The Jordan Harbinger Show - 993: Johann Hari | The Skinny on 'Magic Pill' Weight-Loss Drugs

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Are new weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy "magic" pills that can put an end to the obesity epidemic? Johann Hari is here to give us the skinny! What We Discuss with Johann Hari: Processed and ultra-processed foods are a major driver of the obesity epidemic, as they undermine the body's natural ability to feel full and satisfied after eating. Moving from fresh, whole foods to mostly processed foods is strongly linked to the dramatic rise in obesity rates. Obesity is a complex issue with biological, psychological, and social causes. Factors like genetics, emotional eating, trauma, and the food environment all play a role. Stigmatizing or shaming people for their weight is cruel and counterproductive. New weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy work by artificially boosting satiety hormones like GLP-1, helping people feel full faster and eat less. They are showing impressive weight loss results, but also come with potential risks and side effects that are not yet fully understood, especially in the long-term. While these new drugs may help many people, they are not a magic solution. They don't address the underlying drivers of the obesity crisis in the food system and environment. To make a real difference, we need broader changes to make healthy eating the easy, default option. The good news is, each of us can take positive steps today to improve our health, no matter our current weight. Focus on adding more whole, minimally processed foods to your diet, and find physical activities you truly enjoy. Prioritize getting good sleep, managing stress, and building a strong social support network. Small, sustainable lifestyle changes can make a big difference over time. Be patient and kind with yourself in the process. You have the power to transform your health, one choice at a time. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/993 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. He took away the American diet and left them with nothing but the healthy food again. And he was pretty sure he knew what would happen. They would eat more of the healthy food than they had before. And this would prove that that kind of diet

expands the number of calories you eat in a day. What happened was much weirder. Once they'd been exposed to the American diet, they refused to eat the healthy food at all. It was like they no longer recognized it as food. It was only when they were literally starving and wasting away that they finally reluctantly went back and ate it.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed to more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional gold smuggler, economic hitman, former jihadi, Russian chess, grandmaster, music mogul, or tech luminary.

And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, and cyber warfare, AI, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. By the way, Google Podcasts is closing. So if you are a user of Google Podcasts, that is gone in the United States already.

It's going to be gone globally in June. You won't be able to get Skeptical Sunday or Feedback Friday on YouTube. We do not film those. They do not go into YouTube music. They do not go into YouTube. So you need to get an app like Pocket Castes or CastBox or Castro if you want to continue to get the show and you were a Google podcast user. And if you're a Google podcast user and you're wondering why you don't see Skeptical Sunday

or Feedback Friday, that's why. Now that Google's gone, they forward you to a YouTube. a YouTube feed which only shows videos and audio from our videos. Very weird. So go ahead and grab a different podcast app for Android or for Apple. Castbox, Pocketcasts, Castro, if you want to continue to get the whole show. Today, Johan Hari is back on the show. Y'all loved his earlier episode on social media addiction, episode 707, by the way. Today, talking about obesity and obesity drugs, specifically Ozzympic and what it does to the brain and the body. Like many of us, Johann ate tons of junk as a teen, even took antidepressants, fluctuated between 30 and 40-inch

waste, which, I mean, that's just absolutely hard to imagine, actually. Later, he finds out about this secret weapon called OZempe. We're going to tell that story here today. It's a so-called safe anti-obesity drug. It's compared to the smartphone in terms of changing things around food and weight. This is the Holy Grail in some ways, right? Especially for fat America and the United Kingdom. there's a $200 billion market for this.

The company is now the most valuable company in Europe, almost overnight. Today, we dive into why Johan started with OZepic after several wake-up calls about his weight and health that did not wake him up. We'll also explore how processed foods hijack our brains and cause us to overeat. We'll dig into the psychology of obesity and why it's not just about the calories. And last, how we might be setting ourselves up for yet another health crisis, who should and who should not be using OZempic, and a whole lot more.

So here we go with Johan Hari. Bon Appetit. I have to say, it's funny, I wasn't going to start the interview off this way, but now I feel like it's just natural. You look good, man. I mean, you look like you lost a little bit of weight, which is very apropos what we're going to talk about right now. We're creepily apt, I think, is the right phrase.

So it's been working for you. I guess we'll get to that in a bit. I want to back up, though. I really related to your story at the beginning of the book, which is you go to a party. right post-pandemic and you're like, oh, I'm the fat guy at the party, and I myself got quite fat during the pandemic. We had kids and I was just like ordering DoorDash every day, which, are you familiar with that? I know you live in the UK.

Of course, my God, it's responsible for at least three of my chains. Okay. Yeah, same here. So I got quite chubs and your fried chicken story, you know, go into the fried chicken place and they send you to like this nice note, like, thanks to our best customer and you're like, geez, this isn't even my top fried chicken place. Like, that sunk in for me, that hit for me, because I got a message from DoorDash. It was like an email or something. And it was like, since you signed up with DashPass, which is like their premium saver thing, you've saved $4,000. And I was like, not spent $4,000. Wow. Saved $4,000. Well done. You're a true American. I mean, that's. They should give you the Presidential Medal of Freedom of something.

Because I've never felt like such an idiot in my whole life. My wife and I, were like, let's not do the math on what we had to spend to save $4,000 in Dordash fees. And that was the impetus for me hiring a personal trainer. And it's been three to five days a week since. But then, of course, exercise doesn't make you thin. And we can talk about that later too. But I just wanted to say that landed for me hard because I was like, I get being the guy at the party who's like, why is everyone skinny?

I thought we all agreed to get fat during the pandemic. What the hell? It's so weird. This book has been a bit different to my other books for me in that. The minute I learned about the existence of these drugs, I felt really conflicted. And it comes from that moment at this party, right? So I remember it so vividly. It was the winter of 2022.

It was the first party I'd been invited to in God knows how long as the world had not been having parties. And I was in an Uber on the way there. And the party was being thrown by an Oscar-winning actor. I'm not saying that just a name drop. It is very relevant to what happened next. And I was thinking the way there, just feeling really schlubby like I'd been quite fat at the start of the pandemic and then I'd gain loads of weight.

And I thought, oh, you know, a Hollywood party being a bit fat. It's always a bit embarrassing. And then suddenly I thought, but wait, everyone I know gained weight during the pandemic. This is going to be fascinating to see these Hollywood stars with a bit of chab on them, right? And I arrived and I started walking around and literally everyone was gaunt. It wasn't that they hadn't gained weight. They'd all visibly lost weight. They looked like their own Snapchat filters, you know, like clearer and cleaner and sharper.

I was kind of a bit of a day's and I bumped into a friend of mine on the dance floor. And I said to her, huh, looks like everyone. really did take up Pilates during lockdown. And she laughed, right? And I had no idea where she was laughing. I must have done some weird face. And she said, well, you know this isn't Pilates, right? And I had no idea what she was talking about. And she pulled up on her phone, an ozempic pen, an image of an ozempic pen. And that was when I learned,

we now have a new kind of weight loss drug that works in a totally new way, where if you take it, the average person loses 15% of their body weight in a year. For the next of this class of drugs, Mungaro, you lose on average 21% of your body weight. And for the next ones that will be available next. year, triple G, you lose 24% of your body weight, which is only slightly below bariatric surgery. And the minute I learned this, I immediately thought, okay, I can see the benefits. I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be. He died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Loads of the men in my family get fucked up with heart disease. My dad had very bad heart

problems. My uncle died of a heart attack. My other uncle had a heart attack. I knew that, Sadly, the science is very clear that obesity makes heart disease much more likely along with an actually shocking array of other problems that makes over 200 known diseases and complications more likely. So I was aware that if you've got a drug that can reverse or hugely reduce obesity, that may well massively boost health. Yeah. I also immediately thought, wait a minute, wait a minute. What's the catch? I've seen this story before, right? Every 20 years or so, a new diet drug is announced. We're told it's going to save the world. It's going to end obesity. and loads of people stampede to take it

and then we always discover it has some catastrophic side effect that means it has to be pulled from the market leaving a trail of devastated people in its wake. I also thought, what about people with eating disorders? What about the progress we made with body positivity? I actually immediately had all sorts of doubts. So to get to the bottom of this, as you allude to for a year, I took this drug

and I went 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. world on this question, the biggest critics, the biggest defenders, scientists who made the breakthroughs that led to these drugs, the people who've been thinking about how is it going to affect our culture and our economy. And it's kind of weird, Jordan. It's a bit different to the previous books we talked about. I learned a huge amount about the extraordinary benefits

of these drugs, about the 12 disturbing risks of these drugs, about what they're going to do to all of us in all sorts of complicated ways. But at the end of this journey, although I know so much more, I'm still quite conflicted. Anyone who's reaction to these drugs is, yay, they're going to uncomplicatedly save us all, or boo, they're the devil, I think is missing the much more complicated and interesting picture in the middle. This is complicated. We have to really think through the detail of what it's doing to people and doing to the

culture in a much more nuanced way than I think we instinctively do when we hear about these drugs. Well, we want black and white thinking, right? I talk about this all the time, is we want certainty where we're like, oh, okay, I read Johann Hari's book, OZemik Bad, next. And it's like, oh, but bad if maybe if you're like a fit person and you need to lose five pounds and you're just going to take it because all your friends are. But like, otherwise, what's worse?

Dying of a heart attack when you're age 44 because you have serious problems or like something might go wrong later if, but also maybe not, you know, you stay on it for, anyway, you mentioned earlier other health drugs in the past. Other health drugs include amphetamine, right? Fenn-Fenn, which I'm not sure if that's also anphetamine, but I remember the Fenn-Fen thing from like, you ever see that movie Requiem for a dream? Yeah, literally the most depressing film ever made. If I ever kill myself, I will watch that film first to get me into the mood, right?

