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IIn the past few years, there has been a revolution in healthcare. Semaglutide, a drug originally prescribed for diabetes under the name Ozempic, has been shown to dramatically reduce obesity and has been repackaged for this use as Wegovy. Other drugs have since been approved.
This is a big deal. More than half of adults in the US and UK are overweight or obese, and there are few truly effective treatments: prescribing a diet is almost useless. As a result, sales are astronomical. Ozempic’s maker, Novo Nordisk, is now Europe’s most valuable company.
In Johan Harry’s latest book, we learn that the author himself takes semaglutide to lose weight. But he is conflicted: c The Lost Relationships of 2018, he writes about what he sees as the over-medicalization of depression treatment, so he is wary of the idea of a “magic pill.” In each case, he discusses the discovery and mechanisms of the drugs, their health benefits, possible risks, and how we ended up in a situation where so many of us are obese.
And if I got to it fresh, I would think it was OK. It presents a heated debate reasonably fairly. It never comes down to fear-mongering, despite its tendency to foreground low-probability risks. On the other hand, it’s as light as content for a science book, and Harry’s breathless style is somewhat irritating – he always studying the the things. “The benefits of these drugs were already clear to me,” he wrote, noting with shock that obesity is bad for your health.
He relies on what seem to me to be convenient quotes from pseudonymous friends who often provide the perfect foil at the perfect moment—one he calls Judy, for example, helps him realize that it’s not okay to tell desperate people that they should to simply fix society instead of providing them with effective treatment.
However, my skepticism here reminds me that I am not coming in fresh. Harry has a story. In 2012, he quit his job as a columnist at the Independent after it was revealed that he had stolen quotes and vilified rivals through online sockpuppet accounts. Harry ever since admitted that it “failed badly”, but the facts remain. Magic Pill never mentions this backstory or explains why we should trust him now.
So I went through the references even more carefully than usual to see if the studies supported his points. Not all did. He claims, for example, that “people who look at social media” can end up with “deeply distorted” body images. The endnotes cite a study from 2022. But in the passage itself, the study of 100 people he cites to support his point is since 1987.
Elsewhere, he claimed that the educational intervention made children “half as likely to become overweight or obese”. The result the one in question is not statistically significant and by convention can be considered chance. He also seems to think that the “glucagon gene” is produced in the pancreas, which suggests that he doesn’t know what genes are. He talked about it long enough for me to be sure it wasn’t a typo.
Obviously I couldn’t fact-check the anecdotes, so my notes are full of cynical little queries: Does Judy exist? Is there a little boy in the Grand Canyon? Maybe they all do. Perhaps Harry did develop anhedonia as a side effect, a useful link to the semaglutide chapter and the brain. He may have changed his behavior, but I can’t know for sure, and because of his record, it’s hard for me to trust him very much.
Too bad: a book should be written about the rise of diet pills and how they will change society. But not only did Harry fail to write it; the way he did it undermined his already dwindling supply of confidence.
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