Amy Donnellan

Also in this podcast, people fleeing the deadly crackdown inside Iran offer a rare glimpse of the horrors suffered by those taking to the streets. There were two scientists who were noticing that type 2 diabetics were often people living with obesity. And so when they saw this weight loss, they thought, oh my gosh, we would not just be a treatment company, we would be a prevention. We hear about the history of weight loss drugs.

She told Anna Foster, while many people know it started as a diabetes drug, they may not know just how long ago it was. A lot of people think that these drugs really just came out in the past few years and don't think too much about the development. So it really kind of goes back to the 1980s when...

There were two teams, one in Mass General in Boston and one in the University of Copenhagen, that were essentially in this sort of arms race trying to first of all find this GLP-1, which is the secret sauce in Ozempic and Manjaro and all these other drugs that people are now using for diabetes and weight loss.

yrittäen tunnistaa, että se on olemassa, että se on yksi konsepti, ja myös tunnistaa, että se on auttanut vähentämään syötä. Ja se oli juuri tuossa alkuperäisessä, että he saivat tehdä kaikkea sitä, ja kun se meni terveydenhuollon kehitykselle, se oli silloin, kun he alkoivat nähdä väitökohtaisuutta, jota he näkivät vain ympäristöä, eikä tarkoituksia näistä drogista.

Novo Nordisk on se yritys, joka tekee Ozempicia ja Wigovia obesity medicationia. He olivat insulinin ja diabetesin tyyppisiä. Oli kaksi tutkijaa Novo Nordiskaissa, jotka huomasivat, että obesity levels were rapidly increasing throughout the world and also that their patients, so the type 2 diabetics, were often people living with obesity.

And so when they saw this weight loss, they thought, oh my gosh, we would not just be a treatment company, we would be a prevention. And they got very, very excited about that. But unfortunately, there was a very big stigma around obesity and the causes of it. And even the executives in Nova Nordisk, you know, really kind of thought this has nothing to do with us. This has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.

Kyllä, ja meillä on nyt hyvin tunnettu live-kysymys, jossa on Oprah Winfrey, joka puhui tänä viikonäköisesti siitä, että hän oli näissä drogissa, he todella auttivat hänet, mutta sitten hän tuli ulos niistä, ja hän laittoi 20 poundia takaisin vuoden aikana. Joten luulen, että meillä on myös dataa Oksfordin yliopistossa, jossa on paljon dataa nyt, joka tarkoittaa, että kun tulet ulos näistä drogista, se ei ole niin, että ne kääntyvät uudelleen itsesi tai uudelleen uudelleen uudelleen uudelleen.

It's that actually you do seem to revert back to the way your body was behaving before. So a lot of people who are living with obesity talk about this food noise, which is kind of an incessant chatter in their head, telling them to eat more, eat more, eat more. And for many people that seems to switch off when they're on these drugs. And that's almost, they say, a bigger benefit than the weight loss. Amy Donnellan, author of Off the Scales, The Inside Story of a Zempik and the Race to Cure Obesity.

Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts. We live in a world where the news is at our fingertips. But how often do we stop scrolling and just listen? I'm Malika Bilal and this is The Take. Al Jazeera's daily news podcast where we bring you the context and the people behind the global stories that matter. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.