Is Ozempic™ enabling sustainable consumption?

In the initial weeks of October 2023, a surge of news stories dominated the headlines, proclaiming the potential transformative potential of weight-loss drugs on the food business. Headlines such as “How Weight Loss Drugs Like Ozempic Could Radically Reshape the Food Business,” “Ozempic Is Making People Buy Less Food, Walmart Says,” and “Ozempic Is on the Rise. That Could Be a Problem for Food Companies” (Peck 2023; Case and Banjo 2023; Wiener-Bronner 2023). One food-industry analyst quoted in a CNN article observed that drugs like Ozempic™ “have the potential to have a bigger impact on food consumption…than, arguably, anything that we’ve seen before” (Wiener-Bronner 2023). And it is not just farmers and food retailers who are bracing for potentially transformational changes as consumers increasingly come to rely on the pharmaceutical industry to manage their appetites.¹

A notable article in the Washington Post during this same timeframe took the enthusiasm a step further exploring the potential effects of this new wave of weight-loss medications on the airline industry.

Analysts for investment bank Jefferies theorized that if enough overweight adults lost enough pounds on these drugs, they could reduce the weight of an airplane. Assuming the average passenger’s weight dropped by 10 pounds, they estimated a weight savings of 1,790 pounds per flight, which would result in the saving of $80 million in annual fuel costs per airline (Gilbert and Reiley 2023).

Already approximately two percent of the population in the United States is taking these apparently effective appetite suppressants and rapidly expanding demand is outstripping production capacity.² Estimates suggest that the drugs cut calorie consumption by upwards of 20 percent (Peck 2023). Might it be the case that while researchers and policymakers have been striving—often with underwhelming results—to promote more sustainable consumption, that the pharmaceutical industry has managed to figure out, inadvertently of course, how to slash by significant margins not only food consumption but energy use as well? These developments suggest that it is a timely moment to begin to consider how this process of medicinally induced consumption reduction could unfold.

Even in these early stages, with Ozempic™ and other similar drugs available in just a handful of countries, it is prudent to anticipate how a weekly or monthly injection, or perhaps in due course even a daily pill, could reshape the economies of countries heavily reliant on agricultural, or even fossil-fuel, production. As food producers struggle to achieve customary increases in throughput and sales, we could see macroeconomic changes that, for example, reduce pressure on the conversion of Amazonian rainforests into grazing land for cattle destined for the world’s fast-food restaurants. Might, somewhat unwittingly and without fanfare, pharmaceutical firms harbor a magic bullet for mitigating climate change and accelerating progress on several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals?

Additionally, as formerly overweight consumers slim down and become more physically active, we could witness new political pressure building across metropolitan regions for more open space and outdoor recreational facilities. And given the close relationship between the chemical and agricultural industries, it is not idle speculation to foresee rippling reductions in the ecologically deletrious impacts of a wide range activities.

The stunning impacts being unleashed by this new category of weight-loss drugs even stirs the imagination to gleefully wonder whether it might be possible to formulate medication to curtail the desire for automobile use or altered proclivities to live in outsized homes. While such expectations might today be confined to the realm of science fiction, we should not underestimate the tangible and potentially positive outcomes that Ozempic™ and other similar pharmaceuticals are already enabling.

Simultaneously, historical precedent warns us to be vigilant for perverse and problematic rebound effects. If growing numbers of individuals lose interest in eating, questions immediately arise regarding how they will reallocate their time. It is doubtful that newly slender consumers will turn to building bird houses and other environmentally benign avocations but what will replace the time previously spent around the dining table? Perhaps more importantly, given the centrality of food consumption on everyday practices, social relationships, and cultural reproduction, it is crucial to be attentive to effects on households and broader communities? Will fuel savings due to less rotund passengers translate into new profits for the airline industry or amplified demand for air travel because of lower ticket prices?³

This is not the first instance of the pharmaceutical industry furtively driving sustainability. The precursor, of course, was the birth-control pill which massively shifted—and continues to shift—demographic patterns through declining fertility rates. And drug manufacturers were ultimately responsible for stemming the AIDS crisis over the past few decades as well as more recently for reducing mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acknowledging these contributions does not imply an uncritical endorsement of the pharmaceutical industry but emphasizes that transformational changes can be triggered in unexpected ways, and we should be prepared to embrace them when they appear.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic™ has garnered the largest share of media attention to date, the category of new weight-loss drugs also includes Mounjaro™ (Eli Lily), Trulicity™ (Eli Lily), Rybelsus™ (Novo Nordisk), Wegovy™ (Novo Nordisk), and Saxenda™ (Novo Nordisk). Most of these drugs were originally developed to manage Type 2 diabetes, but their ability to induce weight loss through appetite suppression has been an interesting, and largely unexpected, co-benefit and they are now regularly prescribed on an “off-label” basis for this purpose.

2 Some forecasts for the United States estimate that over the next ten years uptake of these drugs could reach 7 percent of the population, or 24 million people (Peck 2023).

3 It merits drawing attention as well to the unprecedented profits that Novo Nordisk has recently begun to realize. The company has a market capitalization that exceeds the gross domestic product (GDP) of Denmark, its home base, and Danish economic ­authorities have had to make statistical adjustments to account for the distortionary effects that the company’s vast earnings are having on the country as a whole (Foroohar 2023; Nelson 2023).