993: Johann Hari | The Skinny on 'Magic Pill' Weight-Loss Drugs

24:18It's why I've lost 42 pounds, right? In a little bit more than a year. But there's a lot of good things about that, obviously. But one of the risks of that is malnutrition, particularly people taking high doses. For example, a close relative of mine is taking these drugs and literally was like wasting away. Like her kid said to remind her, hey, you got to eat. There's a risk of malnutrition from not eating enough and chronically under eating. That's very serious, I think, with this. It's why actually some doctors are now prescribing alongside the drugs a diet plan, not the typical diet plan to cut down, but a diet plan to make sure you eat enough.

24:52Right. Yeah. So for someone like me who lost, I lost 40 pounds of fat. It took 10 months. I was weighing my food, but I was like getting one gram of protein per pound of body weight ish for those 10 months. And it was not like injecting something. I mean, this is like protein shake in the morning, decent lunch, and then a packet of turkey breast with some mustard for dinner every day, give or take, for 10 months. My wife was like, I can't believe you have the discipline to do that. And I was like, I can't believe I have the discipline to do that. But it's just one of those things I set my mind to.

25:27But 10 months of that is something that most people, even when I look back now, I'm like, I don't think I could do that again. That was kind of miserable. And it took forever. The idea that there's a drug that can get you there faster. And I was not obese. And I kind of want to talk about what that means. 26 % of the people in the UK are obese. 42 % in the US are obese. What is the difference between overweight and obese? I know there's a difference, but I cannot remember for the life of me what it is. It's very simple. BMI, which is dividing your height by your weight. If your BMI is between 25 and 30, you're overweight.

25:59If your BMI is over 30, you're obese. Okay. It's a very simple way to measure it. But I'm just thinking about what you're saying, Jordan. It's so interesting, right? That difficulty you would have now to exercise that willpower, right? I think it's fascinating. Willpower is a very real phenomenon. We've all exercised willpower at some point, right? Over something. When people sort of deny it exists in relation to weight, I'm always like, no, you're being too simplistic. Equally, the people who think it's the only thing going on, I think are being too simplistic. It's worth thinking about what is the factor that's undermining our willpower?

26:26Because it actually leads us. For a long time, I thought I was looking at two different questions. Why did people gain so much weight so quickly? And how do these drugs work? Actually, it turns out the answer lies in the same word. That word is satiety, which is the feeling of having had enough and not wanting anymore. I'll come back to that word in a minute, but just start with the explosion in obesity in our lifetimes. I think we're, yeah, you're younger than me, right? I'm probably younger than you by like, you're 79, I'm early 80. So like we're probably within six to ten months or a year. Between the year we were born and the year we turned 21, obesity doubled in the United States.

27:02And then in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again. If you want to get a sense of this, everyone listening, just pause the podcast for a second and Google photographs of beaches in the United States in 1979. And just look at them, right? You look at them and it seems really weird to us. Everyone is what we would call Slim or Jack. Everyone, right? You look at it and go, well, this must have been like a skinny person convention that day. What's going on? And then you look at the population figures. That is what people look like in the United States in the year we were born. Not a million years ago, not before the civil war, right?

27:33Literally when we were born. So what happened, right? What happened is the evidence is pretty clear about what happened. Obesity explodes everywhere that makes one change. It's not where people lose willpower. It's not where people become greedy. It's where people move mostly from eating fresh whole foods that were prepared on the day to eating mostly processed or ultra-processed foods that were built out of chemicals in factories in a process that actually isn't even called cooking. It's called manufacturing food. So we have 300 ,000 years where humans ate mostly whole foods and obesity was exceptionally rare.

28:10And then in our lifetimes, there's this dramatic swing to 78 % of the calories the average American child consumes in a day are now processed or ultra-processed food. And that leads to this extraordinary explosion of obesity. And if you want to understand why, it's kind of simple. I mean, there's many things going on, but the core of it is that this new kind of food, which has never existed before, undermines our ability to ever feel full and know we've had enough. And there's loads of evidence for this that I go through in the book, but there's an experiment that to me really nails it, right?

28:39Oh yeah, cheesecake rats, baby. Can you tell me about cheesecake rats? You know you want it. This is gross. Like legit made me kind of like have a bubbly stomach when I read it. Exactly. I'm going to promote your way lost by reminding you of this experiment every day. So there's a scientist who's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai University called Professor Paul Kenny. Brilliant guy. He grew up in Dublin in Ireland. And in the 90s, he moved to San Diego, I think to do his PhD and continue scientific research. And he quickly realized, wow, Americans don't eat like Irish people did at the time.

29:13There was a lot more processed food, a lot more sugary and fatty food. And like many a good immigrant, he quickly assimilated. and within a year he gained like 30 pounds and he's like whoa what's going on here and he started to feel like this food he was consuming wasn't just changing his gut it was changing his brain it was changing his whole relationship with food so he designed an experiment to test this which i have nicknamed cheesecake park it's very simple he built a cage and he raised rats in it and all they had to eat was the kind of natural healthy food that rats had evolved to eat over thousands of years.

29:45And it turned out when they had that food, the rats would eat when they were hungry and stop when they were full. They never overate. They never became overweight or obese. Given that food, they had a kind of natural nutritional wisdom that stopped them overeating. Okay. Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some bacon. He bought some Snickers bars and crucially bought some cheesecake and he put it in the cage alongside the option of the healthy food. And the rats went crazy for the American diet. They would literally hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their way out, just completely slicked with cheesecake.

30:21They ate and ate and ate and ate. And that natural nutritional wisdom they'd had with the old kind of fear completely disappeared. As Professor Kenny put it to me, within a couple of days, they were different animals. And very rapidly, they were all obese. Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment in a way that to me as a former KFC addict seems a little bit cruel. He took away the American diet and left them with nothing but the healthy food again. And he was pretty sure he knew what would happen. They would eat more of the healthy food than they had before. And this would prove that that kind of diet expands the number of calories you eat in a day.

30:54That is not what happened. What happened was much weirder. Once they'd been exposed to the American diet, they refused to eat the healthy food at all. It was like they no longer recognized it as food. It was only when they were literally starving and wasting away that they finally reluctantly went back and ate it. Oh, man. Now, there's something very similar happening to all of us. As Professor Gerald Mann at Harvard, who designed the food label that's on all food that's sold in the US, said to me, we know there's something about the food we're eating that's undermining our abilities to fill full.

31:26So this word satiety, this food has robbed us of our satiety, kept coming up. and then i kept hearing that word come up again when we talk about these drugs because what these drugs do is they give you back your sense of satiety dr daniel drucker who made the key breakthrough one of the key breakthroughs in discovering glp1 which the heart of how a zempic works sure we'll talk about that said to me what they give you back is your satiety hormones they give you back that feeling of being full i realized i don't think i'd ever felt full in my life until I took a zembic, right? Not really full. Not like, I'd had times when I'd had too much and couldn't bear to eat anymore because I'd vomit.

