Coming from this article (HN comments):
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/12/ozempic-changing-foods-americans-buy
Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.
That seems huge to me. There’s lots of memes about bad food practices in the US and there’s a lot of truth to it. In 10 years, will there be a stereotype of Americans as skinny people that don’t eat much?
I don’t have a link but I’ve seen that companies are pushing back on this, like researching how to make drinks that counteract GLP-1 drugs. Will Big Pharma or Big Sugar win out?
I read an article that stated the vast majority of people who stopped taking these inhibitors regained the weight within 2 years. So you’re left with taking it forever (expensive) to keep the weight off. Something that is expensive that you have to do forever is not changing an entire country imho.
Will Big Pharma or Big Sugar win out?
Yeah unfortunately you need to use the ozempic to learn how to diet and exercise
Most people just use it to force loss of appetite so they don’t have to actually diet or exercise thus it simply comes back
It may get cheaper. There’s pills on the way that reduces the costs a lot. If those cost savings make their way to the patient then its cost may offset the additional food and healthcare costs of being overweight.
But pharma rarely reduces costs for the patient. What will likely happen is the pill form will stay just below the cost of the injectable until it’s valid as a generic. Then pharma will do some shenanigans to further delay it from going generic such as convert it an OTC drug in order to keep costs high.
There’s pills on the way that reduces the costs a lot
in Canada, because the dumb dumbs at Novo forgot to renew their patent.
Huh, just discovered that it’s now generic in Canada
Semaglutide’s patent protection expired in Canada at the beginning of 2026. (Novo Nordisk failed to pay a required patent maintenance fee.)
My understanding is that it’ll be generic in the US soon too, and any improvements are just in delivery methods (pill vs injection). I’d agree that if it is able to be locked behind expensive patents that there might not be much societal change, but if you assume that it’s as easy to get as tylenol or something, that seems big.
(Novo Nordisk failed to pay a required patent maintenance fee.)
About $400. They killed off $8B in income. Someone needs to see HR.
Will Big Pharma or Big Sugar win out?
I’m betting on Big Zero-Calorie Sweetener insofar as we’re talking specifically about sugar.
The SLGT2 inhibitor/GLP1 agonists do not solve the core problem of metabolic disease. They do help people in the short term, but without addressing WHY people are metabolically unhealthy we wont get out of the current metabolic crisis.
Without dietary changes: People will cycle on and off the drugs, losing bone and muscle mass each cycle, still ending up with non-communicable diseases. Will their lived experiences be better then without the drugs? Yes, probably - but there are real costs and side-effects to be calculated. This will also hurt the processed food industries profits, so they will have to find a new way to keep people addicted during a drug cycle. However, it is a new drug that will make some pharmacological concerns very rich… so there is that.
The secret to metabolic health is getting rid of standard western processed foods (i.e. whole foods only, nothing from a factory, plastic bag, or box).
TLDR: Weight as a subscription service isn’t healthy for a society at large (heh).
but without addressing WHY people are metabolically unhealthy we wont get out of the current metabolic crisis.
they eat too much and do too little. There is only a crisis of gluttony and sloth.
they eat too much and do too little. There is only a crisis of gluttony and sloth.
Allow me to introduce you to the insulin model of obesity: https://hackertalks.com/post/13737743
CICO / Eat Less Move More - Would say that the type of food doesn’t matter, but in animals adding insulin without changing the diet causes weight gain! This disproves the simplistic CICO advice of weight loss.
I wonder if it might be a kick in the pants to get us out of a local minimum. That’s probably optimistic as you point out, but what if there’s a huge shift towards better food, so that even if you’re not on it, it’s more effort to eat bad food?
Probably not by itself. The latest US attempt to modify dietary guidance became a political firestorm. Making health a divisive wedge issue… I’m not hopeful the US will move away from processed foods in the foreseeable future.
The problem is that people have tied their identity to “correct foods”, and with so much ferocious and conflicting advice given most people in the middle have given up
I’ll list what I consider the principles of healthy food (remember based on whole foods), and you will see how controversial it can be
- Saturated fats are not unhealthy
- Industrial seed oils (vegetable oils) that from from chemical plants are not healthy
- Processed plant based foods are not healthy (because of the above)
- Animal sourced foods are the most nutritious and healthy
- Pesticides in the grain supply have a as-yet-unrealized health impact , but it seems large
- Some people can tolerate some plants, but not all people can tolerate all plants (i.e. gluten, wheat, etc)
The standard western diet is so bad anything looks good compared to it, but that means lay people just see people in the plant based, keto, animal based camps giving conflicting advice. Nutritional science is laughable at the moment, not much in the way of falsifiable experiments being done.
