Time to see a shrink

Ozempic and Mounjaro have slimmed down celebrities. Once they hit the mass market, they'll eat away at Big Food, Big Sugar and Big Alcohol sales too

- VIR SANGHVI

In November 2024, I wrote in this column about the imminent arrival of weightloss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro and how they would change the world. The first and most immediate effect, I predicted, would be on the diet industry. The efficacy of the drugs (proven by scientific studies) was such that fad diets would be discredited, nobody would publish diet books and so-called weightloss clinics run by dodgy 'specialists' would close down.

The second effect, I said, would be that people (at least those who could afford the drugs) would get thinner overall. Perhaps there would also be a reduction in diabetes numbers, and cardiac health would improve within the upper-middle class.

I don’t have any figures to buttress my case, but I think that, anecdotally, I have been proven right on both counts. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about the Fit For Life diet? About Atkins? About the need to give up carbs? The new drugs have changed the conversation. Doctors tell me that there has been a distinct reduction in blood-sugar levels among their patients, and that the nature of treatments for cardiac issues has been altered.

Those are the effects among a relatively tiny sliver of patients at the top of India’s economic pyramid. But elsewhere in the world, the effects have been so profound and so widespread that the Financial Times rated the introduction of the new drugs as one of two scientific breakthroughs that have loomed largest in the public imagination in recent history; the other is, of course, AI.