Johann Hari: Uncovering if Ozempic is a Miracle Drug or Health Hazard & 3 Things They Do Not Want To Tell About Ozempic

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'll never forget the second day I took a zen pick,
I woke up. Oh, I feel something really weird? What
is it? I'd woken up and I wasn't hungry. I
don't remember that ever happening before. One of the worst,
most prolific.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Authors, and he has a brand new book, Magic Pill.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Award winning journalist yore Hand hiring forty seven percent of
Americans want to take these drunks. They are going to
change all our lives for better and for worse. And
this is something I think people are not being warned about.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Hey, everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you.
In the last ninety days, seventy nine point four percent
of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are
not subscribed to this channel. There's research that shows that
if you want to create a habit, make it easy
to access. By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a

(00:49):
habit of learning how to be happier, healthier, and more healed.
This would also mean the absolute world to me and
help us make better, bigger writer content for you and
the world. Subscribe right now.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Jay Sheety Jay Sheddy See yet Hey, everyone, Welcome back
to On Purpose, the place you come to become a happier,
healthier and more healed. You know that my goal here
is to sit down with incredible thinkers, thought leaders, people
who are crafting the way our mind works and defining culture,

(01:26):
to have conversations that truly, truly matter. Today I get
to interview one of my favorite authors. I've been wanting
him to be on the show for such a long
time and I can't believe he's finally, finally here. And
this new book is one of the ones that I
really hope that you take the time to read, because
I promise you you, your friend, a family member is having
to deal with the challenges that come with this theme

(01:48):
and concept in their daily, weekly, and monthly life. Today's
guest is none other than Joan Hari. His new book
is called The Magic Pill The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing
Risks of the new weight loss Drugs, and I can't
wait to dive into it with them. If you don't
have a copy of the book already, make sure you
go and grab one. We'll put the link in the
comments and caption below. Please welcome to On Purpose. Johann

(02:11):
Hiri Johanne, thank you for being here.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I'm ridiculously happy to be here. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Honestly, I mean it. I was saying this to you offline,
but I'd like to repeat it for my audience. You're
one of the most gripping and captivating authors that have
read in a long time in the nonfiction space. I
enjoy your work so deeply. I feel completely enthralled when
I'm reading your work. I love the way you tell stories,
and you effortlessly, with so much grace and kindness, bring

(02:37):
people into a universe that they can understand very complex
things and make sense of how to apply them in
their life, which is so hard hard to do. So
thank you so much for all the work that you
do and the experiments you do on yourself.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Oh cheers. Thanks yea.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
And the fact that we're from very similar places with
basically neighbors.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
We might go a little bit too British in this
pub so I'm going to try and remember we are
talking to mostly American audience. Yeah. I was once in
a diner in fact, in an I hop in a
place called Cactus, Arizona, and I was trying to order pancakes.
I kept saying to have some pancakes please, just kept
going what what And after a while she said to me,
do you speak English? I was like, my people invented it.

(03:18):
What do you mean? Right? So, I'm very conscious that,
you know, we sound like weird refugees from downtown Abbey.
I'm going to try and americanize slightly.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Well. It's funny because every time i'm when I live
in the United States, but everyone in the United States
always tells me that they find the British accent quite
authoritative and they see it as a sign of education
and knowledge. And for me, when I heard ted talk
in the American accent from a professor or a researcher,
that's when I find that it's interesting. Do you feel
that way or what's your date?

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Oh that's so interesting, I think because I spent I
live here half the year. Yeah, I think I'm kind
of torn between the value of our accents. But I'm
conscious that we get given like we basically go in
with the assumption of ten added IQ points in this situation.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Right, So yeah, and I'm like, if you knew me,
I'm not from a brush faring like I'm not anyway, we.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Sound like hilariously part like I was ritually raised by
my grandmother, whose job was to clean toilets. But we
sound basically like the queen.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Queen or not? But yeah, and so I want to
dive straight into this, and I want to start off
by saying, what are some of the biggest misconceptions you've
heard about ozempic almost things that people may even be
thinking as they're tuning into this or watching this right now.
What are some of the things people already think they
know that you actually believe in misconceptions.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
I think the biggest misconception is that we should either
be yay, these drugs are amazing or do these drugs evil?
The biggest misconception is that we can be certain or
confident about these drugs at the moment. I never forget
from the moment I learned about these drugs existence. I
felt so conflicted. It's why I wrote the book, right.
I remember the moment so vividly. It was the winter

(04:51):
of twenty twenty two, and it was that moment when
the world was opening up again. And I got invited
to a party for the first time and god knows
how long, and I decided to go, and I was
in an uber on the way there, and the party
was thrown by an Oscar winning actor I think someone
you know actually, And I'm not saying that just a
name drop. It's relevant to what I had the next
And on the way there, I was feeling gained quite
a lot of weight during Lockdown. I was feeling kind