Exactly. And the old lady, she's strung out on, like, Dexatrim. They don't mention, they don't say the name, but it's like, and I remember Dexatrim ads from, you probably do too. You're 79, I'm 1980. I remember watching TV, and it's like Dexatrim, and there's a skinny lady being like, I lost it all with Dexatrim. And then you look up, I was like, whatever happened to that?

And I look it up and it's like, oh, this is banned because it's literally just speed for housewives. It's like, you can't take that. You will die. It's fascinating. Looking at the history of diet drugs did not put me in a good frame of mind, but taking a Zenfic, although I did have some positive and negative effects on Ozmpic. I'm sure we're going to get into the details on that. But if you look at the history of diet drugs, it's pretty grim. So the modern history of diet drugs begins in the First World War.

There was a factory in France where loads of solos. soldiers were working with an explosive powder called dynitrophino. And someone noticed they lost a load away. So after the war, some American scientists from Stanford went and studied this and they realized they were absorbing it through their skin and swallowing it. It was an explosive powder. It made you lose loads of weight. So they turned it into a pill called Reducal. When you consider how incredibly low obesity was at the time, it was incredibly popular, 100,000 people were using it.

Then they discovered something unfortunate, which is that if you use it, you start to come up. go blind. Just try to go blind, yeah. And then you go into a horrific raging fever in which, as one doctor put it, your body cooks itself. I mean, it works by speeding up your metabolism because it is literally cooking you from within. Yeah.

So that got Yang from the market for obvious reasons. Bodybuilders still use it. They still use it. It's called DNP in the bodybuilding community. And yes, it makes you go blind. You can get like a 107 fever and have to take ice bats in order to not die. And it cooks your brown fat, which like this is way too in the weeds. but you need to be brown fat.

It's around your organs and stuff. And if you don't have it, I can't remember exactly what it does. But it's basically like you don't get to choose which fat it cooks off. It cooks off the stuff you need to survive and also cooks off the stuff that makes your underwear stretch out. And that's not good. Yeah, it turns out a great advertising slogan is not, take our drug, we'll cook you internally. Right. Not the best like a slogan in the world.

And that goes on pretty much every 20 years. We go through amphetamins. We go through jaw wiring, a particularly savage and hideous. practice what people don't know, literally dentists would take obese people and literally wire their jaw shut so they couldn't eat and they could only get a straw for liquids. But it turns out, well, A, that's just inherently barbaric and horrific. But B, if you vomit while you've got jaw wiring, you choke to death. Oh, God, I didn't think about that. And it of course was a complete failure the minute you unwinded the person's jaw. They went back to eating and they were, in fact, ate

more because they were really traumatized by this unbelievably humiliating experience. Then you mentioned Fenfent. So Fen, but you don't remember this in the mid-90s, Fenfemn was talked about in almost exactly the way that Ozenpick has talked about now. The front page of Time magazine was the new miracle weight loss drug. The way it worked, it was a combination of two drugs. It was a combination of appetite suppressing called flex fluoramine, which had been around for a while but made you drowsy, so it was never that popular, and an amphetamine called fentramin, which counteracted the drowsiness and also made you wired and made you burn more calories.

And it was massively popular. In 1995, in the United States alone, there were 18 million fen-fen prescriptions that were written, right? And it worked incredibly well. And then some doctors in Fargo, North Dakota, noticed that some of their patients seemed to be having trouble breathing when they took this drug. There was then an investigation. It turned out that it gave you something called primary pulmonary hypertension, which is when the blood vessels in your lungs contract. It's absolute agony. It's incurable.

You have to be on oxygen for the rest of your life. or you die. Oh my God. And lots of people died. It led to the biggest payout in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, $12 billion, a beast at the time. So obviously looking at all this, I'm thinking, okay, is those Zempeg going to turn out to be like Fenfem?

Yeah. And I don't think it will, but there's many reasons to be worried. But you alluded to right at the start, I think before we talk about the risk Jordan, I think it's really important because actually I'm not generally on one hand on the other hand kind of guys, you know? Yeah. But in this case, I think the truth is genuinely. complicated and there are good arguments on both sides.

I just, I wanted to highlight the idea that, like, these drugs always end up terrible. And I'm not a woo-woo guy. I'm like a very sciencey guy, which is why I love your work. But I'm always like, okay, something's got to give. You know, yin and yang or whatever way you want to look at it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, my dad likes to say. And he thinks that sounds deep. But like, it's kind of true. Well, you should bear a mind on a Zen picket would be a smaller free lunch. It would be a lunch you just stared at and didn't eat. Yeah. Exactly. It'd be a tiny free lunch composed mainly of dust. So let's think about the benefits first, right? Because they're really important.

Sure. If you want to think about the benefits, one of the places I would start is actually by looking at a parallel area of science. So people have only been taking these drugs for obesity for a couple of years now. They've been taking diabetes for much longer 18 years. So up to now, it's been very hard, not impossible, but very hard to lose loads of weight and keep it off over the long term. Some people can do it just through calorie restriction. We all know people like that, but it's surprisingly rare. So the best comparison point for the effects of these drugs, I think it's actually bariatric surgery. Things like stomach stapling, gastric bands, that kind of thing.

So if we look at that surgery, what do we know? A few important things. Firstly, it's a horrible operation. It's extremely grueling. One in a thousand people dies during the surgery. It's no job. I didn't know that. But people do it for a very good reason,

which is that if you massively reverse your obesity or reduce it or reverse it completely, the benefits for your health are staggering. So if you have bariatric 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 fact, it's so good for your health that you're 40% less likely to die at all of any cause, right, in the seven years that follow. This is a lot we know about that.

And we can now see that these drugs are having a similar effect. So if you take a Zen pic, for example, for two years and you started with a BMO higher than 27, your chances of having a heart attack or stroke go down by 20%. That's huge. That's a huge reduction. And bear in mind, people with BMI 27 were only slightly overweight, right? Right. It's not 30 and 35 and 40.

Exactly. And that was obviously a topic very close to my heart, literally close to my heart because of the heart disease in my family, right? So the benefits are very clear And this will sound weird But the thing I learned in all the research for the book And all the experts I interviewed And all the science I did a deep dive into Will sound really weird

The thing that most surprised me Is the thing I thought I'd known since I was a little boy? If you'd asked me when I was a kid Is obesity bad for your health, Johan? I would have said, well, yeah, right? I was amazed by the scientific evidence About how bad for your health it is Now that doesn't, for a minute, justify stigma and body shaming, which I hate, and I'm strongly opposed to I'm sure we'll get to that.

But we do have to tell the truth about the science. And there's a very strong scientific consensus around this. Think about something as simple as diabetes, right? Okay, I've noticed since I was a kid, if you're obese, you're more likely to get type 2 diabetes. I think I thought, I did think, until quite embarrassingly recently, okay, it's not good to be diabetic. And if you're obese, when you're 18, you have a 70% chance of becoming diabetic. but provided you've got health insurance and you get insulin, you're fine.

You're basically like everyone else. A diabetic plus insulin is basically me or you, I thought, right? For interviewing doctors who treat diabetics, I mean, that is not the case at all. Really? Even when you get treatment, diabetes knocks 15 years off your life. I didn't know that. It's the biggest cause of preventable blindness in the United States.

Wow. More people in the US have to have a limb or extremity amputated in the US because they've got diabetes than because they got shot. And you will look at. noticed, a lot of us get shot. Yeah, I was going to say, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people, right? Yeah. In fact, the effects of diabetes alone are so severe that one of the leading doctors in Britain, one of the best known doctors in Britain, Dr. Max Pemberton, who treats diabetics, said to me, if you gave me a choice between becoming HIV positive or becoming diabetic,

I would choose to become HIV positive. Really? Because if you're HIV positive and you get treatment, you live as long as everyone else. That is not true of diabetes, right? It radically shortens your life, and it makes it much more likely you'll have a horrific final few years where you're blind or have dementia or lose whole parts of your body. And that's just one of the causes of obesity. And never mind, cancer, dementia, heart disease, stroke. So when we're thinking about the benefits and risks of these drugs, you have to think about it in this context. For me, I tried dieting many times. I'd lost weight and I always regained more than I had at the start. For me, the dilemma was what are the risks are continuing to be obese

versus what are the risks of these drugs, right? Now, different people come into the possibility of taking these drugs with different levels of risk, right? You mentioned before, you know, skinny people, right? People at that party that I went to, none of them were fat at the start. They're not taking the drug to go down from obesity to a healthy weight.

They're taking the drug to go down from actually being skinny already to being super skinny. Sharon Osborne has talked about this and, I mean, look at her, she looks very unwell. I'm very concerned for her. So they're taking on all the risks for none of the health benefits. Obviously, they believe there are aesthetic benefits,

and I'm particularly non-judgmental about the women in this situation because women are made to feel like shit about their bodies, whatever they do. Right, exactly. Making that choice in an environment that they didn't choose where there are intolerable pressures on them. So I get that. I'm not being judging or finger-wagging towards them because I think that would be foolish and cruel.

But there's one set of risk around people who are skinny. Actually, they're endangering their own health because one of the 12 risks of these drugs is when you lose weight using any method, you usually lose muscle mass. And muscle mass is the total amount of soft tissue in your body. It's essential for movement, you know, climbing the stairs, getting out of a chair or whatever. And as you age, depressingly, starting when you're 30 years old, you begin to lose muscle mass every year. You lose about 8% a year from the age of 30.

We're well on the downward curve here. Yeah, man. And not fun. Not fun. If you're going into the aging process with already depleted muscle mass, you put yourself much more at risk of having dangerously low muscle mass as you age, which causes a condition called sarcopenia. It means poverty of the flesh in Greek.

It's basically where you just don't have enough muscle mass. You can't climb the stairs. You can't get out of a chair. You're much more limited in what you can do. So there's a risk that particularly the people who take it to be super skinny. We'll get some aesthetic benefit now, but we could be setting and train a time bomb of people 30, 40, 50 years from now. Right.

