MATT RIDLEY: Move Over, Ozempic: Why an Amazing New Class of Weight-Loss Drugs Will Soon End Obesity FOREVER — and Here Are the Other Surprising Diseases They Might Treat

Imagine if you could eat your fill on Christmas Day and then reduce your appetite for January. Good news: such a prospect may be in sight.

Over the past year, a host of weight-loss drugs have come onto the market that are getting better and better, achieving results where decades of diets and fads have failed – and that’s another miracle of biomedical science.

Not that you would know it: eliminate the positive, accentuate the negative – that’s too often the way medical news works. Yes, cancer, dementia and anxiety are on the rise; there is increasing addiction to drugs and alcohol; there is a pandemic around the corner and there is far too much obesity thanks to processed food.

Yet overall, we have never been healthier. We live longer, rarely go hungry, feel younger, contract fewer infections, develop cancer later and have many more options for life-saving surgeries, injections and pills than any generation before us. For all the sins of Big Pharma, we now have some sort of cure for the vast majority of ailments.

But there’s no denying that almost all of us are getting fatter – and it’s one of the biggest threats to human life expectancy today.

Problematic obesity was once very rare, when food was more expensive and work was more labor intensive.

Nowadays, being dangerously fat is common and it’s the tip of the iceberg of the more moderate flab that many of us practice. No matter how much the nanny state urges us to exercise more, eat more vegetables and ditch the fizzy drinks, our waistlines keep growing.

Or do they? In America, the trend of increasing obesity has stalled and even somewhat reversed. In 2021-2023, 40 percent of U.S. adults were obese, up from 42 percent in 2017-2020.

This is just the beginning of a public health revolution that won’t last until next year. The reason? The distribution of these slimming drugs, produced by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Novo’s drug is semaglutide, known as Ozempic for diabetics and Wegovy for weight loss; Lilly’s is tirzepatide, known as Mounjaro or Zepbound. About 12 percent of Americans have already tried these medications. More than any other product from the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, these injections have taken the world by storm.

Demand exceeds supply, while Novo Nordisk’s valuation is now higher than the annual GDP of Denmark, where the company is based.

Granted, the company’s market value fell by $100 million last month when its latest weight-loss drug underperformed in a clinical trial.

Still, more and more analysts think we’re approaching a turning point where these drugs will really take off.

In the coming years we will see a flood of appetite suppressant drugs hit the market.

Many pharmaceutical companies are developing their own versions in clinical trials. Novo and Lilly, as well as at least five other companies, are developing oral weight-loss drugs. Soon people will be able to take a pill instead of injecting themselves – and there will be dramatically more people taking it.

To the general surprise, weight-loss medications also appear to have beneficial side effects against other diseases.

They appear to reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, high cholesterol and perhaps even brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. They appear to reduce inflammation independently of the effects on body weight. They even seem to be lowering the death rate from Covid.

“These are health promoters,” says Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health in this way actually slows down the aging process.’

It’s not all good news. For some people, the nausea and other side effects are unbearable, and doctors warn of the risk of slim people using them to get too slim. Additionally, you may accumulate the fat again once you stop taking the drug. For those with a puritanical bent, these drugs eliminate the need for responsible abstinence. But for many diabetics and obese people, they are a godsend.

The story behind these drugs has all the usual themes of innovation: it’s a gradual, step-by-step, collaborative story with bursts of luck and plenty of trial and error. Oddly enough, it starts with anglerfish – those hideous bottom-dwellers who lure their prey by dangling a fake morsel in front of their mouths. Monkfish have separate organs for making insulin.

In the 1980s, scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital traveled to Cape Cod and asked fishermen if they could have many of these tiny organs for experiments. From this they isolated a gene that produces a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 or GLP-1. It turned out to be an effective way to regulate blood sugar levels and appetite.

To make GLP-1 last longer in the body, another scientist working for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, John Eng, suggested looking at a similar hormone used by gila monsters: fat black and yellow lizards from Mexico with poisonous bites. They regulate their appetite so well that they only need to eat a few times a year. By studying the lizard molecule, pharmaceutical companies were able to create synthetic versions of the hormone that could be injected daily and then weekly.

Television sensation Oprah Winfrey has downsized in recent years thanks to Ozempic

Britain obviously lags behind America in the adoption of weight loss drugs, with the NHS deterred by the high cost of patented drugs. But Health Secretary Wes Streeting has announced a trial of prescribing Mounjaro to unemployed obese people in a bid to get them back to work.

And nothing prevents us from buying the drugs ourselves, as many celebrities have already demonstrated.

“When an otherwise healthy, middle-aged man exhibits sudden weight loss,” Boris Johnson reasoned about some of his ministerial colleagues, “there are only two possible explanations. Either he has fallen hopelessly in love or he is about to launch a Tory leadership bid.’ Then he realized they were actually injecting the new drugs.

However, another obstacle here is the dominance of the public health lobby. There is a well-funded industry that has a vested interest in wagging its fingers about fizzy drinks and junk food.

Drugs could undermine their campaign for increasing restrictions on advertising such products on television. For these people, semaglutide and tirzepatide are existential threats, similar to the effect electric lights had on candle wick cutters. Puritans prefer pain to technical solutions.

In the world of public health, failure is routine. Low-fat diets, artificial sweeteners, sugar taxes, advertising bans, dietary advice: none have worked well.

As Chris Snowdon of the Institute for Economic Affairs notes, the public health lobby is demanding that the same efforts be redoubled no matter what – an approach that would be considered quackery in the private sector.

Medicines do not address the underlying reason why we are all getting so fat. But here too there is a promise. In a powerful new book called Blind Spots, surgeon Marty Makary draws attention to how the medical establishment has largely ignored multiple, detailed studies showing that it is almost certainly the promiscuous prescribing of antibiotics to young children that drives the propensity for obesity. probably by changing the microbes in our gut.

Restoring healthy microbiomes is the long-term solution – and Makary has been nominated by Donald Trump to head the Federal Drug Administration.

That aside, it’s undoubtedly true that the new generation of anti-fat shots and pills could change the way we live forever.

Viscount Ridley is a writer and businessman.