32:05But that's different to feeling sated, right? You get sated in other things in life. You get sated in, well, sex, for example, the times when you have sex and it's really good. And then it's over and you're like, even if like the hottest person in the world came into the room, you would be like, I'm really sorry, I'm sated now, you know. What's on Netflix? Yeah, exactly. He's like, sorry, Keanu. Well, actually, to be fair, just in case Keanu Reeves listens to your podcast, I want to be clear, Keanu, know I would find a way. But yeah, you know that feeling, right? So when I started to see it that way, there's a brilliant professor in Philly, Professor Michael Lowe, who said to me, what you realize is these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem.

32:42Processed food dug a whole insatiable hunger in all of us and the drugs fill in the hole, but in their own risky, complicated way. Now sink your teeth into the deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, actually, you're probably not wondering that. I'm just trying to awkwardly transition into pumping my free course, Six Minute Networking. It is free over at sixminutenetworking.com. I don't need your credit card information or any of that crap when you sign up.

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33:42There's no nonsense. And I don't secretly trick you into anything weird. You can find it at sixminutenetworking.com. All right, back to Johan Hari. So we don't get full from junk food. And I kind of looked up a little, a few of the reasons why, first of all, the way they make it is horrifying. I'll talk about it in the show close, but we don't get full. There's junk food almost has virtually no fiber. It's a really good blend of fat and protein. That's why when you eat one sort of like barbecue chip, you're like, I need a thousand more of these because it's just like a flavor profile. Only a thousand?

34:14What kind of pussy are you in? Jesus. whatever's left in the bag is going down and you have to, I'm like, I'll go to my wife. I'm like, take these away from me. And she's like, good. And then she's eating them. And I'm like, that wasn't the solution we were looking for. And also liquids. I was at the mall yesterday with my kids taking them to some fun thing and I was thirsty. So I went to the vending machine and they had Coke, Mountain Dew, Diet Coke. There was nothing like, there was nothing that wasn't just a soft drink in there that had a thousand calories and whatever, two liter bottle or, you know, 20 ounce bottle, I can't tell.

34:44And there's artificial sweeteners in some of them, and there's shaky science about whether that's bad for you. I don't really want to go down that thing. But basically the junk food hijacks whatever navigation system our body has evolved around food. And I think you say it in the book pretty well. You say the same system that used to tell us to eat fruit now just tells us to eat Froot Loops. That's exactly right. What you realized then, it brings us right back to what you were saying about willpower. What the science shows when it comes to the causes of obesity is there's three kinds of cause there's biological causes your genes can make you more sensitive to it as you become obese changes happen in your brain that make it harder to go back there's psychological causes things like comfort eating trauma all sorts of things can make us comfort ourselves with eating and then there's social causes like the food supply system right so the fancy term for this is the biopsychosocial model biological causes, psychological causes, social causes.

35:39And they're all real. And when you think about it in that context, you begin to see where willpower comes in. Willpower is one little sliver of the psychological component to this, right? So it's real. And the way I started to think about willpower is it's like in this environment, willpower is like an umbrella in a bad storm. Some people, you hand them that umbrella, they're going to be able to get to the other side of the street and stay dry. And all credit to them. Good luck. If you can do it with willpower, if you can do it with calorie restriction and exercise, do it that way because there's very low risks to that compared to the options we're talking about.

36:14But for most people in this environment, the storm is so bad that it's going to break that umbrella, right? So that to me is how we need to think about willpower. I agree. I wanted to say this early in the show and just sort of we got sidetracked. I want to caveat this because I've gotten in some trouble on this show for so-called fat shaming. So I always want to be careful in episodes where we talk about this kind of thing. I don't think I've ever actually done that, but pretty much anything you say about weight at all can trigger some people. And look, I'm less worried about the chronically offended as I am about the chronically overweight who've tried everything else.

36:48For me, like I said earlier, losing weight was a matter of getting educated about nutrition, willpower to stick to a healthy diet, which is not easy. And not everybody has the same problem because not everybody has the same genetics. Not everyone can afford to build a gym in their backyard during a pandemic. And so it's a position of immense privilege. And I'm also privileged to speak to my audience about this. And I want to make sure that we do that. And we are doing this, I think, in a way that is caring and understanding and results in people learning and feeling empowered by this and not feeling lectured by us coming away feeling ashamed or hopeless.

37:19And I know you're on the same page, but I want to plant that flag because, you know, you hate to get a letter from somebody that's like, I feel like crap after listening to your episode about this. And you're just like, oh, could that have been avoided and this is something i thought about really deeply for my book magic pill because you know the worst moment for me in the whole writing of the book was it was a while working on the book and obviously taking the drug i was facetiming with my niece erin she's actually 19 now but in my head she's fixed as a six-year-old she's the baby of my family she's the youngest she's the only girl so no one makes me more protective than her whenever she has a boyfriend i always want to go get away from her you pedophile but then i realized she's like an adult woman now Yeah.

37:56Although I refused to accept that. So we were FaceTiming and she was kind of, you know, teasing me. She goes, oh, you look great. I never knew you had a neck before. I never knew you had a jaw. And I was kind of laughing and preening. And then she looked down and she said, will you buy me some of those own pills? Oh, no. And she has a totally healthy weight. And I thought she was kidding. I laughed. And then suddenly I realized she meant it. And I was like, f***. Yeah. Have I undercut every message I've ever given her? So I wanted to think a lot about stigma and the messages we send. and one of the people who most helped me to think about this was an amazing woman called Shelley Bovey who basically introduced body positivity to Britain or as it would have been called then fat pride so when we were kids right again not a million years ago fat people only ever appeared on television as the butt of a joke yes particularly fat women but fat men too right you think about like John Candy it was presented as inherently hilarious that there were fat people in the world and they were bullied and treated appallingly in every representation you saw of them the first person i ever saw on television challenging that was shelly so i just told a bit of her story i tracked her down to interview her about this because she's such a wise person i saw her when i was 10 years old on tv on like the equivalent to it's not the equivalent to oprah but there is no equivalent to oprah but like uh i kind of uh trashier lower rent equivalent of Oprah, much trashier because Oprah is not trashier or she's divine.

39:20But so Shelley grew up in a working class town in Britain called Port Talbot. Like Scranton would probably be the American equivalent, somewhere like that. A tough working class town had the biggest steelworks in Britain at the time. She describes herself the only fat girl in the school. And one day when she was 11, her teacher said to her, Bovee, stay behind after class. I want to talk to you. So she's sitting there thinking, what have I done wrong? She waits. Her teacher says to her, you are much too fat. is disgusting go see the school nurse she'll sort you out so completely thrown shelly walks over to the school nurse she said the school nurse is why are you here she says the teacher says i'm too fat the nurse said take off your clothes i'll inspect you and she starts pinching her and said this is disgusting oh my god you should be ashamed of yourself and just berates her and tells her to stop being a pig as she put it so shelly leaves completely shaken and she basically spends her whole life soaking up being treated like that that the other girls are just constantly saying thank God, I'm not as fat as you.

