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 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
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?
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/
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:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you-debunking-a-viral-social-media-myth/
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
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:
charts showing seed oils increased all cause mortality
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.”
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.