The Life Scientific: Jens Juul Holst
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Hello. Ozempic, Wegovy, Manjaro. Just a few years ago, most of us had never heard these names. Now they're everywhere, hailed as miracle weight loss drugs that help people shed the pounds by replicating a gut hormone called GLP-1, which tells the brain that you've eaten enough and nudges the pancreas to release insulin. One of the leading researchers behind this breakthrough is Jens Juhl Holst, Professor of Medical Physiology and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, whose work in the 1980s helped discover and decode GLP-1. Over the decades since then, Jens has laid the groundwork for today's wonder drugs that are changing the lives of millions worldwide by treating obesity and diabetes.
This has earned Jens a slew of high-profile accolades, including the Breakthrough Prize and the Tang Prize. And he was named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people in health for 2024. But with great power come great big questions. The rise of GLP-1 drugs is not only reshaping medicine, but also sparking debate about how they should be used and exactly what they mean for long-term healthcare and healthy societies. So hopefully we'll get some of those questions answered today. Jens Juhlholz, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you very much, and thank you very much for asking me to do this. Certainly a lot of people will have heard about weight loss jabs in recent years. How exactly do they work?
The interesting new thing about them is that they inhibit appetite. So that's the principle of the slimming. And that's quite a difference to many other approaches to weight loss. And if you think about it, it is one of the key ways of regulating the problem, which is the food intake, of course.
There is and always has been a lot of stigma around obesity and weight loss. Have you seen that attitude play out around these new drugs?
Yes, of course. Mostly I know of it from my own country, from Denmark, where people think that it is kind of cheating. You know, you're not supposed to do this. This is not the right way. You must suffer to lose weight. And some people, you know, object to the idea that you should lose weight at all. You should be happy with your own size. And from my angle, it's a different question. The problem is the complications of obesity. I'm a doctor.
What are GLP-1 drugs and how do they work?
So this is my interest here. And we know that there is a large number of complications to obesity. And that's what you can do something about with these new medications. And I think that's fantastic.
Well, we're certainly going to talk about a lot of these hugely positive results. But concerns have been raised, including by you. You said a couple of years ago that the success of GLP-1 drugs has brought new scientific, clinical and ethical questions that the medical community needs to navigate with care. So which questions do you think should be prioritized?
So these drugs were originally meant for diabetes therapy, and they're now spreading out to obesity therapy also. And the problem with both of them is that you have a decreased life expectancy. And not only that, but also you run a risk of having complications during your lifetime. And that can be very cumbersome and invalidating. And this is something that the society should do something about. Now, these new drugs have been proven to reduce the mortality and been proven to improve these complications and the morbidities that are associated with diabetes and obesity. So now we know that you can do something about it. So that's where I think that society somehow has to take over. And somebody should think about how we spread these possibilities to the general benefit of the population rather than to the few that can afford it.
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