CAUGHT BETWEEN BIG FOOD AND BIG PHARMA
Writer-journalist Johann Hari brings himself into the Ozempic conversation, taking readers through the risks of obesity, its causes and eects, and what the drug does
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins. lead character. It is harder to bring in family and friends without over-emotionality, but Hari does all of this without boring the reader. Perhaps the balance comes from his journalistic training. “I’m not an expert,” he says a few times, while talking about the book to The Hindu. “I’m a journalist who goes on a journey to speak to the experts, to speak to all kinds of difierent people, to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on and with these drugs.”
There is a formula to his books, of course. He brings himself into the narrative (he is on Ozempic here), along with people he is close to, visits experts (he’s travelled the world doing that) and takes readers through the science, simple enough for someone with a class 10 understanding of it. “The drug seemed to change more than the patients’ bodies. It seemed to change their minds,” he says at the beginning of the book, not weighing people down with complex knowledge on the brain-gut axis immediately, but introducing it later.
There’s a similar style with Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions and Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention.
In the 323-page Magic Pill,
Hari remains endearingly vulnerable through his admissions and conversations with friends: “I had dinner with a friend one night, and as
he shovelled
IN CONVERSATION
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs 699
some breaded chicken schnitzel into his mouth, he said to me: ‘I don’t get it. Why don’t you lose weight the normal way? Why don’t you go on a diet and exercise instead?’ He was only asking what I had been thinking at the back of my own mind.” This openness makes the drug companies’ responses sound all the more stilted, like they’d been put through several hawk-eyed lawyers.
Going beyond science
Through the 12 chapters, an introduction and conclusion, Hari uses the bio-psycho-social transdisciplinary model of interconnectedness to look at various aspects of the drug, including what it could do to those with eating disorders. He takes the reader through the physical risks of obesity and what the drugs do: positively, “cause the people who use them to lose between 5 and 24 per cent of their body weight”; neutrally, that the efiects “were (SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT) coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and brain”; negatively, “scientists disagree on even basic aspects of it.”
He also goes beyond science, to why we’re becoming fatter in the ffrst place, why we aren’t able to take the weight ofi (and it’s not about greed or the lack of willpower), and why we may need obesity drugs after all. He talks about an experiment done by a scientist, involving rats. The rats were ffrst fed regular, healthy food, and then introduced to an American diet of very-sweet-very-salty “manufactured food”. Their “natural nutritional wisdom” crashed, he says, over a call from London: “They no longer knew when to stop. They just compulsively overate and quite rapidly became obese.” Then the professor withdrew what we call ‘junk food’. “He thought, well, they’ll eat more of the healthy food than they used to, and that’ll prove that it expands your appetite. That’s not what happened. What happened was much weirder. Once they’ve had the American food and it was taken away, they refused to eat the healthy food at all. It was like they no longer recognised it as food. They preferred to starve. It was only when they were literally starving that they went back to eating it.”
Everyone should read Hari’s book, especially those who determine whether a cart selling fruit be ‘allowed’ at the street corner or a supermarket selling ultra-processed packaged foods.
Magic Pill is an honest look at a complex situation, where changing food systems meet burgeoning medical companies, and people are crushed in between.
[on Ozempic].... My body fat percentage fell from 32% to 22%. It was the fastest and most dramatic weight loss of my life.... I felt lighter and quicker on my feet, and that boosted my con dence enough that I started to strut a little.... But I was surprised to notice that, at the same time, I also felt disconcerted and out of sorts