"Revolutionary" anti-obesity drugs like Ozempic appear to be the right tool to deal with the addictive, highly processed foods that are ruining Americans' health, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler writes at the New York Times. He says GLP-1 drugs helped him end the "cycle of despair" of weight loss and gain he had endured since he was a child. "The fact that I'm a doctor, was a dean of two medical schools and ran the Food and Drug Administration for six and a half years was of no help to me," he writes. "Like millions of others, I was caught between what the food industry has done to make the American diet unhealthy and addictive and what my metabolism could accommodate."
Kessler calls ultraprocessed foods the "new cigarette," and says they have caused a similar health catastrophe. He says he calls the foods "ultraformulated because they have been engineered to manipulate the brain's reward system." GLP-1s, he writes, have "revolutionized our understanding of weight loss and of obesity itself," highlighting the fact that obesity isn't the result of a lack of willpower. The drugs, he writes, "help people feel full after eating and reduce the cravings that are central to our addiction to the irresistible, highly processed, highly palatable foods that have glutted our shelves over the past five decades."
Kessler says the drugs aren't "magic medications" and it isn't good medical care to prescribe them without "healthier eating, exercise and behavioral therapies" to develop "lasting lifestyle changes." He also has concerns about pharma companies' lack of transparency about side effects—and about the FDA's approval of the drugs for long-term use without research on long-term effects. But since they can make a huge difference to the health of the 40% of Americans who are obese, it was a mistake for the Trump administration to reject the Biden administration's plan to expand access by requiring Medicare and Medicaid to pay for GLP-1s, Kessler writes.
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"These drugs offer a chance for people to improve their health even as our national body is ill," Kessler writes. "Our health has been hijacked by the ultraformulated food bombs that GLP-1s offer the hope of defusing. If we truly want to make America healthy, as President Trump claims he wants to do, we are going to have to confront the metabolic damage these foods have caused and take steps to protect the public from them." (More GLP-1 stories.)
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