40:14And as she gets older, it's just everywhere. When she got pregnant, she went to the doctor. The first thing the doctor said was, well, you shouldn't be pregnant when you're as fat as you are. She had a very difficult birth. And as she was lying there covered in blood, the midwife said to her, you know, you should really lose some weight. When her baby wouldn't attach properly, he wasn't feeding properly. She went to the doctor to get some help. And the doctor said, well, what are you trying to do? Make the baby as fat as you are. This is insane. But this is constant. 42 % of women with a BMI higher than 35 get insulted every single day, right?

40:44Every day. So Shelley just completely internalized this at first. She told me she had never even looked at her own body in the shower naked because she was so disgusted. She thought it was so wrong. And then one day she learned that in the United States, there was this movement, which at the time called itself Fat Pride and some people still do, that basically said, this is just some bigotry. This is just a form of cruelty. We don't have to take being treated like this and fought back. And so she introduced this to Britain. This is why when I was 10 years older, I see her on this imitation of Oprah.

41:11And she's treated like a mad woman and the audience laughed at her. But nonetheless, her book was very successful and a kind of modest body positivity movement is born in Britain. And Shelley, when I went to see her, she's 76 now, is incredibly proud of everything she did. And it stands by every word she said about stigma. But something else happened to Shelley next. She was very severely overweight. She was not even 50 and she was losing the ability to walk because of her weight. Oh my. And she went to her doctor. She was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and she went to her doctor and the doctor said he was worried about her heart.

41:41And he said, look, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but this is all connected to your weight. And Shelley felt this incredible dilemma because she absolutely believed every word she says about stigma. She's never doubted that that was true, nor should she. But she could also see the scientific evidence was clear that carrying the level of excess weight she did in her body was physically harming her and indeed was going to kill her probably. And she was really struggling to reconcile these things. At the time, there was a body positivity newsletter called fat news in britain and she wanted to write for it about this dilemma they said no no that's not what we want we talk about the positive things about being fat and she's like i get that but we are much more likely to develop these problems we do need to level about that and they were kind of no no no that's not what we want now shelly lost a huge amount of weight by calorie restriction she went to a kind of equivalent to weight watchers now she's the first person to acknowledge that's extremely difficult only about 10 percent of people succeed at it.

42:37But she said to me, I know that that weight loss saved my life. I wouldn't be alive at the age of 78 if that hadn't happened. My heart problems went away when I lost weight. She said, we can't say we have a body positivity movement that isn't concerned at some level about keeping your body alive, right? So she said, we keep presenting it as if it's either or. Either you're opposed to stigma or you're in favor of, if possible, reducing obesity for people. We said, why is that the choice? It can be both and. If you love someone who's obese, and I would guess every single person listening is either obese or loves someone who's obese, what you want for them is to protect them from two things.

43:14You want to protect them from bullying and cruelty, which is what stigma is. And you want to protect them from the health harms of obesity, which are things like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia, your knees and hips being destroyed just across the board. It's a form of love to be against both. Now, of course, you could be in favor of weight loss in a cruel, concern trolling vicious way and we need to strongly oppose that or you can be in favor of weight loss where possible through love and compassion now some people and i stress it is a minority within the body positivity movement and i also want to stress i understand where they're coming from and have a lot of sympathy for them but some people have i would argue over corrected everything they say about stigma is right but some of them also argue that pointing out the scientific evidence about the harms caused by obesity over which there is no scientific debate is one of the most proven facts in science, that pointing out those facts is itself a form of stigma.

44:09And that, I'm afraid, is not right. I agree. Something that hit for me when I was reading your book was the idea that if you've spent your whole life hearing abuse, being shamed, nearly everything coming in looks like abuse and shame, even if it's a doctor telling you in a nice way that you are going to suffer from these consequences. This is very likely why I had some women in my inbox after a recent Feedback Friday episode, those are our advice segments. They came at us really hatefully. And the advice we'd given, I went back and listened to it repeatedly because I was like, what did we do wrong?

44:40The advice we'd given was there was a person working in a doctor's office and her colleagues who were doctors were complaining about how they needed to lose weight because their blood work was bad and they didn't fit into their clothes and they felt like crap. And this person was able to lose weight. And we gave her advice on gently approaching her colleagues and friends who were complaining about this on how to lose weight if they wanted because she had done it successfully and get advice from her on how to do so. And my co-host and I, we were shocked at how people viewed this as fat shaming.

45:07It was almost delusional and we couldn't believe it when they told us what they were reacting to. And I found it really sad because these people, like I couldn't get there mentally without crazy gymnastics. These people must view nearly every discussion around health or weight as fat shaming, which has to be exhausting. At first I was annoyed, but now I just feel bad because that is not going to help them lose weight and live longer. I think we really need to understand where it comes from. Yes. There's an analogy that really helped me to think about this, right? As you know, obviously I'm gay.

45:37Maybe that's not obvious. Maybe I just am British, but I'm in fact gay. I think the Keanu thing was our first hint. Oh yeah, that gave it away. Well, come on, you're telling me you turned down Keanu. Let's be real here. But, you know, if you think about the AIDS crisis, right? When the AIDS crisis started, doctors warned, look, it's a scientific fact that this is going to affect gay men much more than other people because of the nature of anal sex. right interesting and that's why there were moves in san francisco to shut down the bathhouses to shut down points of transmission that were spreading the the virus right and loads of gay men totally understandably said f**k you my whole life i've been told there's something wrong with being gay we're disordered we're disgusting and here you are these other authority people telling us we're disgusting and we can't have sex i've seen this story f**k you we'll carry on going to our saunas right you're not going to shut them down right and i understand what was happening they had been shamed and bullied all their lives.

46:29And it meant they couldn't hear this well-meant medical advice, actually essential medical advice, as anything other than more homophobia. And as a result, a lot of them died. Now, that's not their fault, right? In their position, I might well have been the same because I see where it came from. And I think it's something very similar happening with what you're describing. And I think precisely because we want a body positivity movement to continue and survive. Even if we reverse the obesity crisis back to where it was when we were born, when it wasn't a crisis, if we go back to looking like those beaches in 1979, there's still natural variety in body shapes and we want everyone to feel good in their body.

47:07And so even if we solve this crisis, you'd still need a body positivity movement. But I think a lot about a guy I interviewed called Jeff Parker, super nice guy. He's a retired lighting technician in San Francisco. go. He's 67, he must be 68 now. And he was very severely obese and it was painful for him to walk anywhere. He had gout, he had liver and kidney problems and heart problems. Every morning he had to swallow fistfuls of pills. His doctor was very worried about him. And then his friend Mel gave him some Minjaro, which is one of these drugs. And he lost an enormous amount of weight. He was taking off almost all his pills.

47:41His gout went away. Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate bridge every day and said, I'm going to enjoy my retirement now. Now, not everyone who takes a drug is going to have the experience of Jeff and we'll talk about some of the risks, but it's pretty soon every single person in the United States is going to know someone like Jeff, right? If they don't already. Someone whose health dramatically improved because they lost loads of weight because of these drugs. It was never scientifically plausible to claim that obesity doesn't harm health. Pretty soon it's not going to be emotionally plausible because everyone's going to be like, hey, what happened to Jeff?