(05:13):
of schlubby. I was quite fat start a lockdown, I
was fatter then and I and I was thinking, Oh,
this is gonna be awkward. And then I suddenly realized
that kind of everyone I knew had gained some weight
during Lockdown, and I thought, oh, this is going to
be fascinating to see all these Hollywood stars with a
bit of chub on them. Right, And I arrived and
I started walking around, and it wasn't just that no

(05:35):
one had gained weight. Everyone was gaunt, right. Everyone looked
at their own Snapchat filter them they were like clearer
and cleaner and sharper. And I was kind of wandering
around a bit of a daze, and I bumped into
a friend of mine on the dance floor and I
said to her, WHOA, looks like everyone really did take
up pilazas during lockdown, And she laughed, like, you just said,
I must have looked puzzled, and she said, well, you

(05:57):
know it's not Pilata's right, And I had no I
did what she was talking about, and she pulled up
on her phone and a zenpic pen And that was
when I learned. I guess in the next couple of days,
that we now have a new formal weight loss drug
that works in a completely new way that causes the
average person who uses it to lose fifteen percent of
their body weight. In fact, with Munjiro, the next in
this class of drugs, you lose twenty one percent of

(06:18):
your body weight. And for the next, which will be
available next year, Triple G, you lose twenty four percent
of your body weight on average. And I remember, as
soon as I heard that, just feeling this tremendous division
in my own mind between. On the one hand, I
could obviously see the benefits. I'm older now than my
grandfather ever got to be. He died when he was
forty four of her heart attack. Loads of the men

(06:40):
in my family get heart problems. My dad had terrible
heart problems. My uncle died of a heart attack. My
other uncle had a heart attack that survived it. And
I knew that Sadly, the evident scientific evidence is very
clear that obesity makes it much more likely you'll have
heart problems along with many other medical problems. So I thought, Okay,
if there's a drug that can reverse or really reduce obesity,

(07:01):
that could have really big health benefits. I also thought,
wait a minute, wait a minute, I've seen this story before. Right,
Every twenty years or so, a new miracle weight loss
drug is announced, We're told it's going to save us,
all loads of people take it. They always discover it
has some horrendous side effect that you know, means it
has to be pulled from the market, leaving a wave

(07:22):
of terribly damaged people in its way. So I thought,
are we going to see that again? I also thought,
what about the progress we've made with body positivity, what
about the what about people with eating disorders? There were
just so many doubts that came into my mind. So
to really get to the bottom of this, I ended
up going on this big journey all over the world,
from Iceland to Minneapolis to Okinawa in the south of
Japan to interview the leading experts in the world on it.

(07:45):
The biggest defenders of the drugs, the people who made
the breakthroughs that made them possible. The biggest critics of
the drugs, and I learned a huge amount about the
extraordinary benefits of these drugs. The disturbing risks of these
drugs is twelve quite disturbing risks. How it's going to
try transform the culture in all sorts of ways that
even people who don't want to take these drugs, it's
going to change the world around you in really fascinating ways.

(08:07):
But at the end of all that, it's a slightly
weird feeling. I still feel quite conflicted about it. So
I guess the misconception is that we should be so sure, right,
this is complicated, and we have to think through the complexity.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Soya, and this idea that we have of or this
misconception that you just mentioned that we have of this
idea of that it's all good or all bad. I
wondered through your research kind of how you felt about
that type of thinking. I feel like, as humans, we
have this very binary thinking about anything and everything. Right,
that's a good person, they're a mean person. They're a

(08:39):
healthy person, they are an unhealthy person. When it comes
to drugs. Oh, this one's perfect, this one's going to
ruin your life. What did you discover about people's binary
types of thinking through the research of this drug.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
I guess because if you think about this, this drug
and the book is called magic, Pilker, there's three ways
we could think about this as magic, and the first
two are the kind of binary ways, right. The first
way is these drugs could be magic in the sense
that they could just solve the problem of obesity. And
I've got to tell you, there are days it feels
like that my whole life. I have hugely overeaten because

(09:15):
I was screwed up by the food industry and various
other things. And now, you know, to do the book.
I've been taking a zempic for a year. There's been
lots of ups and downs, but you know, now that
problem has largely gone away. I've lost an enormous amount
of weight forty two pounds. But also I've lost these
a lot of these destructive habits. So you know, it

(09:35):
could be magic in the sense of just like WHOA,
the problem solved. The second way it could be magic,
and I think this is a real possibility, is it
could be like a magic trick. It could be like,
you know, the conjurer who shows you a card trick
while secretly picking your pocket. It could be that, in
addition to giving you these benefits, the risks, and there
are really significant risks here, are so substantial that they

(09:58):
undo the good. I don't rule that out. In fact,
I think it's a significant possibility. But the third way
is actually the most likely, and I think it's the
one that gets us out of that kind of binary thinking.
And it's the think about the stories of magic that
we grew up with as kids. Right, think about it,
I'll add in, Right, you find the lamp, you rub it,
the genie appears, and he grants your wishes, and your

(10:20):
wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected. Right,
You get what you wanted, but always at some weird
right angle that you never anticipated. And we're already seeing
that with these drugs. You've got to get out the
binary good or bad to think about that. But you know,
Barclay's Bank commissioned a really interesting, sober minded financial analyst
called Emily Field to just look at these drugs to

