A bumpy ride ahead for bond markets
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Do GLP‑1 weight‑loss injections cause faster weight regain after stopping treatment?
Could weight loss drugs make it harder to keep the pounds off in the long run? Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Guy Kilty. Good morning. revolutionary weight loss jabs like Ozempic, Monjaro and Wagovi have flooded the market in the past couple of years, helping millions of people shed excess pounds and creating a boom in the pharma industry. But a new UK study published in the British Medical Journal says that while these injections can be effective initially, once users stop taking them, they can regain their lost weight four times faster than those who stop conventional dieting and exercising. The BBC's Nick Marsh has been looking into this.
Hi, Nick. Hello, Guy. So does the report say why people who've been taking the weight loss drugs do put on the weight much more quickly?
What it found was that even though these weight loss jabs are incredibly effective at helping people lose weight, it basically suppresses your hunger by providing this hormone, GLP-1. even though they are incredibly effective at doing this, if you suddenly come off them, it found that people were gaining on average 0.8 kilos a month compared to 0.1 kilos a month if you were dieting and exercising and stopped doing that. Now, even though the study didn't explicitly say why, a lot Lots of experts say that artificially producing this hunger-suppressing hormone over long periods of time in your body means that your body could produce less of its own natural GLP-1, the hunger-suppressing hormone. And so when you come off the drugs, you're going to be even hungrier than you were before you even went on them.
The companies that make these drugs, what have they said in response to this survey?
So there's a couple of main pharmaceutical companies that we're talking about. Eli Lilly, an American company that makes Monjaro. Novo Nordisk, that is a Danish company that makes Swigovy. They basically both say the same thing. They say that these drugs should be taken under medical supervision. You should always follow the advice of your health practitioners, and they should crucially be accompanied by healthy eating, physical activity, lots of medical follow-ups, and that obesity is a chronic disease. They don't dispute the findings, but they put it into a broader context of a healthy lifestyle.
Why might stopping GLP‑1 drugs make people hungrier than before?
As you mentioned, these companies have been very successful over the last couple of years producing these drugs. What are the implications, if any, for the industry that makes these drugs available?
Well, there's no regulatory implications. They're selling them as they were before, but it does highlight the risks of coming off them. The cynical onlookers could look at this as something which could definitely benefit pharmaceutical companies. If it's something that you have to take for the rest of your life, then that means that's a drug that you're going to be spending money on for a substantial period of time. Nick, thanks very much for joining us on Marketplace. Thanks, Guy.
Let's do the numbers. Samsung's quarterly profits more than tripled after global demand for AI servers lifted memory chip prices. South Korea's largest company reported an operating profit of almost $14 billion in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, stock markets in Asia trended down on Thursday with the Nikkei in Tokyo and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong both down. Now, the social media platform X has missed a deadline from the Indian government to explain how it's responding to the generation of indecent imagery by its AI chatbot, Grok. India is one of several countries, including the UK and others in the European Union, that are raising concerns. Over the weekend, X's owner, Elon Musk, said that anyone generating illegal content through AI would suffer the same consequences as if they uploaded it themselves.
2025 was a choppy year for the world's bond markets, with a lot of price volatility. Events in Venezuela this week saw US Treasury bond yields rise, and many analysts are predicting 2026 bond markets will be as turbulent as they were last year.
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