48:10What happened to Bob? Hey Susie, what do you mean you don't take these pills anymore and your heart problem has gone away and your diabetes has been reversed. What do you mean? How did that happen? We absolutely desperately need a movement against stigma. If that movement implies that the scientific evidence about the harms caused by obesity is itself a form of stigma. As Shelley said to me, Shelley Bovey, the woman I was talking about, said to me, we have to live in reality. It doesn't serve anyone to not live in reality. The only person who pays the price for that in the end is you. We've all had moments in our lives where we want to not hear bad news.

48:43You don't open the bill, you can't pay, you don't answer the call from your doctor that you're afraid to hear. But we all know that in the end, if you don't listen to bad news and adjust for it, who pays the price for that but you? I couldn't agree more. This, in addition to the stigma, is one reason why I kind of waffle on using words like overweight or obese, right? Because I know you've got an opinion on this, which I also share. You can use euphemisms, but is that short-term relief at the expense of long-term honesty that could save someone's life? Well, the truth is there's a physical reality, right?

49:16The World Health Organization, which is the biggest medical body in the world, defines overweight and obesity very simply as carrying excess weight that poses a threat to health. That's a real phenomenon. We may want to change the words for it. I'm open-minded about that. But what we can't do is change the fact that there is an underlying physical reality there. Carrying excess weight poses a threat to health. Now, not for everyone. Not in every case. my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. She's alive and well at the age of 78, but she's a statistical outlier, right? So some people come back and go, well, I weigh this and I'm alive and well.

49:48Unfortunately, again, the evidence is really clear on this. So for example, there was a big study here in London of government bureaucrats that tracked their health over many years. And what it found is at the start when they were young, the obese people and the other weight people had pretty similar health outcomes. By 20, 30 years on, the obese people were eight times more likely to become unwell than the people who were not obese. So there are ways of, particularly talking about this prior to these weight loss drugs, a lot of people would kind of go, well, I can't change it anyway. So why are you even telling me this?

50:21It's just upsetting me. Now we have this new tool. I mean, we did have tools before, but this is a much easier tool than the tools we had before. Although it does carry these 12 big risks. I think we need to have a loving and compassionate conversation. And when I think about the people I love who are obese. It's that I want to desperately want to protect them both from bullying and from illness. And I believe we can do both. I think you're right. I think in going back to what you'd said about our food system, I'm paraphrasing from your book, we built a food system that poisons us and then to keep us away from the consequences, we inject ourselves with a different drug that makes us not want to eat.

50:55And I think the key question is, do we want to live in a world where we don't solve the underlying problem, but we just drug ourselves to get rid of the symptoms? Now, on the other hand, for some folks, this is the best solution for the situation at hand, as you kind of talked about towards the top of the show. And if somebody has cancer, we don't say, hey, we need to get pollution out of the atmosphere. I'm so sorry you got lung cancer. We pump them full of radiation and chemo to kill the cancer and keep them alive. So I'm not anti-Ozempic at all. I'm really not. It's just, in part, I got to admit, man, part of me is also biased and I'm trying to resist it.

51:31Like there's a part of my brain that says, I worked out and I dieted to lose weight and drugs are cheating. And I know that that's bulls**t and that's unfair, but it's somehow that's in the back of my head. And I'm wondering what you think about that, because surely I'm not the only person who has that bias. I felt it about myself. Really? For months and months when I was taking the drugs, I kept feeling like I was doing something really wrong. I could think, why is that? Like one of my best friends takes statins, there's cholesterol. I've never once looked at him and gone, you're a f**ker, cheating to get better cholesterol than me no cross my mind of course i would regard you as literally mad if you said that right yeah and yet these drugs bring out remind me to come back to what you were saying before about dealing with the symptoms not the causes because it's a really important point as well but in terms of cheating i think one thing that's really interesting here is these drugs are bringing to the surface lots of deep underlying ideas that have been kind of semi-conscious for a lot of us some of those things are like actually the things that drive why we eat things like comfort eating which was a very hard transition for me but think about what you just said about cheating right i appreciate your honesty about it and i felt it too if you look at the history of ideas about obesity if you go back to for example in the sixth century the pope pope gregory i invented the seven deadly sins right people know this part because of the film seven though it turns out uh kevin spacey was a bigger risk than the uh the regular in that one but the um yeah hope it doesn't sue me for that the you think about seven deadly sins one of them is gluttony right and it's always depicted with someone who's overweight eating in some grotesque way, right?

53:02And if you think about how we think about weight loss, the only kind of weight loss we really like and admire is one that follows the old Catholic model of sin. You're a sinner, you have to go through hell, and then we'll forgive you, right? So think about that show, The World's Biggest Loser, right? A disgusting game show where they get very severely overweight people and make them actually do things that are very dangerous for their health, like starve themselves and take part in very extreme forms of exercise to compete to be the biggest loser, right? That's a classic model, right? Yeah, we'll forgive you for being fat if you've tortured yourself, right?

53:35The more agonizing a diet is, the more extreme the exercise program, the more likely we are to go, fair enough, Bob paid his price, right? We don't quite articulate it that way. Or you think about another way, which is cheating. Lots of people in our culture, particularly women because of the pressures that are put on them, are making massive sacrifices every day to be thin or thinner, right? They're denying themselves food, they're going hungry, they're uncomfortable. And I can well understand to them, I must look like Lance Armstrong looks to a cyclist. It's like, what? I put in all this effort.

54:07I do all this work. I deprive myself. And you, you fucker, you just inject yourself once a week in the leg and you get to look the same way I do. I can well understand it, but I think we need to unpick these ideas. Firstly, I think we can move beyond the idea of sin. We should be able to think a little bit better than a sixth century Pope by now. But when it comes to cheating, I actually think we are in a race. We are competing, but it's not me competing against my neighbor. It's all of us competing against the forces that have made us obese, processed and ultra processed foods. And I went to countries where they dealt with that problem.

54:39Japan, for example, 42.5 % of Americans are obese. 4 % of Japanese people are obese, right? And it's mind blowing when you go there and see how they did it. I'm sure we'll come back to that. It's kind of weird that we expect Japanese people to look like sumo wrestlers because that's basically like expecting an American to look like a bald eagle. But that is very rare. So you're totally right. And this actually comes back to the other thing I wanted to pick up on, which is when you were saying as well about, this was one of my biggest concerns about taking these drugs. I went to my closest friend.

55:08I think it was maybe three months into doing it. I was researching a lot of the stuff about why obesity had risen at first. And I said to her, I've got to stop taking these drugs. I'm going to be a complete hypocrite here. I write all these books for how we need to deal with these deep underlying social causes of problems and not deal with the symptoms. And here I am with a problem that's got profound environmental causes. And here I am jabbing myself to deal with the symptoms and congratulating myself on how good I look. Right? Right. And so this is a friend of mine who eight years ago, she got very bad breast cancer.

55:34She nearly died. And she's a single mom. So you can imagine how horrendous it was. And I was with her all through the chemo and the double mastectomy and the hysterectomy and all those things. and she said to me yeah when i got breast cancer we could have said something really fucked up is happening in our environment that's causing breast cancer one in seven british women get breast cancer one in eight american women that didn't happen in the recent past in our parents generation not happening in japan where one in 38 women get breast cancer something is going on that's causing breast cancer right so you could have said to me well yeah you've already got this problem caused by the environment.

