The big problem with weight-loss drugs that we cannot ignore

They are the Ozempic brigade and they are everywhere nowadays. I met one last weekend. Hadn’t seen him for ages and he was a sliver of his former self, transformed, like so many others, by the weight-loss drug mania sweeping Britain.

A estimated 1.5 million adults are taking the injections to change how they look. Not that you would know it, of course. Most are on private medication and all the advertising mentions the same buzz words… discrete, confidential… plain packaging.

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The bigger picture

Ozempic and Wegovy were created to treat diabetes so using them because you like buns but hate exercise feels like a bit of a cheat. That’s why many on these treatments instead claim to have changed their diet, joined a gym or become vegan. Anything to avoid admitting they pay £85 a month to stay slim.

So what’s the problem? If they feel better about themselves, surely that’s a good thing. And if weight-loss drugs temper the £6.5 billion cost to the NHS of obesity every year, maybe we should all be on it?

However there is a bigger picture. This summer a study in the scientific journal Nature revealed Ozempic might raise a person’s likelihood of developing conditions including arthritis and all weight-loss medications come with risks and complications.

That’s why they’re only recommended for people who are clinically obese or at risk of diabetes. It’s about balancing risks and benefits.

But if it simply becomes a way of managing weight for those who too easily pile on the pounds, something else is at risk.

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Tackling childhood obesity

After years of inaction, successive governments have finally been moving to tackle the real reasons two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. Interventions and legislation to address what is in food and how it’s sold to us have started to have an impact.

A sugar tax was introduced in 2018 and is being widened. Junk food advertising is now severely limited. Clearer labelling has been introduced and rules govern where and how unhealthy food can be sold within stores.

Much more still needs to be done to achieve the aim of halving childhood obesity by 2030 but if acquiring weight-loss drugs becomes too easy, will that jeopardise the progress being made?

READ MORE: Readers' letters: Treat causes of obesity before doling out weight-loss jabs

All this has taken a long time because it’s not easy. To lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more. To change what and how we eat, politicians need to battle the huge vested interests of the industrial food conglomerates.

Paying the same price as a gym membership to get monthly injections to keep you slim sounds much, much easier. But that’s treating the outcome, not the cause.

Ozempic and Wegovy are useful in extreme and difficult cases, where all else has failed. But they don’t address the real reasons we have some of Europe’s highest rates of obesity.

That requires a continued and enhanced commitment to the healthier eating goals set by government and a realisation that you might be able to eat yourself fat, but you can’t inject your way slim in the long term unless other things change as well.