the hill. And she said, I can't stay long because I'm looking after my son who fell off the roof fixing it the other day. I was like, Jesus, how old is your son? But okay. And we sat down and we talked and she talked about how much she loved life. It was volleyball season, she's been watching her great grandchildren play volleyball, she loved volleyball. You could see how much joy she took in life.

She talked to all these other women and then someone put on some old Okinawa music. And she put on a kimono and she started dancing. And so I start dancing with this 102 year old woman and I thought, wow, you were born before they started doing radio broadcasts in Japan and here I am dancing with you and recording it on my iPhone. That's what you get if you solve obesity. You don't get destroyed. Clearly not everyone will live to be 102, but you don't get your knees destroyed and your heart destroyed and your, you know, you get to live and you get more years of joy and more years of laughter and more years of dancing. That's what we get if we solve this crisis and it is within our grasp to solve it.

These drugs are one tool. They are a difficult and controversial tool. And I'm not sure I've made the right decision to carry on taking them. It was the heart benefits that did it for me. But we absolutely can deal with this wider crisis. They've done it in Japan. Think about smoking, right? When we were kids, people smoked everywhere. People smoked on the subway, people smoked on the bus, people smoked on the plane.

Doctors used to smoke while they examined you. I remember it happening. There's a photo of me and my mother where she's breastfeeding me when I'm a baby, obviously, smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach. When I found this photo a few years ago, I thought she'd feel guilty. I showed it to her. She said, you were a difficult baby. I needed that cigarette, right?

But you think about how normal that was then, right? Now if you saw that, you'd call the police, right? We've gone from, you know, more than 50% of people were smokers when we were kids. It's now 12%. You very rarely see a young person smoking cigarettes now. Okay, we've got an issue with vaping, but that's an enormous transformation that's happened in our lifetimes through concerted action.

We can do the same with food. We can free future generations from this shitty choice. Japan showed me you can do it with joy. Japanese people aren't sitting there being miserable. They love food. Their food is great. I've never eaten better than in the two and a half weeks I was in Japan, right? Literally never, right? It's not about depriving yourself.

It's about making better choices and empowering everyone to be in an environment where we can make better choices. Do they still have a stigma around body shape, size, weight and all of that as well? Yeah, this is one of the complexities. So I don't want to shy away from it. Japanese people are horrifically stigmatizing towards overweight people. And that informs some of their policies, which are just so strange to us that they sound like a kind of just bizarre parallel universe. I'll give you an example. So 2008, their obesity level went up by like 0.4% and they had a massive like national freak out and it was like this huge debate in Japan. And what was it?

I mean, it was from like, you know, I can't remember. It was literally from something like 3% to 3.4%. Like saying that like we wouldn't even notice in the US if that happened, right? And then this huge debate and they introduced something that I frankly just when I read about it thought this can't be true. It's something called the Metabol Law. It's named after metabolic syndrome, which is a kind of combination of problems you can get when you're obese. It has very bad health effect.

So they introduced this rule. I actually can't even say it without like it just sounded insane. In Japan, every single employee once a year has to be weighed by their employer. If your weight has gone up, you have to by law drop a plan with your employer to bring your weight down. And a company overall has to report its weight levels to the government. And if your overall workforce got fatter, you can be fined by the government. Right. So it's like, how can this work?

So I went to this company that does it. I mean, every company does it, but this is a company that agreed to show me partly because they manufacture, uh, products to keep you healthy. So they, they can't want people to know about it and they're super nice people. But it was freaky. So you arrive, the first thing you see when you arrive at work is a face recognition thing. It says, hi Jay, you walked 1,300 steps yesterday or whatever because you have to wear a Fitbit,

equivalent of a Fitbit. And then it says you were number 121 in the company. By the way, Suzie, who sits two deaths away from you, hasn't weighed herself this week. Oh my gosh. Tell her to weigh herself. You're like, whoa! Oh my gosh. Tell her to weigh herself. You're like, whoa! Oh my gosh. Wow.

So every, you're encouraged, it's not required, but you're encouraged to take a photograph of every meal you take and post it. So you can literally go, oh, I wonder what Bob who sits next to me ate yesterday. And you can look at it all. It's just bizarre. And I was interviewing people there. So I interviewed the boss, who's this 58 year old man, I have to say incredibly hot boss. And he was like talking about, yeah, this is great.

It's really good for everyone. And I was interviewing the employees and they would go, yeah, this really helps me be healthy. And I would kind of go, right, so if you did this in the US or Britain, we would burn the office building down. And they genuinely didn't understand what I was saying. They would kind of go, well, why? It really was a moment I felt like a profound cultural chasm, right? I thought, this is, you're not like us.