We're going to be much more frail and unwell as they end. age and much more likely to fall. They're going to have that 90-year-old body at age 65 or something because they cut their lean mass down. And it's very hard to build that. I mean, I know from working out with the train, it's very hard to build that backup. And it's literally not possible if you're not getting enough calories. Like my trainer's like, you need to eat more.

You are not eating enough. And I'm like, but wait, I want to lose. And he's like, you can either gain muscle or lose weight. You can't do really both things at the same time. That's why bodybuilders do bulking and cutting cycles. and it's a whole thing. And this isn't just for bodybuilders. This is like for people who want to be in decent shape. You can't be a gaunt Kate Moss body type and then also hit the gym and build muscle. It just doesn't really work that way. Yeah, you can't be Timothy Shalomey and Donald Schwarzen.

You've got to you're going to choose. Yes. And you're right. What you're saying actually connects to another one of the 12 risks related to these drugs, which is one of the more common ones, malnutrition. And I really got a sense of how easy that is when I started taking them. I will never forget the second day that I was on a Zen pic. I was lying in bed and I woke up. I thought, oh, I feel something really weird. What is it? And I couldn't locate in my body what it was that felt weird. And it took me literally five minutes to realize I woke up and I'm not hungry. Right. Wow. Every day of my life before that I would wake up with like a raging hunger. It was often what got me out of bed was being hungry and wanting food. And I thought, oh, this is weird. Up the road,

there's a diner that I used to go to every morning run by a lovely Brazilian woman called Tatiana. And I went in and I ordered the thing I would order every morning, which was a huge brown bread roll with loads of chicken and loads of mayo. I'm not proud. And she brought over and I had like less than a quarter of it and I was full. I thought, huh, this is weird. And I left. Actually, Tatiana called after me saying, are you okay where they left? Because we're like, what?

Why is he left? He's never done this before. Normally this is gone before I check on you, but now you're leaving. Yeah. Exactly. And then for lunch that day, I went to there's a Turkish restaurant near where I live next to my office. where I went in, I ordered the same lunch I always order, Mediterranean lamb it was. And again, I had like two mouthfuls, three mouthfuls. I was full. This is really weird. So what these

drugs do is they make you feel much fuller, much faster, right? To an extraordinary degree. It's why I went from eating about 3,200 calories on a typical day to about 1,800. It's why I've lost 42 pounds, right? In a little bit more than a year. But there's a lot of good things about that obviously, but one of the risks of that is malnutrition, particularly people taking high doses. For example, a close relative of mine is taking these drugs and literally was like wasting away. Like her kid said to remind her, hey, you got to eat. Oh, man. There's a risk of malnutrition from not eating enough and chronically under-eating.

There's very serious, I think, with this. It's why actually some doctors are now prescribing alongside the drugs a diet plan, not at the time, a typical diet plan to cut down, but a diet plan to make sure you eat enough. Right. Yeah, so for someone like me who lost, I lost 40 pounds of fat, it took 10 months. Wow. I was weighing my food. But I was like getting one gram of protein per pound, a body weight, ish for those 10 months.

And it was not like injecting something. I mean, this is like protein shake in the morning, decent lunch, and then a packet of turkey breast with some mustard for dinner every day, give or take, for 10 months. my wife was like, I can't believe you have the discipline to do that. And I was like, I can't believe I have the discipline to do that. But it's just one of those things I'd set my mind to. But 10 months of that is something that most people, even when I look back now, I'm like, I don't think I could do that again. That was kind of miserable. And it took forever. The idea that there's a drug that can get you there faster, and I was not obese. And I kind of want to talk about what that means. 26% of the people in

the UK are obese, 42% in the U.S. are obese. What is the difference between overweight and obese? I I know there's a difference, but I cannot remember for the life of me what it is. It's very simple. BMI, which is dividing your height by your weight. If your BMI is between 25 and 30, you're overweight. If your BMI is over 30, you're obese. Okay. It's a very simple way of measure.

But I'm just thinking about what you're saying, Jordan. It's so interesting, right? That difficulty you would have now to exercise that willpower, right? I think it's fascinating. Willpower is a very real phenomenon. We've all exercised willpower at some point, right? Over something. When people sort of deny it exists in relation to weight,

I'm always like, you know, you're being too simplistic. equally the people who think it's the only thing going on, I think, are being too simplistic. So I think about what is the factor that's undermining our willpower? Because it actually leads us, for a long time, I thought I was looking at two different questions. Why did people gain so much weight so quickly? And how do these drugs work? Yeah. Actually, it turns out the answer lies in the same word. That word is satiety, which is the feeling of having had enough and not wanting anymore.

I'll come back to that word a minute. But just start with the explosion and obesity in our lifetime. So I think we're, yeah, you're younger than me, right? I'm probably younger than you by like, you're 79. I'm early 80s. So like we're probably within 6 to 10 months or a year. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Between the year we were born and the year we turned 21, obesity doubled in the United States. Wow. And in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again. If you want to get a sense of this, everyone listening just pause the podcast for a second and Google photographs of beaches in the United States in 1979. And just look at them, right?

You look at them and it seems really weird to us. Everyone is what we would call slim or jack. Everyone, right? You look at it and go, well, this must have been like a skinny person convention that day, what's going on. And then you look at the population figures, that is what people look like in the United States in the year we were born. Not a million years ago, not before the Civil War, right? Literally when we were born. So what happened, right?

What happened is the evidence is pretty clear about what happened. Obesity explodes everywhere that makes one change. It's not where people lose willpower. It's not where people become greedy. is where people move mostly from eating fresh whole foods that were prepared on the day to eating mostly

processed or ultra-processed foods that were built out of chemicals in factories in a process that actually isn't even caught cooking it's called manufacturing food. So we have 300,000 years where humans ate mostly whole foods and obesity was exceptionally rare and then in our lifetimes

there's this dramatic swing to 78% of the calories the average American child consumes in a day are now processed or ultra-processed food. And that leads to this extraordinary explosion of obesity. And if you want to understand why, it's kind of simple. I mean, there's many things going on, but the core of it is that this new kind of food, which has never existed before, undermines our ability to ever feel full and know we've had enough.

And there's loads of evidence for this that I go through in the book, but there's an experiment that to me really nails it, right? Oh, yeah, cheesecake rats, baby. You tell me about cheesecake rats? You know you want it. This is gross. Legit made me kind of like have a bubbling stomach when I read it. Exactly.

I'm going to promote your way last by reminding you this experiment every fucking day. So there's a scientist who's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai University called Professor Paul Kenney, brilliant guy. He grew up in Dublin in Ireland and in the 90s he moved to San Diego, I think to do his PhD and continue his scientific research. And he quickly realized, wow, Americans don't eat like Irish people did at the time. There was a lot more processed food, a lot more sugary and fatty food. And like many a good immigrant, he quickly assimilated. And within a year, he gained like 30 pounds. And he was like, what's going on here?

And he started to feel like this food he was consuming wasn't just changing his gut. It was changing his brain. It was changing his whole relationship with food. See, he designed an experiment to test this, which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park. It's very simple. He built a cage, and he raised rats in it. And all they had to eat was the kind of natural healthy food that rats. had evolved to eat over thousands of years.

And it turned out when they had that food, the rats would eat when they were hungry and stopped when they were full. Okay. They never over ate. They never became overweight or obese. Given that food, they had a kind of natural nutritional wisdom

that stopped them overeating. Okay, then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some bacon, he bought some Snickers bars, and crucially he bought some cheesecake. Yeah. 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. They ate and ate and ate and ate. And that natural nutritional wisdom they'd had with the old kind of fear completely disappeared. As Professor Kenny put it to me, within a couple of days they were different animals. And very rapidly they were all obese.

Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment in a way that to me as a former KFC addict seems a little bit cruel. he took away the American diet and left them with nothing but the healthy food again and he was pretty sure he knew what would happen they would eat more of the healthy food than they had before and this would prove that that kind of diet expands the number of calories you eat in a day

that is not what happened what happened was much weirder once they've been exposed to the American diet they refused to eat the healthy food at all it was like they no longer recognized it as food it was only when they were literally starving and wasting away that they finally reluctantly went back and ate it Oh, man.

Now, there's something very similar happening to all of us. As Professor Gerald Mann at Harvard, who designed the food label that's on all food that's sold in the US, said to me, we know there's something about the food we're eating, that's undermining our abilities feel full. So this word satiety, this food has robbed us of our satiety, kept coming up. And then I kept hearing that word come up again when we talk about these drugs. Because what these drugs do is they give you back your. sense of satiety. Drucker, who made the key breakthrough, one of the key breakthroughs in discovering GLP1, which is the heart of how a Zemphic works. I sure we'll talk about that, said to me, what they give you back is your satiety hormones. They give you back that feeling

of being full. I realized, I don't think I'd ever felt full in my life in July to go Zembek, right? Not really full, not like, I'd had times when I'd had too much and couldn't bear to anymore because I'd vomit, but that's different to feeling sated, right? You get sated in other things in life. You get sated in, well, sex, for example, times you have sex and it's really good and then it's over and you're like even if like the hottest person in the world came into the room you would be like I'm really sorry I'm stated now you know what's on Netflix yeah exactly is like sorry Keanu just in case Keanu listens to your podcast I want to be clear Keanu I would find a way

but yeah you know that feeling right so when I started to see it that way there's a brilliant professor in Philly and professor Michael Lowe who said to me what you realize is these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem Yeah. Process food dug a whole, insatiable hunger in all of us, and the drugs fill in the hole, but in their own risky, complicated way. Now, sink your teeth into the deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

If you're wondering how I managed to book all these authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, actually, you're probably not wondering that. I'm just trying to awkwardly transition into pumping my free course, six-minute networking. It is free over at six-minute networking.com. I don't need your credit card information or any of that crap when you sign up. I'm basically just teaching you

relationship building skills and the course does that in a super easy, non-cringy, very non-shmoozy down to Earthway. So there's no awkward strategies, there's no cheesy tactics. It's just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector,

a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Really easy stuff. The course is very, very short and easy to apply. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. The course is again free. There's no nonsense, and I don't secretly trick you into anything weird. You can find it at six-minute networking.com. All right, back to Johan Hari. So we don't get full from junk food, and I kind of looked up a little, a few of the reasons why. First of all, the way they make it is horrifying.