56:11Don't inject yourself with all these poisons. But no, you said, let's make sure you live to fight another day. Then we can think about the environmental causes. And she gave me this really great analogy. She said, imagine if your house is on fire. You could make a very good argument to say, you know, we should change the building code so houses get built out of less flammable materials. You could make a very strong argument to go, apartment blocks, make sure they've got sprinklers. If your house is on fire, that's no f***ing to you. Call the fire brigade and douse the house in water, right? In the same way, she's like, yes this is a hugely environmentally driven problem we've got to deal with that but how does it help for you to just sacrifice yourself on that you know i'm strongly in favor of gun control many reasonable people i love disagree with me but i'm strongly in favor of gun control partly because i've known so many people who were murdered with guns in the u.s but if someone gets shot in front of me i don't stand over them going well we must show close the gun show loophole and we must get background checks for everyone who goes in to buy a gun, I say, call a f***ing ambulance, right?

57:10There's no contradiction between dealing with the symptom and dealing with the deeper causes, especially failing to deal with the symptom for you will mean that you die. And you can't deal with environmental causes if you die. So another guy who really underscored that for me was Jeff Parker, that guy I was talking about in San Francisco, who when I said to him, but don't you think we should be dealing with the environmental causes? He said to me, 100 % sign me up. I'll join that fight. But let's be honest, I'll be dead by the time we solve that problem. I want to live. And I found that very hard to rebut.

57:39There's many legitimate reasons to reject these drugs and be concerned about these drugs, but I don't think that's the right one. No need to starve yourself. In fact, take an extra helping of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, you're not sure if we have a sponsor for XYZ product, go ahead and email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

58:13I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Johan Hari. These solutions, we have to come to terms with what eating does for us, right? The underlying issue needs addressing. And it goes to your earlier point about the Ozempic just addressing the symptoms of the eating. And I found it interesting you mentioned how often people substitute the eating for something else like booze or even exercise. And we see this with bariatric surgery patients going and finding something that's not food.

58:46Like, I don't know if they start smoking, but some of them start drinking. I'm sure some start smoking. And some start going to the gym four times a day. And I know somebody who used to be overweight and eat a bunch and they lost a bunch of weight and now they go to the gym literally four times, they work out, I should say, four times per day. That is not normal. And I asked him, do you think you just substituted one addiction for another? And he goes, oh yeah, 100%. It's just that this one's less likely to kill me because I'm doing a lot of yoga and a lot of weightlifting. And I'm just like, gosh, but four times, I mean, if you do anything four times a day that takes an hour, that's a part-time job, man.

59:24I actually found it quite, here's a whole separate show I want to do. You mentioned that sometimes being overweight is psychologically comforting and there's a connection between sexual abuse and weight gain. Can you speak to that a little bit? I literally want to do like a whole episode on that because I just find that endlessly fascinating. Yeah, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own experience in relation to this, not the abuse component, but something else. And then talk about the abuse thing, the evidence about abuse. This was probably, for me personally, other than that moment with my niece, the hardest element of taking the drugs.

59:53And it really became clear to me, I had an epiphany about it. I was in Vegas. As you know, I'm writing a book about a series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas, and I was researching the murder of someone I knew and loved. So obviously, it's a very painful thing to do. And really on autopilot, I went to this KFC I've been to a thousand times. It's on West Sahara for people in Vegas. It's the skeeziest KFC in Vegas, which is saying something. Yeah, it is. and we're good at skeezy fast food places in vegas and i went in and i ordered what i would have ordered a year before i ordered a bucket of fried chicken and i sat down and i had a chicken drumstick and i remember very almost hearing it as a voice in my head looking at this chicken and thinking i can't eat this i'm just gonna have to feel bad yeah and one of the fascinating things about these drugs is because they so radically interrupt your eating patterns for many people not everyone they bring to the surface the underlying drivers of your eating all along so i go through five drivers of eating in the book but you've gone to one that i found really difficult so i interviewed a man called dr vincent felitti he's a doctor he was in san diego in 1981 obviously long before i met him and he was approached by kaiser permanente one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in california and they said look we've got a problem obesity is blowing up in fact it was laughable and low by our standards but it was blowing up and we give people diet advice and it doesn't work and we even give people personal trainers it doesn't work, what can we do?

1:01:14Can we give you a load of money to just do blue skies research and figure out what the hell's going on? He said, sure. So he started working with 200 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 300 pounds. And he thought, well, what can I do with them? And he had an idea that sounds, and in fact is quite dumb. He said, what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them like vitamin shots so they didn't get scurvy or whatever, would they burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight. So with an absolute ton of medical supervision, they did it.

1:01:44And incredibly, at first, it worked. There's a woman who I'm going to call Susan, not her real name, who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 132 pounds, like a staggering level of weight loss. And Dr. Felitti, you know, she's saying to him, you've saved my life. Her family are ringing up and saying you've saved her life. Mind-blowing. And one day something happened that no one expected. Susan cracked. She went to KFC, or actually, I think that's me projecting. I don't think it was KFC, but somewhere it starts hugely overeating and quite quickly went back to a, you know, dangerous way.

1:02:14Not where she'd been, but a dangerous way. And Dr. Felitti said, well, he called her in. Susan, what happened? And she looked down. She said, I don't know. I don't know. She was obviously really ashamed. He said, well, Susan, tell me about the day you cracked. Did anything in particular happen that day? It turned out something had happened that day that had never happened to Susan before. She was in a bar and a man hit on her, not in a nasty way, in a nice way. and she got completely freaked out and went and started eating. This is when Dr. Felitti asked her something he'd never thought to ask his patients before.

1:02:43He said, Susan, when did you start to gain your weight? In her case, it was when she was 11. He said, well, did anything happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were nine or 14? Anything in particular happened that year? And Susan looked down and she said, well, that's when my grandfather started raping me. Dr. Felitti interviewed everyone in the program and he discovered that 60 % of the women had made their extreme weight gain in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And at first he was like, whoa, what is this about? And Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be.

1:03:16Gaining weight has a sexually protective function. Of course, it can still happen, but you're significantly less likely to be raped if you're very overweight. Roxane Gay, a brilliant writer, has written about she was getting raped when she was 11 by a group of boys. And very consciously thought, that must never happen to me again. I'm going to eat as much as I can to be as fat as I can to ward off male attention. When we think about obesity, one of the things we have to think about is the psychologically positive functions of obesity. That's one of them. There are other ones. It can lower people's expectations of you because of stigma, which can be something that a lot of people need, right?

1:03:55There's all sorts of things that can happen. And it can also mean that when people take the drugs, they suddenly feel incredibly frightened and vulnerable and they don't know why and of course i mean there's many reasons why and it can be related to the other psychological factors as well but that's one of them it's why um a lot of people have heard this phrase by now but dr robert ander who worked on that research with dr feliti so i said when we see people who appear to be doing something dysfunctional massively over eating injecting drug users whatever it might be we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to I think that that is, well, one, like I said, endlessly fascinating.

