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Weight-loss drugs alone will not solve UK’s obesity crisis, says Chris Whitty
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Why does everyone suddenly seem to regard weight loss drugs as safe? Up until RFK became health chief in the USA administration, stuff like Ozempic was a joke. Now it's actually prescribed to people other than the Kardashians
The thing is, weight loss should be about learning and easing yourself into the habits of 1. Healthy Eating 2. Adequate Exercise 3. Not sitting on your arse all day, hence I feel like giving people a hack to skip all that grind is not good - you avoid learning about how to take care of yourself in the process.
But seriously, is ozempic some sort of scientific break-through, The Substance-style?
This kind of moral judgement type of advice really doesn't help. As for the other two, that's true if you want to drop a few Kgs. Obesity comes with hormonal changes that work like a conveyor belt dragging a person towards more weight. It takes more effort to stay still than I think you believe it takes to lose it all.
On top of that, dieting triggers a hormonal process that seeks calorific foods and holds on to more of those calories. This has evolved to help us survive food shortages, but is backfiring on a population wide level now that food is no longer scarce. If dieting were the answer then Weight Watchers and Slimming World would have solved this problem decades ago. Instead they encouraged people to fall into the yo-yo diet trap that leads to ever more weight going on each time the cycle completes.
This is all hormonal, not willpower driven.
What GLP-1 inhibitors do is to shut down or quieten this hormonal response. This means that people can then do the obvious bit of eating less and moving more without their own bodies sabotaging them.
Sorry if that was triggering, I'm not actually that kind of super critical person. I just thought it would be an appropriate time to slip in a joke-y phrase and I guess it didn't come across as lighthearted. I myself am very sedentary, so I don't actually hold contempt towards people for it.
That being said, the reason I threw that phrase in was because i feel the NHS (or at least, Wes Streeting) is making precisely these kinds of moral judgements when doing these decisions. And that the government is shying away from holistic improvement of our society.
Very enlightening. This is pretty much what I wanted to know - if it's actually regarded safe and useful - because when ozempic was rolled out in the USA there was some uproar about it and I personally don't trust Trump's regime with healthcare, so seeing that the NHS was promoting ozempic gave me pause.
After seeing your reply and mannycalavera's i'm more optimistic about ozempic