I'll talk about it in the show close. But we don't get full. There's junk food almost has virtually no fiber. It's a really good blend of fat and protein. That's why when you eat one sort of like barbecue chip, you're like, I, need a thousand more of these because it's just like a flavor profile. Only a thousand? Yeah. What kind of pussy are you in?

Whatever's left in the bag is going down and you have to, I'm like, I'll go to my wife and like, take these away from me and she's like, good and then she's eating them and I'm like, that wasn't the solution we were looking for. And also liquids, I was at the mall yesterday with my kids taking them to some fun thing and I was thirsty. So I went

to the vending machine and they had Coke, Mountain Dew, Diet Coke. There was nothing like, there was nothing that wasn't just a soft drink in there that had a thousand calories in whatever two-liter bottle or you know 20-ounce bottle I can't tell and there's artificial sweeteners in some of them and there's shaky science about whether that's bad for you I don't really want to go down that thing but basically the junk food hijacks whatever navigation system our body has evolved around food and I think you say it in the book pretty well you say

the same system that used to tell us to eat fruit now just tells us to eat fruit loops that's exactly right what you realize then it brings us right back to what you were saying about willpower What the science shows when you come to the causes of obesity is there's three kinds of cause. There's biological causes. Your genes can make you more sensitive to it. As you become obese, changes happen in your brain that make it harder to go back. There's psychological causes, things like comfort eating, trauma, all sorts of things can make us comfort ourselves with eating. And then there's social causes like the food supply system, right?

So the fancy term for this is the biopsychosocial model. Biological causes, psychological causes, social causes. and they're all real. And when you think about it in that context, you begin to see where willpower comes in. Willpower is one little sliver of the psychological component to this, right? So it's real.

And the way I started to think about willpower is it's like in this environment, willpower is like an umbrella in a bad storm. Some people, you hand them that umbrella, they're going to be able to get to the other side of the street and stay dry. And all credit to them, good luck. If you can do it with willpower,

if you can do it with calorie restriction and exercise, do it that way because there's very low risks to that compared to the options we're talking about. But for most people in this environment, the storm is so bad that it's going to break that umbrella, right? So that to me is how we need to think about willpower. I agree. I wanted to say this early in the show and just sort of we got sidetracked. I want to caveat this because I've gotten some trouble on this show for so-called fat-shaming. So I always want to be careful in episodes where we talk about this kind of thing. I don't think I've ever actually done that, but pretty much anything you see.

say about weight at all can trigger some people. And look, I'm less worried about the chronically offended as I am about the chronically overweight who've tried everything else. For me, like I said earlier, losing weight was a matter of getting educated about nutrition, willpower to stick to a healthy diet, which is not easy. And not everybody has the same problem, because not everybody has the same genetics. Not everyone can afford to build a gym in their backyard during a pandemic. And so it's a position of immense privilege. And I'm also privileged to speak to my audience about this. And I want to make sure that we do that, and we are doing this, I think, in a way that is caring and understanding and results in people learning and feeling empowered by this and not

feeling lectured by us coming away, feeling ashamed or hopeless. And I know you're on the same page, but I want to plant that flag because, you know, you hate to get a letter from somebody that's like, I feel like crap after listening to your episode about this. And you're just like, oh, could that have been avoided? And this is something I thought about really deeply for my book, magic pill because, you know, the worst moment for me in the whole writing of the book was it was a while into working on the book and obviously taking the drug. I was facetiming with my niece, Erin. She's actually 19 now, but in my head she's fixed as a six-year-old. She's the baby in my family. She's the youngest. She's the only girl. So no one makes me more protective than her.

Whatever she has a boyfriend, I always want to go, get away from her, you're pedophile, but then I realize I don't know. She's like an adult woman now. Although I refuse to accept that. So we were FaceTiming and she was kind of, you know, teasing me. She'd go, oh, you look great. I'd ever knew you had a neck before. I'd ever knew you had a jaw. And I was kind of laughing and preening. And then she looked down and she said,

will you buy me some of those own pets? Oh, no. And she was a totally healthy weight. And I thought she was kidding. I laughed. And then suddenly I realized she meant it. And I was like, fuck.

Yeah. Have I undercut every message I've ever given her? So I wanted to think a lot about stigma in the messages we send. And one of the people who most helped me to think about this was an amazing woman called Shelly Bovie, who basically introduced body positivity to Britain, or as it would have been called then Fat Pride. So when we were kids, right, again, not a million years ago, fat people only ever appeared

on television as the butt of a joke. Yes. Particularly fat women, but fat men too, right? You think about like John Candy, it was presented as inherently hilarious that there were fat people in the world, and they were bullied and treated appallingly in every representation you saw at them. The first person I ever saw on television challenging that was Shelly. So I just heard a bit of her story

I tracked her down to interview her about this because she's such a wise person A story when I was 10 years old on TV on like the equivalent to It's fact to say the equivalent to Oprah But there is no equivalent to Oprah But like a kind of trashier Lower End equivalent of Oprah

Much trashier Because Oprah's not trashier Or she's divine But so Shelley grew up in a working class town In Britain called Port Talbot Like Scranton would probably be the American Equivalence or something like that A tough working class town

had the biggest steelworks in Britain at the time. She describes herself the only fat girl in the school. And one day when she was 11, her teacher said to her, Bovi, stay behind after class, I want to talk to you. So she's sitting there thinking, what have I done wrong? She waits.

Her teacher says to her, you are much too fat. It's disgusting. Go see the school nurse. She'll sort you out. So completely thrown, Shelly walks over to the school nurse. She said, the school nurse says, why are you here?

She says, the teacher says, I'm too fat. The nurse said, take off your clothes and I'll inspect you. And she starts pinching her and said, this is disgusting. Oh my God. You should be ashamed of yourself and just berates her and tells her to stop being a pig, as she put it. So Shelly leaves completely shaken. And she basically spends her whole life soaking up, being treated like that. That the other girls are just constantly saying, thank God I'm not as fat as you. And as she gets older, it's just everywhere. When she got pregnant, she went to the doctor. The first thing the doctor said was, well, you shouldn't be pregnant when you're as fat as you are. Oh, that's terrible. She had a very difficult birth. And as she was lying there covered in blood, the midwife said to her, you You know, you should really lose some weight. When her baby wouldn't attach properly, he wasn't feeding properly, she went to the doctor to get some help. And the doctor said, well, what are you trying to do, make the baby as fat as you are? This is insane.

But this is constant. 42% of women with a BMI higher than 35 get insulted every single day, right? Every day. So Shelly just completely internalized this at first. She told me she had never even looked at her own body in the shower naked because she was so disgusted. She thought it was so wrong. And then one day she learned that in the United States there was this movement, which at the time called itself. pride instead some people still do, that basically said this is just some bigotry. This is just

a form of cruelty. We don't have to take being treated like this and fought back. And so she introduced this to Britain. This is why when I was 10 years older I see her on this imitation of Oprah. And she's treated like a mad woman and the audience laugh at her. But nonetheless, her book was very successful. And a kind of modest body positivity movement is born in Britain. And Shelley, when I went to see, as she's 76 now, is incredibly proud of everything she did. And it stands by every word she said about stigma. But something else happened to Shelley next. She was very severely overweight. She was not even 50 and she was losing the ability to walk because of her weight. Oh my. And she went to her doctor. She was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and she went to her doctor and the doctor said

he was worried about her heart and he said, look, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but this is all connected to your weight. And Shelley felt this incredible dilemma because she absolutely believed every word she says about stigma. She's never doubted that that was true, nor should she. But she could also see the scientific evidence was clear that carrying the level of excess weight she did in her body was physically harming her and indeed was going to kill her probably. And she was really struggling to reconcile these things. At the time there was a body positivity newsletter called Fat News in Britain. And she wanted to write for it about this dilemma. They said, no, no, that's not what we want. We talk about the positive things about being fat. And she's like, I get that. But we are much more

likely to develop these problems. We do need to level about that. And they were kind of, no, no, no, that's not what we want. Now, Shelley lost a huge amount of weight by calorie restriction. She went to a kind of equivalent to Weight Watchers. Now, she's the first person to acknowledge that's extremely difficult. Only about 10% of people succeed at it. But she said to me, I know that that weight lost saved my life. I wouldn't be alive at the age of 78. If that hadn't happened, my heart problems went away when I lost weight. Right. She said, we can't say we have a body positivity movement that isn't concerned at some level about keeping your body alive, right? So she said, we keep presenting it as if it's either or.

Either you're opposed to stigma or you're in favor of if possible reducing obesity for people. But she said, why is that the choice? It can be both out. If you love someone who's obese, and I would guess every single person listening is either obese or love someone who's obese, what you want for them is to protect them from two things. You want to protect them from bullying and cruelty, which is what stigma is. And you want to protect them from the health harms of obesity, which are things like diabetes. cancer, heart disease, dementia, your knees and hips being destroyed, like just across the board.