1:04:33And two, this is the real part of the real epidemic, right? Because look, that 60 percent figure is enormous. And what fills in the other 40 percent? Because there's probably other trauma that fills in at least some of that that is not sexually abusive in nature. It could be bullying. It could be literally anything else. And fighting those underlying causes seems to be the key here. I do wanna, I know we're running out of time. I wanna talk a little bit about the potential, not just side effects of these drugs. I mean, there's Ozempic face and Ozempic butt where you sort of empty out of fat and then you need fillers to correct it, which is, you know, those are cosmetic side effects.

1:05:15But what about things like cancers or, first of all, don't our bodies resist change as well? Aren't there, isn't there a hormonal component? I know you mentioned when you're dieting and I had this as well, you just, you see food and you're like, I really want to eat that right now. Like you're just focused on it because you're hungry in some ways. And metabolism changes, we're evolved to hold onto fat, right? We're evolved to thrive in lean times and we're not going to change that. There's no amount of therapy that can change that. This is our evolution, correct? I think there's some truth in what you're saying.

1:05:50One of the weird things about these drugs is we don't actually know how they work. We know a few things. It's very disconcerting to interview the leading scientists and realize this. So we know a few things for sure. If you ate something now, Jordan, no matter what it is, after a while, your pancreas would produce a hormone called GLP-1. And that's part of your body's natural signals. Just saying, hey, Jordan, you've had enough, stop eating it's the brakes basically but that natural glp1 only stays in your system for a couple of minutes then it's washed away what these drugs do is they inject you with an artificial copy of glp1 that instead of sticking around for a few minutes stays around for a whole week it's why when i went to the cafe out the road a few mouthfuls and i'm full right because i'm so close to full already because of this glp1 already being in my system initially it was thought well okay glp1 is a hormone that's made in the gut the effects of this drug are mostly in the gut it might be slowing down gastric emptying something like that there are definitely effects on the gut everyone agrees on that but we also know that you don't just have glp1 receptors in your gut you've got them in your brain and it's increasingly clear that these drugs work primarily on your brain it's very disconcerting we don't know how yeah but we know that if you give these drugs to a rat for example and then you cut open his brain which obviously we're not allowed to do with humans you see that the drug goes everywhere in the brain right and the kind of effects we're seeing are clearly brain effects.

1:07:10And you know, Dr. Clémence Bluet, who's a brilliant obesity specialist at Cambridge University, said to me, you know, the brain is the most complex object in the whole universe. We shouldn't be surprised we don't understand everything about it. But if you think about, there's several different theories about what's happening in the brain. And one of them relates to what you just asked. So you were talking about how we resist change. We try to hold higher levels of weight, right? So if you gained three stone now, I'm terrible at pounds, sorry, barbaric colonials don't use the measurements that we use.

1:07:36I like that though. If you gain 41 pounds now, or whatever, anyway, and then you tried to lose weight, you would find it hard to go back. Right. Because your brain tries to hold on to the excess fat. It slows your metabolism down. It makes you crave more sugary and salty foods and sweet foods. It makes you more lethargic, so it's harder to exercise. There's all sorts of changes that happen, for which there's a lot of scientific evidence. Some scientists argue, and I stress this as a speculative theory, that what this drug does is it undoes that effect. It undoes that resistance to change. That in a way, and I'm putting this more crudely than scientists would, that it's a bit like resetting your iPhone to the factory settings, right?

1:08:17It just lowers that effect that you get after you gain weight that makes it so hard to come back. That's one potential way of thinking about it. There are other theories we don't really know. It also makes me think about what you're saying. You know, my book is called Magic Pill because there's three ways these drugs could be magic, right? The first way is the most obvious. They could just solve the problem, right? And I've got to tell you, Jordan, there are days when it feels like that. My whole life, I have overeaten food. And now once a week, I inject myself in the leg. Boom. I don't eat anything like as much of it.

1:08:46It feels like magic. The second way is much more disturbing. It could be a magic trick. It could be like a conjurer who shows you a card trick while picking your pocket, right? it could be that the 12 risks that i go through in the book of these drugs undo the good or outweigh the good right the third way in which it could be magic is actually the one i think is the most likely if you think about the classic stories of magic that we grew up with think about like uh what would be an example aladdin right you find the lamp you rub it you get the genie you make the wish and your wish comes true but never quite in the way you expected right right it starts to unfold in some complicated weird way that you could never have foreseen at the start or think about Fantasia, you unleash the magic and it starts to run away from you.

1:09:28We're already at that point. 47 % of Americans want to take these drugs. 47%. It's transforming the economy in all sorts of crazy ways. Barclays Bank commissioned a very sober-minded financial analyst to look into the science of these drugs to do a report to guide their future investment decisions. And she came back and said, if you want a comparison for how big these drugs are going to be, you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone wow right and i think she's right my prediction my best prediction would be eight years from now when a zempic goes out assuming we don't discover some horrific side effect that i do not rule that out assuming we're not in a fen-fen scenario i would anticipate so a zempic goes out patent in 2032 at which point you'll be able to manufacture them as pills for 40 a month i would guess half the population of the United States will be taking them, roughly.

1:10:20I mean, that's going to transform the economy. Look already what's happening. Krispy Kreme stocks are down. Head of Nestle is publicly shitting himself about the future of the ice cream market. That's crazy. Jewelers in LA have had a huge run on refitting wedding rings because people's fingers have shrunk so much in LA that their wedding bands no longer fit them, right? Wow. There was just a big report for the American Airlines that said, prepare to spend much less money on jet fuel because pretty soon we're going to have a much thinner population, right? And it obviously costs more money to fly people who are larger.

1:10:48Wow. I'm sure they're going to pass those savings down to us, right? That's how that works? I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. That's the nature of capitalism. Always. Man, that's crazy. By the time you're manufacturing fewer knee and hip replacements and saving millions of dollars on airline fuel, and Nestle's like, oh, crap, how are we going to sell all this stuff that makes people sick? Like you, I mean, it's really, you kind of want to be team Ozempic at that point, right? You're like, oh, good. But again, we're not solving the underlying problem, which is always what freaks me out. We're not solving the underlying problem and there are risks.

1:11:20Now, of course, we can do both. We can treat the problem in the same way that I call an ambulance for my friend who's been shot and I fight for gun control. We can take the drugs and deal with the underlying factors that cause it. Indeed, one of the things I hope is that it wakes us up, that we go, how the f*** did we get into this situation where we're forced to choose, particularly for our children, between a risky medical condition and a risky drug? And it's worth just unpacking a little bit more some of the risks. I'll give you an example. When you talk about the safety of these drugs, what most of the experts say, and they're making a good and important point, is we actually know quite a lot about these drugs in the medium term because diabetics have been taking them for 18 years now.

1:11:56And I'm putting it more crudely than they would, but basically, if the drugs gave you horns, the diabetics would have grown horns by now, right? And that's a good and important point. And it should give people some sense of security. But some equally reputable and brilliant scientists said, well, hang on a minute. If we're going to base a key plank of our belief in the safety of these drugs on the diabetics, let's dig a little bit deeper into the diabetics. So for example, there's a brilliant scientist called Professor Jean-Luc Fayy, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France. He was commissioned by the French Medicines Agency to look into the safety of these drugs for the French market.

