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
The Hindu.
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
Johann Hari 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 rst place, why we aren’t able to take the weight o (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 rst 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.