“If you don’t have a solution for me, then it’s not a problem.” This concise statement of wisdom distilled from human behavior explains why it has been so hard for so many years to have people pay attention to obesity in any constructive way. Doctors largely ignored it and rarely diagnosed it. Patients denied it. But now, in just five years, diagnoses of obesity and overweight have risen by 50%.

These data come from a white paper published yesterday by FAIR Health, based on data extracted from 51 billion commercial healthcare claim records.

Now that healthcare providers have better tools for dealing with obesity, it seems they are much more willing to diagnose it.

A Treasure Trove of Data and Insights

This white paper is a genuine treasure trove of data on overweight, obesity, and the utilization of GLP-1 agonists to manage these conditions. Of course, it has its limitations. It represents only data from commercially insured patients, including Medicare Advantage participants. It tells us nothing about uninsured patients or Medicaid patients.

Nonetheless, we can see that the availability of GLP-1 agonists for obesity treatment has brought dramatic change to the approach that private medical care providers take with obesity. Not only have diagnoses of obesity risen by 50%, utilization of these medicines has risen even more. The growth was roughly 350% between 2019 and 2024.

The number of people with a diagnosis of overweight or obesity taking one of these medicines specifically to treat obesity has grown by 587%. You get the picture. Now that we have good tools for treating obesity, people are using them.

Suddenly obesity is a problem we can deal with.

Click here for the report from FAIR Health, here for their press release, and here for more from Axios.

The Great Wave, woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai / Wikipedia