And we're not like, as in we can't, yeah. Just as they can't understand us, we can't understand that. Exactly. So there are lots of things about the Japanese model. I definitely would not, I mean, we couldn't integrate that even if we wanted to, but if we could, I wouldn't understand that. Exactly. So there are lots of things about the Japanese model. I definitely would not. We couldn't integrate that even if we wanted to, but if we could, I wouldn't want to. So there's lots of things about the Japanese model we can't integrate, including just shame. It's a very, particularly to women who are overweight, it's really brutal, the shaming there. So yeah, there's lots of things we wouldn't want to integrate and lots of things

we would. Yeah. Yeah. It's one thing that has stayed with me as we've been on this beautiful journey together today, I feel like we've, you know, I've learned so much from you, I learned so much from the book. I really want people to read the book, to dive into it. We've kind of nicely kind of visited different chapters and different sections inside of the book. But there's one thing that stayed with me and it's this idea of even after

being on Ozempic, if people are unable to change their eating habits, even though they're satiated quicker, does that not necessarily double up on the health problems too? So inevitably changes your eating patterns in one key way, you eat much less. Right. But the, an issue, and this was definitely true of me for the first six months months is to put it crudely, I was eating smaller portions of the same old. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was going to McDonald's, but instead of getting like a large Big Mac meal and nine nuggets, I was getting a hamburger. Right. And that's

a move in the right direction, but still very imperfect as Robert Kushner, one of the scientists who was involved in the studies about these drugs explained to me, look, there's an issue about nutrition just separate to weight. If you're eating food that doesn't give your body what it needs, even if you're not obese, that's still really bad for you, right? So for me, it made me realize I had to do... I'm super embarrassed to say it, but I didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to do really basic things. I learned that partly because I realized I had to make that change.

But you could... I could have just carried on eating smaller portions. And frankly, I'm on the road at the moment. I am eating smaller portions this morning. I had a... Travel is impossible. Travel is really tough. Or even try living in Las Vegas. Not ideal.

But the, you worry about portion size in this country generally. You want to try Vegas. But yeah, so yeah, the issue you're pointed to is real. I mean, you're still moving in a positive direction, but it can leave you far from the ideal position. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and it's been such a joy talking to you today. What a joy, what a pleasure.

I deeply, insightfully appreciate the honesty of just what a challenging, nuanced, layered subject matter this is. And I feel your analysis, research and thought through it is actually so, so, so helpful in that if people are confused in their decision-making for themselves, their family, I think you've at least given them every angle possible to think about, which is I think somewhat, sometimes what's missing, right? Sometimes we are just presented a binary angle, which is where we started. And now we're ending today feeling like we can look at this from 12 different angles and 12 different points of view. We end every episode of On Purpose with a fast five

or a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay, this is very hard for me as you can tell. Johan, hurry, these are your... I'm going to do my brutal... Right, okay. These are your final five. You should have someone to...

Your colleague should taser me if I go beyond the sentence. We should wire you up. Exactly. The first question is, what is the best health advice you've ever heard or received? It's what Lindy West said that I quoted before. It's hard to treat well an object you hate. You've got to learn to love your body. That's great advice. I love that one.

Second question, what is the worst health advice you've ever heard or received? I went to an Austrian diet clinic in Klagenfurt where they made me eat nothing but tea for like days and days and days. Yeah. Not good advice. Yeah. Just tea. Exactly.

Yeah. How did that end up? Tell us. I want to know more. I was surrounded by people. I would go like... So there were people there who'd been there for like three weeks and they were on the tea diet. And I said, how do you feel?

And they said, terrible. I was like, yeah, you're going to die. Get out of here. I felt like Jack Nicholson who won't flow over the cookers' nests. Get out of here. That's amazing. He's going to buy a brat first, not the road. Question number three. What's something that surprised you about this journey that you went on with the magic pearl? How hard it is, how complicated it's not.

I'm not normally such an even handed person. It's really complicated. And that surprised you. You thought it would be a lot more clear cut. I thought every other book I've ever written, I've come to a more firm conclusion at the end than this. You know, with this, it's sort of like, you've really got to go down the list of the risks and benefits for yourself, and it will really help you to know all these risks and benefits,

but I can't tell you at the end, and now, dear reader, do it, or don't do it, or do these things, you know. I'm completely failing at these one sentence. No, no, no, that's great. I'm asking you. You've been too permissive, James. Yes, exactly. Angry face when I go to your one sentence. Question number four.