It's a form of love to be against both. Now, of course, you could be in favour of weight loss in a cruel, concern, trolling, vicious way, and we need to strongly oppose that. Or you can be in favour of weight loss where possible through love and compassion. Now, some people, and I stress it is a minority within the body positivity movement, and I also want to stress, I understand where they're coming from and have a lot of sympathy for them. But some people have, I would argue, over. corrected. Everything they say about stigma is right, but some of them also argue that pointing

out the scientific evidence about the harms caused by obesity, over which there is no scientific debate, it's one of the most proven facts in science, that pointing out those facts is itself a form of stigma. And that, I'm afraid, is not right. I agree. Something that hit for me when I was reading your book was the idea that if you've spent your whole life hearing abuse, being shamed, and nearly everything coming in looks like abuse and shame, even if it's a doctor telling you in a nice way that you are going to suffer from these consequences. This is very likely why I had some women in my inbox

after a recent feedback Friday episode. Those are our advice segments. They came at us really hatefully. And the advice we'd given, I went back and listened to it repeatedly because I was like, what do we do wrong? The advice we'd given was there was a person working in a doctor's office. And her colleagues who were doctors were complaining about how they needed to lose weight because their blood work was bad and they

didn't fit into their clothes and they felt like crap. And this person was able to lose weight. And we gave her advice on gently approaching her colleagues and friends who were complaining about this on how to lose weight if they wanted because she had done it successfully and get advice from her to how to do so. And my co-host and I, we were shocked at how people viewed this as fat shaming. It was almost delusional and we couldn't believe it when they told us what they were reacting to. And I found it really sad because these people, like I, I, couldn't get there mentally without crazy gymnastics. These people must view nearly every discussion around health or weight as fat shaming, which has to be exhausting. At first I was annoyed, but now I just

feel bad because that is not going to help them lose weight and live longer. I think we really need to understand where it comes from. There's an analogy that really helped me to think about this, right? As you know, obviously I'm gay. Maybe that's not obvious. I'm just saying British, but I'm in fact gay. I think the Kianu thing was our first hint. Oh yeah, that gay. Well, come on. You're telling me you Turn down Kianu, let's be real here. But, you know, if you think about the AIDS crisis, right? When the AIDS crisis started, doctors warn, look, it's a scientific fact that this is going to affect gay men much more than other people because of the nature of anal sex, right?

Interesting. And that's why there were moves in San Francisco to shut down the bathhouses to shut down points of transmission that were spreading the virus, right? And loads of gay men, wholly understandably, said, fuck you, my whole life I've been told there's something wrong with being gay, we're disordered, and. we're disgusting, and here you are, these other authority people telling us we're disgusting and we can't have sex. I've seen this story, fuck you, we'll carry on going to our saunas, right? You're not going to shut them down. And I understand what was happening. They had been shamed and bullied all their lives, and it meant they couldn't hear this well-meant medical advice, actually essential medical advice, as anything other than more homophobia. And as a result, a lot of them die.

Yeah. Now, that's not their fault, right? In their position, I might well have been the same, because, I see where it came from. And I think it's a thing very similar happening with what you're describing. And I think precisely because we want a body positivity movement to continue and survive, even if we reverse the obesity crisis back to where it was when we were born, when it wasn't a crisis, if we go back to looking like those beaches in, you know, in 1979, there's still natural variety in body shapes and everyone, we want everyone to feel good in their body.

And so even if we solve this crisis, you'd still need a body positivity movement. But I think a lot about a guy I interviewed called Jeff Parker. But a super nice guy. He's a retired lighting technician in San Francisco. He's 67. He must be 68 now. And he was very severely obese. And it was painful for him to walk anywhere.

He had gout. He had liver and kidney problems and heart problems. Every morning he had to swallow fistfuls of pills. His doctor was very worried about him. And then his friend Mel gave him some Minjaro, which is one of these drugs. And he lost an enormous amount of weight. He was taken off almost all his pills. His gout went away.

Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate. bridge every day and so I'm going to enjoy my retirement now. Now, not everyone who takes a drug is going to have the experience of Jeff and I'm sure we'll talk about some of the risks, but it's pretty soon every single person in the United States is going to know someone like Jeff, right, if they don't already. Someone whose health dramatically improved because they lost loads of weight because of these drugs. It was never scientifically plausible to claim that obesity doesn't harm health. Pretty soon it's not going to be emotionally plausible because everyone's going to be like, hey, what happened to Jeff? What happened to Bob? Hey, Susie, what do you

mean you don't take these pills anymore and your heart problem's gone away and your diabetes has been reversed. What do you mean? How did that happen? Right? We absolutely desperately into movement against stigma. If that movement implies that the scientific evidence about the harms caused by obesity is itself of a form of stigma, you know, as Shelley said to me, Shelley Boevi, the woman I was talking about said to me, we have to live in reality. It doesn't serve anyone to not live in reality. The only person who pays the price for that in the end is you, right? We've all had moments in our where we want to not hear bad news. You don't open the bill. You can't pay. You don't answer the call from your doctor that you're afraid to hear. But we all know that in the end, if you don't

listen to bad news and adjust for it, who pays the price for that but you? I couldn't agree more. This, in addition to the stigma, is one reason why I kind of waffle on using words like overweight or obese, right? Because I know you've got an opinion on this, which I also share. You can use euphemisms, but like, is that short-term relief at the expense of long-term honesty that could save someone's life? Well, the truth is there's a physical reality, right? The World Health Organization, which is the biggest medical body in the world, defines overweight and obesity, very simply, as carrying excess weight that poses a threat

to health. That's a real phenomenon. Yeah. We may want to change the words for it. I'm open-minded about that. But what we can't do is change the fact that there is an underlying physical reality there, carrying excess weight poses of harm to health. Now, not for everyone.

Not in every case. My mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. she's alive and well at the age of 78, but she's a statistical outlier, right? So some people come back and go, well, I weigh this and I'm alive and well. Unfortunately, again, the evidence is really clear on this. So, for example, there was a big study here in London of government bureaucrats that tracked their health over many years. And what it found is at the start when they were young, the obese people and the other weight people had pretty similar health outcomes. By 20, 30 years on, the obese people were eight times more likely to become unwell than the people who were not

obese. So there are ways of particularly talking about this prior to these weight loss drugs, a lot of people would kind of go, well, I can't change it anyway. So why are you even telling me this? It's just upsetting me. Now we have this new tool. I mean, we did have tools before, but this is a much easier tool than the tools we had before, although it does carry these 12 big risks. I think we need to have a loving and compassionate conversation. And when I think about the people I love, who are obese, it's that I want to desperately want to protect them, both from bullying and from illness. And I believe we can do both. I think you're right. I think in going back to what you'd said about our food system, I'm paraphrasing from your book, we built a food system that poisons us and

then to keep us away from the consequences, we inject ourselves with a different drug that makes us not want to eat. And I think the key question is, do we want to live in a world where we don't solve the underlying problem, but we just drug ourselves to get rid of the symptoms? Now, on the other hand, Some folks, this is the best solution for the situation at hand, as you kind of talked about, towards the top of the show. And if somebody has cancer, we don't say, hey, we need to get pollution out of the atmosphere. I'm so sorry you got lung cancer. We pump them full of radiation and chemo to kill the cancer and keep them alive.

So I'm not anti-Ozempic at all. I'm really not. It's just, in part, I got to admit, man, part of me is also biased. And I'm trying to resist it. Like, there's a part of my brain that says, I worked out and I dieted to lose weight and drugs are cheating. And I know that that's bull-h-and-that's unfair, but it's somehow that's in the back of my head. And I'm wondering what you think about that, because surely I'm not the only person who has that bias. I felt it about myself. For months and months when I was taking the drugs,

I kept feeling like I was doing something really wrong. I could think, why is that? Like, one of my best friends takes statins, fiss cholesterol. I've never once looked at him and gone, you're fucking, cheating to get better cholesterol by me. Never crossed my mind. Of course. I would regard you as literally mad if you said that. right? Yeah. And yet these drugs bring out, remind me to come back to what you were saying before about dealing with the symptoms of what the causes, because it's a really important point as well. But it terms of cheating, I think one thing that's really interesting here is these drugs are bringing to the surface lots of deep underlying ideas that have been kind of semi-conscious for a lot of us.

Some of those things are like actually the things that drive why we eat, things like comfort eating, which was a very hard transition for me. But think about what you just said about cheating, right? and appreciate your honesty about it, and I felt it too. If you look at the history of ideas about obesity, if you go back to, for example, in the 6th century, the Pope, Pope Gregory I, invented the Seven Deadly Sins, right? People know this part because of the film Seven.

Though it turns out Kevin Spacey was a bigger risk than the surrogular in that one. But the, I hope it doesn't seem to me for that. You think about the Seven Deadly Sins, one of them is gluttony, right? And it's always depicted with someone who's overweight, eating in some grotesque way, right? And if you think about how we think, about weight loss, the only kind of weight loss we really like and admire is one that follows the old Catholic model of sin. You're a sinner, you have to go through hell, and then we'll forgive

you, right? Yeah, yeah. Think about that show, the world's biggest loser, right? A disgusting game show where they get very severely overweight people and make them actually do things very dangerous for the hell, like, you know, starve themselves and take part in very extreme force of exercise to compete to be the biggest loser, right? That's a classic model, right? Yeah, we'll forgive you for being fat if you've tortured yourself, right? The more agonising a diet is, the more extreme the exercise program, the more likely we are to go, fair enough, Bob paid his price, right? We don't quite articulate it that way. Or you think about another way, which is cheating. Lots of people in our culture, particularly women because of the pressures that are put on them, are making massive sacrifices

every day to be thin or thinner, right? They're denying themselves food, they're going hungry, they're uncomfortable. And I can well understand to them, I must look like Lance Armstrong looks to a cyclist. It's like, what? I put in all this effort. I do all this work. I deprive myself. And you, you fucker, you just inject yourself once a week in the leg and you get to look the same way I do. I can well understand it, but I think we need to unpick these ideas. Firstly, I think we can move beyond the idea of sin. We should be able to think a little bit better than a sixth century pope by now. But when it comes to cheating, I actually think we are in a race. We are competing. But it's me competing against my neighbor, it's all of us competing against the forces that have made us

obese, processed and ultra-processed foods. And I went to countries where they dealt with that problem. Japan, for example, 42.5% of Americans are obese. 4% of Japanese people are obese, right? Wow. And it's mind-blowing when you go there and see how they did it. I'm sure we'll come back to that. It's kind of weird that we expect Japanese people to look like sumo wrestlers because that's basically like expecting an American to look like a bald eagle. But that's very rare. So you're totally right. And this actually comes back to the other thing I wanted to pick up on, which is when you were saying as well about, this was one of my biggest concerns about taking these drugs. I went to my closest friend, I think it was maybe three months into doing it.

