Has the US turned the tide on obesity? The prevalence of obesity decreased by 2 percentage points between 2017-2020 and 2021-23, according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It may be too early to let go of the bunting. Obesity rates remain high at 40 percent (compared to 28 percent in the UK), and 10 percent of Americans are morbidly obese (in the UK the figure is 2 percent). It will take another year or two to see if the decline continues. But the signs are promising, and as John Byrne-Murdoch argues in the Financial Times, there’s only one plausible explanation for it: the weight loss drug semaglutide, sold as Ozempic or Wigovy. .
As Vern Murdock points out, one in eight Americans has tried the new generation of weight loss drugs, and “the decline[in obesity]has been steepest among college graduates, and that group is most likely using. Additionally, randomized controlled trials have shown that their use leads to “significant and sustained weight loss.” Semaglutide and its competitors have done what sugar taxes, fat taxes, advertising regulations, and warning labels have failed to do elsewhere in the world: they actually reduced obesity rates.
Reducing obesity, even by a small amount, seems to be the least that anti-obesity policies can hope for. However, in the field of “public health,” it is considered extremely impudent to judge obesity prevention policies based on such strict criteria. When childhood obesity rose after the sugar tax was introduced in the UK, its proponents argued that even if it was only among girls and only among certain age groups, it would have been worse without the tax. He argued that it would have increased. This is the kind of thing a quack would say when a patient feels unwell after taking a medication.
If no improvement in outcome is expected, it becomes impossible to distinguish between a placebo and a poison. This suits the public health racketeers with their idea of evidence-based policy, who want to throw everything against the wall and hope some of it sticks, regardless of the cost to consumers. The contrast between the medieval approach of nanny state politicians and the rigorously evaluated and highly effective weight loss drugs available today could not be more stark. If semaglutide reduced obesity rates in the United States by just 2 percentage points, it would have achieved far more than all public health policies designed to tackle obesity combined.
The only problem is that these drugs are very expensive and will likely remain so until their patents expire in the 2030s. UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced this week that the government would spend £279 million on a similar drug, tirzepatide, to examine whether it could help obese people return to work. Tilzepatide, sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound, appears to be even more effective than semaglutide and is also cheaper at £120 per month. Whether it pays for itself by using it on long-term patients remains to be seen. On the street, we need to target people who are really too fat to work, and who really want to work. There may be fewer of them than he thinks.
The social costs of obesity are greatly exaggerated by campaigners. There are many benefits to losing weight, but they are mostly limited to the individual. The test will come when the inflated, largely imaginary costs of obesity to the NHS and economy collide with the very real costs for governments of distributing weight loss drugs to millions of people.
Still, at least tirzepatide does what it’s supposed to do. It will be interesting to see how the introduction of effective but expensive anti-obesity drugs compares to cheap but useless nanny state policies such as banning ‘junk food’ advertising and closing fish and chip shops. . Have the fissures in public health ever been so clearly exposed?
Christopher Snowdon is Director of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He is also the co-host of Last Orders, Spike’s Nanny Nation podcast.
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