If you had to ask people to reflect on three things while they're making their decision, there are many things in the book that they need to read and study, but three things while they're reading the book that you'd like them to reflect on as they're making their own decision, what would they be that are not related to BMI

or some of those more tactical elements, not tactical, those tangible elements you shared with us earlier. Think about what your relationship with food was in your family when you were a child. Because all sorts of issues around that will come to the surface, which we haven't touched on, but it's really important. Number two is think about how important pleasure in food is for you, because a lot of people experience a huge reduction in it. Although I didn't, a lot of people do.

Number three is these drugs might be significantly reducing addiction. This is hugely contested, but there are serious scientists who think they are. And that's a whole dimension we need to think about, not just food addiction, but actually like cocaine addiction, fentanyl addiction across the board. Those would, I guess, be the three things that we haven't covered that would be the things that there's about a hundred things from the book. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, great.

Fifth and final question. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Oh. One law. Can I get rid of a law? Oh, that'd be the first person to do it. I love it. The law I would get rid of would be the criminalization of addiction. You know, I had a lot of addiction in my family. Punishing people who've got addiction problems makes the problem worse.

Most of the money we spend on drug policy in this country is shaming, humiliating, and literally caging people with addiction problems. In Portugal, when they took all that money they spent on putting people in prison, shaming them and humiliating them, and spent it instead on like helping them. Addiction massively fell, overdose deaths massively fell. We could do the same and we'd get the same results. So it would be, I guess, take the current law on criminalizing addiction and drug use more generally. And transfer all that money to helping people instead.

Brilliant. You're the first person ever to get rid of a law. Oh, get rid of a law. Great. Happy days. I'm not normally so libertarian, but there we go. Everyone, the book is called The Magic Pearl, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs. Johan Hari, thank you so much. Make sure you go and grab and order a copy right now. I really, really want this. Make this the book of your book clubs, the book that you're reading with your friends, your family, I think it will, as Johan said,

there's so many parts of it that we didn't even get to cover. I hope you'll come back and we'll dissect it a second time. But I really believe that this book is so significantly important at this time, especially, and especially for the younger generations to follow. So highly, highly recommend Magic Pill. Thank you so much. I'm well chuffed with that.

Thanks so much, Cian. Thank you. I really mean it. I feel quite emotional hearing you say that. Thank you so much. I really mean it. I think there's so many things, like you said, that we still haven't covered and I hope you'll come back to do those.

Anytime. So many things, like you said, that we still haven't covered. And I hope you'll come back to do those anytime because, uh, yeah, I, I think this is, it's, it's, it's the biggest thing right now. And, and especially with the way you've dived into it, when you're talking about just the amount of stigma there is from day one, and it seems to never go. Like you said, even with Oprah, right? Like, is it like whether you're here or you're here, it's like that experience of that stigma doesn't disappear. And so if you're living with that for your whole life and it was created by a system, that needs to be addressed.

And I think you're addressing it in a really deep and profound way, so thank you. I think I meant to say my lovely publicist is in the corner, so shortaze me if I don't say this. Anyone who wants to know anything more about the book can go to magicpillbook.com then get the audiobook, which I read, the e-book, the physical book. And I think I meant to say you can get it from good bookshops or good bookshops, but you could also get it from shitty bookshops as well.

You can get many bookshops at all. Yeah, I've never understood that statement. I know, it's like a weird, it feels weirdly distant. Exactly, we don't have like a quality test. So let's go order some KFC on Uber Eats now, shall we? Let's do it. We got some for you. And bring your whole buckets of KFC.

I hope that served you. Amazing. Thank you so much. I hope you felt... Of course it was amazing. You got to share what you wanted to share. Thanks everyone. If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my conversation with Megan Trainor on breaking generational trauma and how to be confident from the inside out. My therapist told me stand in the mirror naked for five minutes. It was already tough for me to love my body, but after the C-section scar with all the stretch marks, now I'm looking at myself like I've been hacked.

But day three when I did it, I was like, you know what, her thighs are cute. Day three when I did it, I was like, you know what, her thighs are cute. Tune into the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes, that it's not a waste that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is She Pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them.

Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, every Wednesday on She Pivots. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, friends. I'm Danielle Robay. And I'm Simone Voice. And we're here to introduce you to The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast that's guaranteed to light up your day.

Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. We'll hear from celebrities, authors, experts, and listeners like you. Whether it's relationships, friend advice, or figuring out how to navigate life's transitions, big and small, we'll talk through it together. Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine every weekday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.