I was researching a lot of the stuff about why obesity had risen at first. And I said, I've got to stop taking these drugs. I'm going to be a complete hypocrite here. I write all these books for how we need to deal with these deep underlying social causes of problems and not deal with the symptoms. And here I am with a problem that's got profound environmental causes. And here I am, jabbing myself to deal with the symptoms and congratulating myself on how good I look, right? Right. And so this is a friend of mine who, eight years ago, she got very bad breast cancer, she nearly died.

And she's single mum, so you can imagine how horrendous it was. And I was with her all through the chemo and the double mastectomy and the hysterectomy and all those things. And she said to me, yeah, and when I got breast cancer, we could have said, something really fucked up is happening in our environment that's causing breast cancer. one in seven British women get breast cancer one in eight American women that didn't happen in the recent past in our parents generation

not happening in Japan where one in 38 women get breast cancer something is going on that's causing breast cancer right so you could have said to me well fuck me you've already got this problem caused by the environment don't inject yourself with all these poisons

but no you said let's make sure you live to fight another day then we can think about the environmental causes and she gave me this really great analogy she said imagine if your house is on fire you could make a very good argument to say You know, we should change the building code, so houses get built out of less flammable materials. You can make a very strong argument to go, apartment blocks, make sure they've got sprinklers. If your house is on fire, that's no fucking east of you.

Call the fire brigade and dows the house in water, right? In the same way, she's like, yes, this is a hugely environmentally driven problem. We've got to deal with that. But how does it help for you to just sacrifice yourself on that? You know, I'm strongly in favour of gun control. Many reasonable people I love disagree with me, but I'm strongly in favour of gun control. but I'm struggling in favour of gun control. Part of because I've known so many people

who were murdered with guns in the US. But if someone gets shot in front of me, I don't stand over them going, well, we must close the gun, show loophole, and we must get background checks for everyone who goes in to buy a gun. I say, call a fucking ambulance, right? There's no contradiction

between dealing with the symptom and dealing with the deeper causes, especially failing to deal with the symptom for you will mean that you die. And you can't deal with environmental causes if you die. So another guy, really underscored that for me was Jeff Parker, that guy I was talking about in San Francisco,

who when I said to him, but don't you think we should be dealing with the environmental causes? He said to me, 100%, sign me up, I'll join that fight. But let's be honest, I'll be dead by the time we solve that problem. Yeah. I want to live, right? And I found that very hard to rebut. There's many legitimate reasons to reject these drugs and be concerned about these drugs, but I don't think that's the right one.

Don't need to starve yourself. In fact, take an extra helping of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. You're not sure if we have a sponsor for XYZ product. Go ahead and email me. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am more than happy to

surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Johan Hari. These solutions, we have to come to terms with what eating does for us, right? The underlying issue needs addressing. It goes to your earlier point about the OZemPEC just addressing the symptoms of the eating. And I found it interesting. You mentioned how often people substitute the eating for something else like booze or even exercise. And we see this with bariatric surgery patients going and finding something that's not food.

Like, I don't know if they start smoking, but some of them start drinking. I'm sure some start smoking. And some start going to the gym four times. day. And I know somebody who used to be overweight and eat a bunch, and they lost a bunch of weight, and now they go to the gym literally four times, they workout, I should say, four times per day. That is not normal. And I asked him, do you think you just substitute one addiction for another? And he goes, oh, yeah, 100%. It's just that this one's less likely to kill me because I'm doing a lot of yoga and a lot of weightlifting. And I'm just like, gosh, but four times, I mean, if you do

anything four times a day that takes an hour. That's a part-time job, man. I actually found it quite, here's a whole separate show I want to do. You mentioned that sometimes being overweight is psychologically comforting and there's a connection between sexual abuse and weight gain. Can you speak to that a little bit? I literally want to do like a whole episode on that because I just find that endlessly fascinating. Yeah, I'm going to tell a little bit of my own experience in relation to this, not the abuse component, but something else. And then I talked about the abuse thing, the evidence about abuse. This was probably, for me personally, other than that moment with my niece, the hardest element of taking the drugs.

And it really became clear to me, I had an epiphany about it. I was in Vegas. As you know, I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas and I was researching the murder of someone I knew and loved. So obviously it's very painful thing to do. And really on autopilot, I went to this KFC, I've been to a thousand times. It's on West Sahara for people in Vegas. It's the skeeziest KFC in Vegas, which is saying something. Yeah, it is. And we're good at SkiZE fast food, places in Vegas. And I went in and I ordered what I would have ordered a year before. I ordered a bucket of fried chicken. And I sat down and I had a chicken drumstick. And I remember almost hearing it as a voice in my head, looking at this chicken and thinking, I can't eat this. I'm just going

to have to feel bad. And one of the fascinating things about these drugs is because they so radically interrupt your eating patterns, for many people, not everyone, they bring to the surface the underlying drivers of your eating all along. So I go through five drivers of eating in the book, but you've gone to one that I found really difficult. So I interviewed a man called Dr. Vincent Feliti. He's a doctor, he was in San Diego in 1981, obviously long before I met him. And he was approached by Kaiser Permanente, one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in California. And they said, look, we've got a problem. Obesity is blowing up. In fact, it was laughably low by our standards, but it was blowing up. And we give people diet advice and it doesn't work. And we even give people personal trainers,

it doesn't work. What can we do? Can we give you a load of money to just do blue skies research and figure out what the hell is going on. He said, sure. Yeah. So he started working with 200 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 300 pounds. And he thought, well, what can I do with them? And he had an idea that sounds, and in fact, it is quite dumb. He said, what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating? And we gave them like vitamin shots so they didn't get scurvy or whatever. Would they burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight? So with an absolute ton of medical supervision, they did it. And incredibly at first it worked.

There's a woman who I'm going to call Susan, not her real name, who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 132 pounds, like a staggering level of weight loss. Wow. And Dr. Felitti, you know, she's saying to him, you've saved my life. Her family are ringing up and saying you've saved her life. Mind-blowing.

And one day something happened that no one expected. Susan cracked. She went to KFC or, actually, I think that's me projecting. I don't think it was KFC, but somewhere it starts hugely over-eating and quite quickly went back to a, you know, a dangerous way, not where she'd been, but a dangerous way. And Dr. Felitti said, when he called her in, Susan, what happened? And she looked down, she said, I don't know. I don't know. She was obviously really a shame. He said, well, Susan, tell me about the day you crack. Did anything in particular

happened that day? It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan before. 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. This is when Dr. Felitti asked her something he'd never thought to ask his patients before. He said, Susan, when did you start to 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 9 or 14? Anything in particular happened that year?

And Susan looked down and she said, well, that's when my grandfather started raping me. Dr. Filiti interviewed everyone in the program and 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, why, what is this about? And Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be. Gaining weight has a sexually protective function. Of course, it can still happen, but you're significantly less likely to be raped if you're very overweight. Roxanne Gay, a brilliant writer, has written about she was gang raped

when she was 11 by a group of boys and very consciously thought, that must never happen to me again. I'm going to eat as much as I can to be as fat as I can to ward off male attention. when we think about obesity, one of the things we have to think about is the psychologically positive functions of obesity. That's one of them, there are other ones. It can lower people's expectations of you because of stigma, which can be something

that a lot of people need, right? There's all sorts of things that can happen, and it can also mean that when people take the drugs, they suddenly feel incredibly frightened and vulnerable. And they don't know why, and of course, I mean, there's many reasons why, and it can be related to the other psychological factors as well, but that's one of them.

It's why a lot of people have heard this phrase by now, but Dr. Robert Ander, who worked on that research with Dr. Feliti, it's why he said when we see people who appear to be doing something dysfunctional, massively abriding, injecting drug users, whatever it might be, we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. I think that that is, well, one, like I said, endlessly fascinating. And two, this is the real part of the real epidemic, right? Because look, that 60% figure is enormous. And what fills in the other 40%? Because there's probably other trauma that fills in at least some of that that is not sexually

abusive in nature. It could be bullying. It could be literally anything else. And fighting those underlying causes seems to be the key here. I do want to, I know we're running out of time. I want to talk a little bit about the potential, not just side effects of these drugs. I mean, there's ozempic face and ozempic butt where you sort of empty out of fat and then you need fillers to correct it, which is, you know, those are cosmetic side effects. But what about things like cancers or, first of all, don't our bodies resist change as well?

Aren't there, isn't there a hormonal component? I know you mentioned when you're dieting and I had this as well. You just, you see food and you're like, I really want to eat that right now. Like you're just focused on it because you're hungry in some ways. and metabolism changes. We evolved to hold on to fat, right? We're evolved to thrive in lean times, and we're not going to change that.

There's no amount of therapy that can change that. This is our evolution, correct? I think there's some truth in what you're saying. One of the weird things about these drugs is we don't actually know how they work. We know a few things. It's very disconcerting to interview the leading scientists and realize this.