From my reading Metabolic dysfunction is rooted in a highly processed food, highly carbohydrate based, and rich in processed seed oil diet… Removing any one of these might be enough to swing someone back into metabolic health, but for people taking the drugs they probably need to change all three.
Do you know if there’s something like this chart, but for food instead of supplements?
I’ve seen that seed oils are bad. I’ve also seen people that say all oil is bad, and (without having looked into this at all), it seems like the “all oil is bad” people are probably overreacting and it’s something more specific like seed oils or something like that (though what specifically about them is bad?). It’d be nice to see a chart like above with handy links to scientific papers.
While looking this up btw, I found that Scientific American just published something today about seed oils:
Do you know if there’s something like this chart, but for food instead of supplements? https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/
Right so the coffee heart disease link makes huge assumptions - i.e. that everyone is in the same metabolic context (i.e. standard western diet). From my reading there is a reasonable probability that for someone eating the standard western diet, small doses of coffee have a cardiovascular benefit… but someone with a healthy metabolism (ketogenic metabolism) wouldn’t see any of those same benefits (low cardio vascular disk to begin with). Whenever you see this type of “good for you” advice, you need to ask
- According to whom
- On the basis of what
- In what context?
I’ve seen that seed oils are bad. I’ve also seen people that say all oil is bad, and (without having looked into this at all), it seems like the “all oil is bad” people are probably overreacting and it’s something more specific like seed oils or something like that (though what specifically about them is bad?). It’d be nice to see a chart like above with handy links to scientific papers.
The question shouldn’t be “why seed oils are bad” (they are), but rather “Why replace saturated fat with something that didn’t exist until 115 years ago?”. We don’t know for certain why seed oils are bad, the best theory I’ve seen to explain it is that plant sterols are close enough to animal sterols that they go throughout the body to the cholesterol sites, but then interfere with cholesterol signaling (i.e. https://hackertalks.com/post/4924264)
Here are some papers to get you started on why seed oils arnt great for you:
- https://hackertalks.com/post/6200879 paper - https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.127.4
charts showing seed oils increased all cause mortality
- https://hackertalks.com/post/6054186 - https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i1246
- https://hackertalks.com/post/11881867 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2021.748847
This doesn’t cite any sources… it’s just a dude giving their opinion.
Diet doctor has a great medical staff and writes extremely well cited reviews the literature and doesn’t say anything that they can’t support, so for the full seed oil story please read: https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/vegetable-oils#conclusion
TLDR: “If your goals include eating less processed food — as ours do — the best course may be to avoid these newcomers and return to traditional dietary fat sources. Get your fats from whole foods, including avocados, oily fish, nuts, seeds, olive oil, traditional oils, butter, coconut oil and meats.”
- Highly oxidized
- High omega-6/omega-3 ratio
- Plant sterols interfere with healthy cholesterol functioning
If someone is struggling with metabolic health and is thinking about taking the drugs I think carbohydrates are the most effective leaver they can pull, seed oils will help - but not nearly as much.
High doubtful (read: no way).
Unless you just mean “reduce grocery spending”, in which case still no, as food prices are rising so rapidly that at some point it will definitely eclipse the reduction trends, if it has not done so already.
It could help though, as part of an overall regimen to change the way that we think about food? Except that I suspect that most people are simply being lazy at wanting quick fixes.
Hit the gym folks: when you see how hard it is to burn off a numbered amount of calories, it will provide the necessary context to suddenly understand what those numbers mean, and thereby help with the incentive to aim for better health rather than merely feeling a full sensation.
Hit the gym folks…”
People don’t do that. You’ll never get that to happen at scale. If it’s possible to reduce consumption and improve health across a population with a pill why wouldn’t you?
Um… because it’s only a quick “fix” that offers its own plethora of side-effects and does nothing to alter the underlying causes of… Oh, yeah, right, nevermind, lazy hive-mind consumption culture go brrrr. 🍕💊🎂🍰🧁😋