1:12:31So he looked at what's called the preclinical evidence, the animal trials, and he was immediately struck by one thing. If you give these drugs to rats, they're much more likely to get thyroid cancer. And we have GLP-1 receptors in our thyroid, in addition to our brain and our gut. So it kind of makes sense that there's at least a plausible mechanism there. If you're screwing with GLP-1, you might be screwing with the thyroid. So he started to look at, could this be happening with humans? So he looked at, they have very good medical databases in france because they don't have hipper rules like we do so you have to be on the database and he looked at a really large group of diabetics i think they were people who were taking the drug between 2006 and 2012 if i remember right and he compared them to a really big group of diabetics who were not taking these drugs who are in every other way similar and what he found if he's right and it's highly contested is very sobering he calculated that these drugs increase your thyroid cancer risk by between 50 to 75 percent.

1:13:28Now, when at first you read that, and he said this to me, I was like, what the fuck? But he said, no, no, you need to understand what that doesn't mean. It doesn't mean if you take the drug, you have a chance of getting thyroid cancer. Yeah. If that were the case, we'd be having bonfires of a Zempick everywhere in the world. What it means is whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, it will increase, if he's right, by 50 to 75 percent. Now, thyroid cancer is relatively rare. 1.2 percent of people get it. 84 percent of people survive. Nonetheless, that's a flashing red light for me, particularly when we remember that with fen-fen, these things start small, right?

1:13:59The things that unraveled fen-fen were a few doctors in Fargo, you know, saying, oh, looks like our patients can't breathe very well when they take this drug, right? Although I want to be balanced about this because I think the truth is balanced. Against that, some other scientists said to me, well, even if Professor Faii is right and it does significantly increase the thyroid cancer risk, you've got to compare that to the cancer risk just from being obese. Cancer Research UK, one of the biggest cancer groups in the whole of Britain, in fact, in the whole of Europe, has explained if you carry excess weight, it doesn't just sit there.

1:14:30It's not inert in your body. It's active. It sends signals through your body. One of those signals is for cells to divide more rapidly, which can cause cancer. This is why actually, although we don't talk about it this way, obesity is one of the biggest causes of cancer in both Britain and the United States. So again, at every stage when you think, oh, I've got a thing to hold onto here, you realize that in this very complex calculation what i really recommend people do is they go down the list of the 12 risks that i write about in the book they go down the risks of obesity they try to weigh these for themselves it's so hard to talk about this without using words like weighing as well for unfortunate yeah i think anyone is just like there's a blanket answer for everyone unless your bmi is lower than 27 in which case i think there is a blanket answer don't take them you don't have the risks of being overweight or obese so you're taking on all the risks of the drug for none of the benefits, none of the physical benefits.

1:15:22Unless you're in that category, I think it's a fiendishly complicated decision. And you should inform yourself in great detail about those risks. Also, you should inform yourself about things like what it's going to do to you when you take it. I hope the book helps prepare people to know that. And we should all be thinking about what it does to the culture, because you may be sitting here thinking, oh, I'm not interested in taking these drugs. But in 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, you may well not be interested in buying an iPhone. you might still not be interested in having a smartphone, but the smartphone changed the world around you for damn sure.

1:15:51And these drugs are going to change the world around us for better and for worse, for better for people with serious obesity or just obesity, for worse for people with eating disorders and in between for everyone else, right? So I think we've got to reckon with the complexity because the stakes here are so high. Professor Gerald Mann, who I mentioned before, has calculated that 678 ,000 Americans die every year as a result of obesity or what he calls food-related illnesses caused by our diets, right? That's more than all the soldiers, American soldiers, who died in the entire 20th century combined.

1:16:26That's 10 times more almost than the number of people who died by being shot every year. Almost everyone listening will not have loved someone who died of obesity, although we don't talk about that. your uncle dies of a heart attack at 61, your aunt got breast cancer at 50. We don't say they died of obesity, but obesity is such a driver of those factors that they may well have been, right? So the stakes here are really high. Whether we get this right or wrong is hugely consequential. And I'm not sure I've made the right decision even for myself, nevermind advising anyone else. So I would say don't trust anyone who's highly confident on this.

1:17:00Trust the people who are talking you through the detail. That's right. Yeah. Go through your doctor, read this book and do the math and don't order that crap online thinking like, oh, I got this. I watched a couple of YouTube videos, including this one, for God's sake. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much for your candor, your transparency. Not a lot of people are going to put something like this in their body and then as an experiment, experiment, and then spend the next few years writing about it. And also hit a brother with an invite next time you go to one of those Hollywood parties. I got poopy diapers all day over here.

1:17:27Could use a little glamour. All right. I'll do it. Are you addicted to drama? Check out this preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with psychologist Dr. Scott Lyons. Do you vent constantly? Do you find yourself changing the stories? Do you find that wherever you go, there's always something that's wrong or happening? Do you find yourself believing the other shoe will always drop? That no matter how good things are, something bad is going to happen? Do you find yourself crisis hopping? If you're in it, you will have no idea that that's what you're doing. And it takes a lot of time for those addicted to drama to recognize, to even be aware of the pattern is happening.

1:18:09Our primal needs as a kid is to be seen and heard, to feel safe. And so you will go to whatever extremes and tense shouting is needed to pierce through the chaos of a family household to be seen and heard, even if it's burning down the house. a wave of an emotion, it lasts 30 to 90 seconds. Anything after that is the story we're feeding to maintain it. We're trying to keep that emotion active. We're feeding off the emotion as opposed to processing or metabolizing it. We're not letting it go because there's some belief system. If we let it go, we'll be victims. If we let it go, we won't be safe.

1:18:49Whatever it is, why we won't let go of the emotion. Even a small trauma can feel like death because we feel helpless. And if we don't have the resilience capacity to know that someone will help us, there are tools out there to help us. If we don't inherently know that, it feels like we're going to drown. In that moment, it feels like death. Learn to recognize and heal from drama addiction on episode 836 with Dr. Scott Lyons on The Jordan Harbinger Show. fascinating conversation johan's so funny man that guy is just a trip to talk to i really like him it's crazy his diet was so bad as a kid his dad was a chef so it must have been weird that he was immersed in food culture and he's just also inhaling processed junk food it must there must have been some tension in the house with his dad being like i i know in fact his dad was like why are you eating this i i'm a chef for god's sake and it was just like a cultural thing that they couldn't beat.

1:19:47Johan got a Christmas card from a fried chicken place. This is one of his wake-up calls that kind of didn't wake him up. He didn't tell the story during the show, but this was a wake-up call because when he got a Christmas card from a fried chicken place, his first thought wasn't, wow, I buy too much chicken from this place. His thought was, dang, this isn't even my favorite fried chicken place. It's not even my second favorite fried chicken place. So imagine getting a Christmas card for being the best customer of your third most visited fried chicken place. That's kind of what he was dealing with when he decided to change his habits and his ways.