So we know a few things for sure. If you ate something now, Jordan, no matter what it is. after a while your pancreas reproduce a hormone called GLP 1 and that's part of your body's natural signals just saying hey Jordan you've had enough stop eating it's the breaks basically

but that natural GLP 1 only stays in your system for a couple of minutes then it's washed away what these drugs do is they inject you with an artificial copy of GLP 1 that instead of sticking around for a few minutes stays around for a whole week it's why when I went to the cafe up the road

a few mouthfuls and I'm full right because I'm so close to full already because of this GLP 1 already being in my system. Initially, it was thought, well, okay, GLP1 is a hormone that's made in the gut. The effects of this drug are mostly in the gut. It might be slowing down gastric emptying, something like that. There are definitely effects on the gut. Everyone agrees on there. But we also know that you don't just have GLP1 receptors in your gut. You've got them in your brain. And it's increasingly clear that these drugs work primarily on your brain. It's very disconcerting.

We don't know how. Yeah. But we know that if you give these drugs to a rat, for example, and then you cut open its brain, which obviously we're not allowed to do with humans, you see that the drug goes everywhere in the brain, right? And the kind of effects we're seeing are clearly brain effects. And, you know, Dr. Clermontz-Blue-A, who's a brilliant obesity specialist at Cambridge University,

said to me, you know, the brain is the most complex object in the whole universe. We shouldn't be surprised we don't understand everything about it. But if you think about, there's several different theories about what's happening in the brain. And one of them relates to what you just asked. So you were talking about how we resist change. We try to hold higher levels of weight, right? So if you gained three stone now, I'm terrible at pounds, sorry, you barbaric colonials don't use the measurements that we use.

Yeah, stone. I like that, though. If you gain 41 pounds now, or whatever, anyway, and then you tried to lose weight, you would find it hard to go back. Right. Because your brain tries to hold onto the excess fat. It slows your metabolism down. It makes you crave more sugary and salty foods and sweet foods. It makes you more than thorisic, so it's harder to exercise. There's all sorts of changes that happen, for which there's a lot of scientific evidence.

Some scientists argue, and I stress this as a speculative theory, that what this drug does is it undoes that effect, it undoes that resistance to change, that in a way, and I'm putting this more crudely than the scientists would, that it's a bit like resetting your iPhone to the factory settings, right? It just lowers that effect that you get after you gain weight that makes it so hard to come back. That's one potential way of think about it.

There are other theories we don't really know. It also makes me think about what you're saying. You know, my book is called Magic Bill, because there's three ways these drugs could be magic, right? right? The first way is the most obvious. They could just solve the problem, right? And I've got to tell you, Jordan, there are days when it feels like that. My whole life, I have overeaten food. And now once a week I inject myself in the leg, boom, I don't eat anything like as much of it. It feels like magic. The second way is much more disturbing. It could be a magic trick. It could be like a conjurer who shows you a card trick while picking your pocket, right? It could be that the 12 wrist that I go through in the book of these drugs undo the good. or outweigh the good, right? The third way in which it could be magic is actually the one I think is the most likely. If you think about the classic stories of magic that we grew up,

we think about like what would be good example, Aladdin, right? You find the lamp, you rub it, you get the genie, you make the wish, and your wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected, right? Right. It starts to unfold in some complicated, weird way that you could never have foreseen at the start. Or think about Fantasia, you unleash the magic and it starts to run away from you. We're already at that point, 47, percent of Americans want to take these drugs.

47 percent. Wow. It's transforming the economy in all sorts of crazy ways. Barclay's Bank commissioned a very sober-minded financial analyst to look into the science of these drugs, to do a report to guide their future investment decisions. And she came back and said, if you want a comparison for how big these drugs are going to be, you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone. Wow.

Right? And I think she's right. My prediction, my best prediction would be eight years from now when a Zemphic goes out. assuming we don't discover some horrific side effect that I do not rule that out, assuming we're not in a Fenn-Fent scenario, I would anticipate. So, a Zempe goes out of patent in 2032, at which point you'll be able to manufacture them as pills for $40 a month. I would guess half the population of the United States will be taking them, roughly.

I mean, that's going to transform the economy. Look already what's happening, crispy cream stocks are down, head of Nestle, he's publicly shitting himself about the future of the ice cream market. That's crazy. Joolers in L.A. have had a huge role. on refitting wedding rings because people's fingers have shrunk so much in LA that their wedding bands no longer fit them, right? There was just a big report for the American Airlines that said, prepare to spend much

less money on jet fuel because pretty soon we're going to have a much thinner population, right? And it obviously costs more money to fly people who are larger. Wow. I'm sure they're going to pass those savings down to us, right? That's how that works? I'm sure. Yeah, yeah.

That's the nature of capitalism. Always. Man, that's crazy. By the time you're manufacturing fewer knee and hip replacements, and saving millions of dollars on airline fuel, and Nestle's like, oh, crap, how are we going to sell all this stuff that makes people sick? Like, you, I mean, it's really, you kind of want to be Team Ozempic at that point, right?

You're like, oh, good. But again, we're not solving the underlying problem, which is always what freaks me out. We're not some underlying problem, and there are risks. Now, of course, we can do both. We can treat the problem in the same way that I call an ambulance for my friend who's been shot and I fight for gun control. We can take the drugs and deal with the underlying factors

that causing it. Indeed, one of the things I hope is that it wakes us up, that we go, how the f*** did we get into this situation where we're forced to choose, particularly for our children, between a risky medical condition and a risky drug. And it's worth just to unpacking a little bit more some of the risks. So I'll give you an example. When you talk about the safety of these drugs, what most of the experts say, and they're making a good and important point, is we actually know quite a lot about these drugs in the medium term, because diabetics have been taking them for 18 years now. And I'm putting it more crudely than they would, but basically, if the drugs, gave your horns, the diabetics would have grown horns by now, right?

Yeah. And that's a good and important point. And it should give people some sense of security. But some equally reputable and brilliant scientists said, well, hang on a minute. If we're going to base a key plank of our belief in the safety of these drugs on the diabetics, let's dig a little bit deeper into the diabetics. So, for example, there's a brilliant scientist called Professor Jean-Luc Fayet, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France.

He was commissioned by the French Medicines Agency to look into the safety of these drugs for the French market. So he looked at what's called the preclinical evidence, the animal trials. And he was immediately struck by one thing. If you give these drugs to rats, they're much more likely to get thyroid cancer. And we have GLP1 receptors in our thyroid, in addition to our brain and our gut. So it kind of makes sense that there's at least a plausible mechanism there. If you screwing with GLP1, you might be screen with the thyroid. Sure. So he started to look at, could this be happening with humans. So he looked at they have very good medical databases in France because they don't have HIPAA rules like we do. So you have to be on the database. And he looked at a really large

group of diabetics. I think they were people who were taking the drug between 2006 and 2012, if I remember right. And he compared them to a really big group of diabetics who were not taking these drugs, who are in every other way similar. And what he found if he's right and it's highly contested is very sobering, he calculated that these drugs increase your thyroid. cancer risk by between 50 to 75%. Wow. Now, when at first you read that and he said this to me, I was like, what the fuck? He said, no, no, you need to understand what that doesn't mean.

It doesn't mean if you take the drug, the chance of getting thyroid cancer, yeah. If that were the case, we'd be having bonfires of a Zempic everywhere in the world. Right. What it means is whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, it will increase, if he's right, by 50 to 75%. Now, thyroid cancer is relatively rare. 1.2% of people get it, 84% of people survive. Nonetheless, that's a flashing red light for me, particularly.

when we remember that with Fenf, these things start small, right? The things that unravels Fen were a few doctors in Fargo, you know, saying, oh, looks like our patients can't breathe very well when they take this drug, right? Although, I want to be balanced about this, because I think the truth is balanced. Against that, some other scientists said to me, well, even if Professor Fai is right, and it does significantly increase the thyroid cancer risk, you've got to compare that to the cancer risk just from being obese. Cancer Research UK, one of the biggest cancer groups in the whole of Britain, in fact in the whole of Europe, has explained, if you carry excess weight, it doesn't just sit there, it's not inert in your body, it's active, it sends signals through

your body. One of those signals is for cells to divide more rapidly, which can cause cancer. This is why, actually, although we don't talk about it this way, obesity is one of the biggest causes of cancer in both Britain and the United States. So again, at every stage, when you think, oh, I've got a thing to hold on to here, you realize that in this very complex calculation, What I really recommend people do is they go down the list of the 12 risks that I write about in the book. They go down the risks of obesity.

They try to weigh these for themselves. It's so hard to talk about this without using words weighing as well, I'm very unfortunate. I think anyone is just like there's a blanket answer for everyone. Unless your BMI is lower than 27, in which in case I think there is a blanket answer, don't take them.

You don't have the risks of being overweight or obese, so you're taking on all the risks of the drug for none of the benefits, none of the physical benefits. Unless you're in that category, I think it's a fiendishly complicated decision and you should inform yourself in great detail about those risks. Also, you should inform yourself about things like

what it's going to do to you when you take it. I hope the book helps prepare people to know that. And we should all be thinking about what it does to the culture because you may be sitting here thinking, I'm not interested in taking these drugs. But, you know, in 2007, when Steve Jobs on build the iPhone, you may well not be interested in buying an iPhone. You might still not be interested having a smartphone,

but the smartphone changed the world around you for damn sure. And these drugs are going to change the world around us for better and for worse, for better for people with serious obesity, or just obesity, for worse with people with eating disorders, and in between for everyone else, right? So I think we've got to reckon with the complexity because the stakes here are so high. Professor Gerald Mann, who I mentioned before, has calculated that 678,000 Americans die every year as a result of obesity or what he calls food-related illnesses caused by our diets, right? That's more than all the soldiers, American soldiers who died in the entire 20th century combined. Wow. You know, that's 10 times

more almost than the number of people who died by being shot every year. Almost everyone listening will not have loved someone who died of obesity, although we don't talk about that. Your uncle dies of a heart attack at 61, your aunt got breast cancer at 50. We don't say they died of obesity, but obesity is such a driver of those factors that they may well have been, right? So the stakes here are really high, whether we get this right or wrong, is hugely consequential. And I'm not sure I've made the right decision even for myself, never mind advising anyone else. So I would say, don't trust anyone who's highly confident on this. Trust the people who are talking you through the detail.

