Dr. Ania Jastreboff

Hi.

Hi, Oprah.

Yes, yes, yes, we have.

Actually, longer than that.

OK, longer than that.

Well, it's one thing for a medical association to declare obesity as a disease, right?

So the AMA declared obesity as a disease in 2013.

The WHO declared it as a disease in 1948.

And actually, we already knew that obesity was a disease back in Egyptian times.

It's another thing to say that it's because of biology and to understand that there's a biology that is driving that obesity.

And it wasn't really until the mid-1990s with the discovery of leptin, which is a hormone made by our fat, that we started to understand that hormones communicate with the brain and that can lead to obesity biology.

The other part of it is the new medicines.

The new medicines actually opened up an entire new world in terms of helping us to understand the biology of obesity.

So until we had effective treatments, there wasn't necessarily a way to treat that obesity.

And so they were key in helping us to understand the biology, which is why obesity is a disease, not because an association declares it to be.

Yes, not everybody is carrying the propensity.

Although, as you pointed out, two thirds or three fourths of us actually are.

So if we had been born 100 years ago, all of us would likely weigh less.

So somebody born... Why?

Well, because of our obesogenic environment.