1:20:19Processed foods, by the way, we're going to do a skeptical Sunday on this. I dare y 'all to Google how these are created. It is not pretty. The worst ones are loaded with modern chemicals. Everything's a chemical. I'm talking about modern chemicals. There's glue in there. There's bacteria, of course, in all this stuff. And they create something called pink slime, which is sort of like this meat product-y offshoot kind of deal. And then, of course, if you were to just eat that, it looks gross. It tastes gross. So what do they do? They inject flavors, but then it smells gross. Well, they inject fragrance into it and then it looks gross.

1:20:54Well, then they add color to it. So that's what we are dealing with and that's what we are eating. And that's what a lot of the stuff, especially fast food, super ultra processed stuff, that's what that stuff is. And it is, it's vile. Not to mention all these kinds of foods, this ultra processed stuff is hijacking our gut and undermining satiety as discussed in the interview, which means that it makes it hard for you to get full. Our gut biome these days on average has 40 % less diversity in there than our ancestors. What that means is there's far fewer different kinds of bacteria in our gut than our ancestors had.

1:21:28That doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, right? Why should it have less bacteria, less diversity of bacteria than our ancestors when you can eat any kind of food at any time. You can get fresh fish from Hokkaido and next you can be eating sea bass from Spain, right? We should have more diversity in our bio, not less. But no, we're eating too much of the same crap and it's not supporting that same variety of bacteria. Eating these processed foods because we're hungry, it's like trying to quench your thirst by drinking seawater. We eat it and it just makes us more hungry. I know we had a note earlier in the show, a little sidebar about fat shaming.

1:22:04The cold truth is that society just hates overweight people. I learned this when I was chubby as a kid for a little while. I got out of that phase because I just didn't want to hear it anymore. And not everybody has the luxury of being able to just turn things off like that. I wasn't addicted to food. I just had some bad habits. I cut them out and that was the end of it. Nobody knows this better than overweight people, of course. The fact that society hates overweight people, nobody knows this better than overweight people, of course. Look, we shame them, right? We pretend we're doing it for their own good, but often it's to protect ourselves and to make ourselves feel better.

1:22:37And even parents are doing this. It's really kind of sad. I even found in research that overweight people are more likely to be convicted of a crime in court during trial by jury. That is shocking. I'm not saying, to be clear, I am not saying overweight people commit more crimes. I'm saying juries view overweight people as somehow morally defective, and this results in a higher conviction rate. That is absolutely bananas. It should be no surprise. I mean, until recently, fat shaming was more or less acceptable in society, and in many places it still is. The major problem with this is often that, well, there's a million problems with it, but one of the major, major problems is that the constant abuse that people take, it causes them to tune out.

1:23:22Even if they're getting good advice, let's say from a professional, a nutritionist, a doctor, they're used to just turning their ears and their brain off when they hear about this because it's been so hurtful and traumatizing throughout their whole lives. So this is really, don't do it, people. I've become much more sensitive about this. And I don't mean talking about it whatsoever. I'm gonna get hate just for doing this show. And I get in trouble for quote-unquote fat shaming all the time, even when I'm not doing it, I really think it's traumatizing. And I feel for people who are that sensitive about it, because there's obviously a reason.

1:23:52And the reason is because these people are treated so poorly. So don't be part of the problem, people. I'm trying to be part of the solution with an episode like this. I think y 'all should do the same. Anyway, so stepping down from my soapbox here. It's not just about blood pressure or whatever. Being obese causes inflammation. It causes other diseases like cancer, autoimmune stuff. I know it contributes to dementia, which is terrifying. It also grinds cartilage down on your knees and hips. It's hard to sleep if you're overweight. You suffer from sleep apnea and breathing issues. It's really just bad for your body and your brain all around.

1:24:24Now, Ozempic was originally a diabetes drug. I think we noted that in the show. Now, it's so popular, a lot of diabetics are having trouble getting it. I took an Uber a few weeks ago, and the driver was talking about it on the phone. And I said, hey, I hope you don't mind me eavesdropping while you're on this call. But are you taking Ozempic? You look good. And he goes, no, no, it's for my wife. And I said, oh, is she enjoying the results? And he goes, what are you talking about? She's diabetic. I don't think there's really any results you would enjoy. It's just a diabetes drug. He was having trouble getting the drug.

1:24:56And the price is way, way up. He actually had no idea that it was being used for cosmetic purposes. and he drives Uber specifically to pay for this drug for his wife with diabetes. He's otherwise retired. That is so sad to me that this guy had to take another job doing that to pay for a drug for his diabetic wife because otherwise they couldn't afford it. Absolutely nuts. He was, unfortunately, the scary part is he was looking at a Chinese knockoffs from compound pharmacies because it's so much cheaper and it's quote unquote the same thing. And now I hope my conversation warned him away from that.

1:25:31but I basically took the wind out of his sails because he thought he was gonna retire from Uber. And that just, the whole thing just kind of makes me sad. I'm especially fascinated in the idea that if Ozempic interferes with satiety and cravings in the brain, that this could be used for addiction. If it's killing cravings in the brain, maybe we can kill cravings for heroin, not just Cheetos and stuff like that. But if it decreases desire for addiction, could that not also decrease people's desire for other things that include rewards? raising kids, having a fulfilling career, learning skills. Anhedonia is a real thing.

1:26:06The absence of pleasure in life. We do not want to increase that. A lot of people turn to drugs because they have that. It can affect bonding with children, raising children. Now, I'm speculating, but this is very much within the realm of possibility. In the end, the conclusion that Johan came to essentially was, we want to starve ourselves, and now we've got a drug that just makes it a hundred times easier. I just cannot see how this doesn't end up making many of us worse off in the long run. So if you are taking this drug, more power to you, but please, please keep up with your health. Make sure your doctors have a close eye on you.

1:26:43Make sure your nutrition is on point. I need you to stick around for a while. I don't want you to grow another head or whatever, unless both heads are listening to this podcast, in which case my downloads will go up. But otherwise, I don't want you to go anywhere. I want you to be healthy and happy because you are loved, even though I don't know you. Statistically, you're loved. There's a few of you I could do without. But most of you, I really enjoy your company, virtually or otherwise. All things Johan Hari will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. That includes transcripts, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:27:16Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, available at jordanharbinger.com slash news. a lot of really good feedback. Now Gabriel and I are writing this. It's practical. It's an under two minute read. That's the idea. Something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. It's a very wee newsletter over at jordanharbinger.com slash news. Six Minute Networking, don't forget that. Sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm doing a lot of written content on LinkedIn now about podcasting and other things I've learned from guests.

1:27:51So find me there. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is taking Ozempic, thinking about taking Ozempic, definitely share this episode with them, or if they're just interested in the science and nutrition of the brain. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you learn.

1:28:21and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by the Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a great new podcast can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Let me save you some hassle. Check out Something You Should Know with my friend Mike Carruthers. Every episode is packed with fascinating insights that you can actually use. Mike interviews top experts on topics that shape your life, like how to optimize your brain chemistry, the best and worst ways to apologize, probably could have used that recently, why couples hate to talk about money. No matter the topic, Mike asks the questions you'd want to ask, getting straight to the good stuff, and the conversations are always engaging, always insightful, guaranteed to leave you a little smarter than before.

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