That's right. Yeah. Go through your doctor, read this book and do the math and don't order that crap online thinking like, oh, I got this. I watched a couple of YouTube videos, including this one, for God's sake. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for your candor, your transparency. Not a lot of people are going to put something like this in their body and then as an experiment, experiment. and then spend the next few years writing about it.

And also hit a brother with an invite next time you go to one of those Hollywood parties. I got poopy diapers all day over here. You could use a little glamour. All right. I'll do it. Are you addicted to drama? Check out this preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with psychologist Dr. Scott Lyons. Do you vent constantly? Do you find yourself changing the stories?

Do you find that wherever you go, there's always something that's wrong or happening? Do you find yourself believing the other shoe will always drop? that no matter how good things are, something bad is going to happen. Do you find yourself crisis hopping? If you're in it, you will have no idea that that's what you're doing. And it takes a lot of time for those addicted to drama to recognize to even be aware of the pattern is happening. Our primal needs as a kid is to be seen and heard, to feel safe.

And so you will go to whatever extremes and tens of a shouting is needed to pierce through the chaos of a family household to be seen and heard, even if it's burning down the house. A wave of an emotion, it lasts 30 to 90 seconds. Anything after that is the story we're feeding to maintain it. We're trying to keep that emotion active. We're feeding off the emotion as opposed to processing or metabolizing it. We're not letting it go, because there's some belief system

if we let it go, we'll be victims. If we let it go, we won't be safe. Whatever it is, why we won't let go of the emotion. Even a small trauma can feel like death because we feel helpless. And if we don't have the resilience capacity to know that someone will help us. There are tools out there to help us. If we don't inherently know that, it feels like we're going to drown. In that moment, it feels like death.

Learn to recognize and heal from drama addiction on episode 836 with Dr. Scott Lyons on the Jordan Harbinger show. Fascinating conversation. Yohan's so funny, man. That guy is just a trip to talk to. I really like him. It's crazy his diet was so bad as a kid. His dad was a chef.

So it must have been weird that he was immersed in food culture and he's just also inhaling processed junk food. There must have been some tension in the house with his dad being like, I know, in fact, his dad was like, why are you eating this? I'm a chef for God's sake.

And it was just like a cultural thing that they couldn't beat. Yohan got a Christmas card from a fried chicken place. This was one of his wake-up calls that kind of didn't wake him up. He didn't tell the story during the show, but this was a wake-up call because when he got a Christmas card from a fried chicken place, his first thought wasn't, wow, I buy too much chicken from this place. His thought was, dang, this isn't even my favorite fried chicken place.

It's not even my second favorite fried chicken place. So imagine getting a Christmas card for being the best customer of your third most visited fried chicken place. That's kind of what he was dealing with when he decided to change his habits in his ways. Process foods, by the way, we're going to do a skeptical Sunday on this. I dare y'all to Google how these are created.

It is not pretty. The worst ones are loaded with modern chemicals. Everything's a chemical. I'm talking about modern chemicals. There's glue in there. There's bacteria, of course, and all this stuff. And they create something called pink slime, which is sort of like this meat product-y offshoot kind of deal.

and then, of course, if you were to just eat that, it looks gross, it tastes gross, so what do they do? They inject flavors, but then it smells gross. Well, they inject fragrance into it, and then it looks gross, well, then they add color to it. So that's what we are dealing with, and that's what we are eating. And that's what a lot of this stuff, especially fast food, super ultra-processed stuff, that's what that stuff is, and it's vile. Not to mention all these kinds of foods, this ultra-process stuff, is hijacking our gut

an undermining satiety as discussed in the interview, which means it makes it hard for you to get full. Our gut biome these days, on average, has 40% less diversity in there than our ancestors. What that means is there's far fewer different kinds of bacteria in our gut than our ancestors have. That doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, right? Why should it have less bacteria, less diversity of bacteria than our ancestors when you can eat any kind of food at any time? you can get fresh fish from Hokkaido, and next you can be eating sea bass from Spain, right?

We should have more diversity in our bio, not less, but no, we're eating too much of the same crap, and it's not supporting that same variety of bacteria. Eating these processed foods because we're hungry, it's like trying to quench your thirst by drinking seawater. We eat it, and it just makes us more hungry. I know we had a note earlier in the show, a little sidebar about fat shaming. The cold truth is that society just hates overweight. people. I learned this when I was chubby as a kid for a little while. I got out of that phase because

I just didn't want to hear it anymore and not everybody has the luxury of being able to just turn things off like that. I wasn't addicted to food. I just had some bad habits. I cut them out and that was the end of it. Nobody knows this better than overweight people, of course. The fact that society hates overweight people, nobody knows this better than overweight people, of course. Look, we shame them, right? We pretend we're doing it for their own good, but often it's to protect ourselves and to make ourselves feel better. And even parents are doing this. It's really kind of sad. I even found in research that overweight people are more likely to be convicted of a crime in court during trial by jury. That is shocking. I'm not saying, to be clear, I am not saying

overweight people commit more crimes. I'm saying juries view overweight people as somehow morally defective, and this results in a higher conviction rate. That is absolutely bananas. It should be no surprise. I mean, until recently, fat shaming was more or less acceptable in society, and in many places it still is. The major problem with this is often that, well, there's a million problems with it, but one of the major, major problems is that the constant abuse that people take, it causes them to tune out, even if they're getting good advice, let's say, from a professional, a nutritionist, the doctor, they're used to just turning their ears and their brain off when they hear about this because it's been so hurtful and traumatizing throughout their whole life. So this is, it's really,

Don't do it, people. I've become much more sensitive about this. And I don't mean talking about it whatsoever. I'm going to get hate just for doing this show. And I get in trouble for quote unquote fat shaming all the time, even when I'm not doing it. I really think it's traumatizing. And I feel for people who are that sensitive about it because there's obviously a reason. And the reason is because these people are treated so poorly.

So don't be part of the problem, people. I'm trying to be part of the solution with an episode like this. I think y'all should do the same. Anyway, so stepping down from my soapbox here. It's not just about blood pressure or what. whatever, being obese causes inflammation. It causes other diseases like cancer, autoimmune stuff. I know it contributes to dementia, which is terrifying. It also grinds cartilage down on your knees and hips. It's hard to sleep if you're overweight. You suffer from sleep, apnea, and breathing

issues. It's really just bad for your body and your brain all around. Now, OZempec was originally a diabetes drug. I think we noted that in the show. Now it's so popular, a lot of diabetics are having trouble getting it. I took an Uber a few weeks. ago and the driver was talking about it on the phone. And I said, hey, I hope you don't mind me eavesdropping while you're on this call, but are you taking a Zepic? You look good. And he goes, no, no, it's for my wife. And I said, oh, is she enjoying the results? And he goes, what are you talking about? She's diabetic. I don't think there's really any results you would enjoy. It's just a diabetes drug. He was having trouble getting the drug and the price is way, way up. He actually had no idea

that it was being used for cosmetic purposes. And he drives Uber specifically to pay for this drug for his wife with diabetes. He's otherwise retired. That is so sad to me that this guy had to take another job doing that to pay for a drug for his diabetic wife because otherwise they couldn't afford it. Absolutely nuts. Unfortunately, the scary part is he was looking at a Chinese knockoffs from compound pharmacies because it's so much cheaper and it's quote unquote the same thing.

And now I hope my conversation warned him away from that, but I basically took the wind out of his sales because he thought he was going to retire from Uber. And that just the whole thing just kind of makes me sad. I'm especially fascinated in the idea that if OZempic interferes with satiety and cravings in the brain, that this could be used for addiction. If it's killing cravings in the brain, maybe we can kill cravings for heroin, not just Cheetos and stuff like that. But if it decreases desire for addiction, could that not also decrease people's desire for other things that include rewards, raising kids, having a fulfilling career, learning skills. Anhedonia is a real thing. The absence of pleasure in life. We do not want to increase that. A lot of people turn to drugs because they

have that. It can affect bonding with children, raising children. Now, I'm speculating, but this is very much within the realm of possibility. In the end, the conclusion that Johan came to, essentially, was, we want to starve ourselves, and now we've got a drug that just makes it a hundred times easier. I just cannot see how this doesn't end up making many of us worse off in the long run. So if you are taking this drug, more power to you, but please, please keep up with your health, make sure your doctors have a close eye on you, make sure your nutrition is on point. I need you to stick around for a while. I don't want you to grow another head or whatever, unless both heads are listening to this podcast, in which case my downloads will go up. But otherwise,

I don't want you to go anywhere. I want you to be healthy and happy because you are loved, even though I don't know you. Statistically, you're loved. There's a few of you I could do without, but most of you, I really enjoy your company, virtually or otherwise.

All things Johann Hari will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com that includes transcripts, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter,

available at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news. a lot of really good feedback. Now Gabriel and I are writing this. It's practical. It's an under two-minute read. That's the idea. Something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology,

your relationships. It's a very wee newsletter over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash news. Six-minute networking. Don't forget that. Six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm doing a lot of written content on LinkedIn now about podcasting and other things I've learned from guests. So find me there. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting,

and the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is Taken Ozempic, thinking about Taken Ozempic, definitely share this episode with them, or if they're just interested in the science and nutrition and the brain. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you'll learn. see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast,

focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and

start listening. You can thank me later.