Dhruv Khullar

So these are millions, tens of millions of people who are using these medications and are seeing the effects of them in their lives.

I mean, I think because these medications are so widely used, there's going to be a different relationship both towards obesity as well as addiction.

But I think there's still a lot of stigma that's preventing people from coming forward when they have an addiction.

We have, as you said, made a lot of strides towards recognizing that a lot of this is biological, that it's happening even unconsciously, and that people really struggle in ways that they shouldn't be blamed for what's happening here.

And so we've known that for many decades.

And for me, some of this really came home during my reporting for this piece.

You know, I underwent an MRI scan, similar to what trial participants would have gone through.

And, you know, I went into this MRI.

They were showing me photographs of all sorts of things, whether it's Big Macs or...

you know, mountains or alcohol like beer, wine, whiskey.

And they were basically seeing how my brain reacted to these various images.

And afterwards, they showed me in response to photographs of alcohol, there was very little activity in kind of the relevant centers of my brain.

And they compared them to people who are struggling with alcohol use disorder.

And those areas just lit up in those people.

And for me, it kind of drove home this point that

so much of our behaviors downstream of these processes that are happening inside of our brains before we even have an opportunity to make a kind of a reasoned decision about what we're going to do.

And so I don't want to say that, you know, our behavior, our will has no role in these conditions.

Of course, we need to encourage and help people make decisions that are in line with their health.

But

I think that needs to be paired with an understanding that a lot of these processes are neurobiological and shaming people because they have these conditions is not going to be a productive way to go about it.