NEWS

It’s entertaining in a perverse way. Cluelessness about the potential of orforglipron is impossible to miss in the news about Lilly’s new oral GLP-1 medicine for obesity this month. The company announced topline results from the first of two pivotal studies for this medicine on August 7 and investors decided the drug was a dud. […]

In the top ranks of the most watched shows on Netflix now is a documentary describing 18 seasons of exploitation on The Biggest Loser. For the folks who ran the original show, it generated hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in revenue. For the folks who opened themselves up to exploitation on the […]

The evidence keeps building. Broadly, it is telling us that treating obesity is about much more than simply losing weight. It is about gaining health by managing the chronic disease of obesity and controlling it over time. Specifically this week, we have another piece of evidence to suggest that obesity treatment prevents cancer. In JAMA […]

We are hearing much sound and fury about making America healthy and the noise is largely about improving the quality of the U.S. food supply. It would indeed be nice if MAHA brought us a better food supply. But in a thoughtful piece for The Atlantic, Yasmin Tayag says a more likely outcome may be […]

Americans are setting their mouths on fire with spicy hot foods says Ellen Cushing in her recent article for The Atlantic. Getting to the bottom of any trend in popular culture is not an easy task with a singular result. But Cushing explains part of the story is that flamin’ hot spice is an easy […]

There’s a long history on the tricky business of celebrity endorsements for weight management. Years ago, the benchmark was the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, who became a spokesperson for Weight Watchers after her divorce from Prince Andrew. Proving much has changed in the popular conception of health and weight, the new benchmark is Serena […]

Yes, wearable tech for personal health and fitness monitoring is still with us, but it comes in waves. The first wave, with Fitbit, peaked sometime around 2017, judging from Google search interest. The second wave came with smartwatches. The Apple Watch launched in 2015 and interest in smartwatches peaked in 2020. Now the hot new […]

By now, it should be obvious. List prices for GLP-1 medicines like semaglutide and tirzepatide are fiction. If you had any doubt, read up on the deal Novo Nordisk just struck with GoodRx to sell both the Ozempic and Wegovy brands of semaglutide for $499 per month. This deal with GoodRx is happening for two […]

Increasingly, weight bias has gone underground. Explicit fat shaming has become socially unacceptable. But the human impulse behind it has not disappeared. So it pops up in diverse new ways. Like a school district that covers metabolic and bariatric surgery for employees, but requires a $5,000 copay that it refunds to employees only if they […]

We have a flourishing market for new obesity drugs. But that market has a problem. New drug developers are stumbling over what to target with their drugs. The old way of looking at goals for new drugs in this space was to aim for greater weight loss. More is better – right? In a new […]