(10:41):
figure out, Okay, what's this going to mean for our
investment decisions going forward? What should be investing in, what
should be not investing in as she came back and said,
if you want a comparison for the effect of these drugs,
you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone. Right. So,
if you and me had been speaking in whatever it
was two thousand and seven when Steve Job's On veiled
the iPhone, we would not have been able to game out,
you know, door tod ash and TikTok and all these

(11:03):
things that have transformed our lives that flowed from that.
I think we're already beginning to see outside that kind
of narrow binary, such an array of things that happening
as a result of these forty seven percent of Americans
want to take these drugs. They are going to change
all our lives for better and for worse in a
way that I think we need to take a moment,

(11:23):
as this extraordinary transformation happens all around us, to really
think through the benefits, the risks, and what it's going
to mean for all of us and what we should
do about it. Now.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, let's talk about how we got here. You mentioned
that the food industry has screwed us up, screwed you up.
You mentioned just there. Let's talk about how we got here.
How we even needed to turn towards these drugs, starting
with some of the issues that you think the food
industry has caused, and how we've been trained to almost
eat more, eat worse, eat unhealthier for ourselves.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
For a long time, I thought when I was researching
the book that I was looking at two separate topics,
because I thought, at first, so I was looking at
why did obesity explode in our lifetimes massively explode? And
how do the drugs work? But actually I discovered these
are not separate topics. The same thing explains both that
it's core. So I would just urge everyone watching listening

(12:19):
to just stop for a moment and google photographs of
beaches in the United States or Britain in the year
I was born, nineteen seventy nine. Just take a look
at them. Right. If you look at them, they seem
really weird to us, because almost everyone is what we
would call skinny or jacked. Right, and you look at
it and you think that's really weird. Where's everyone else?
Was it like a skinny person convention in Atlantic City

(12:41):
that day? And then you look at the population figures, No,
that's what people look like in the year I was born,
We basically humans have a bit more than three hundred
thousand years in which obcity is extremely rare, and then
essentially in your lifetime and mind, it absolutely blows up.
Between the year I was born and the year I
turned twenty one, obesity doubled in the United States, and

(13:02):
then in the next twenty years severe obesity doubled again.
And it seems really weird. What's going on? What would
what could possibly explain this unprecedented transformation in our bodies
where we got to the point where now forty two
percent of Americans are obese, right, seems really weird. What happened?
We know what happened. This change takes place everywhere where

(13:24):
one thing happens. It's not where people become weak willed
or lack will power, or become lazy or all the
other cruel, stigmatizing things we say about overweight people. It
always happens where people move from mostly eating fresh, whole
foods that they prepared on the day to mostly eating
processed and ultra processed foods which are constructed in factories

(13:46):
out of chemicals in a process that actually isn't even
cool cooking. It's called manufacturing food, and it turns out
this new kind of food, which never existed before in
human history, affects our bodies in a completely different way
to the old kind of food that all humans before.
And there's loads of ways that's true. I go through
seven reasons in the book. But there's an experiment that
was actually done here in New York that to me

(14:06):
just totally distills what happened to us. Right. So it's
done by a brilliant Irish scientists called Professor Paul Kenny,
not just up the road from where we are. So
he's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai here in
New York. And he grew up in Dublin in Ireland,
and when he was in his twenties he moved to
San Diego in California to continue his scientific research. And
he quickly clocked, WHOA, Americans don't eat like Irish people

(14:27):
did at the time, much more process and ultra process food,
much more sugary, salty food, right, And like many a
good immigrant, he quickly assimilated. Within a year, he'd gained
like thirty pounds and he was like, why, what's going on?
And he felt like this new kind of food he
was eating wasn't just affecting his gut, it was affecting
his brain. It was changing what he wanted. So he

(14:49):
designed this experiment to test it, which I have nicknamed
a cheesecake Park. It's not the official name of it.
It's very simple. He got load of rats and he
raised them in a cage, and they had nothing to
eat but the kind of healthy thing that rats evolved
to eat over thousands of years, right in pellet form.
So when the rats have got the kind of natural
food they used to they would eat when they were hungry,
and they would stop when they were full, and they

(15:11):
never became overweight or obese. Given their kind of natural food.
They had a kind of innate nutritional wisdom that meant
they were gone, I've had enough now. Then Professor Kenny
introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some
baker and he bought a load of Sneakers' bars. Crucially,
he bought a load of cheesecake and he put it
in the cage alongside the option of the healthy food,
and the rats went crazy for the American diet. They

(15:34):
would literally hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their
way out, just completely slicked with cheesecake, right, and they
ate and ate and ate and ate, and all that
nutritional wisdom they'd had before disappeared. They just rapidly became obese.
In fact, the way Professor Kenny put it to me
was within a couple of days they were different animals,

(15:55):
and so this nutritional wisdom that they'd had before with
their natural food just disappeared. The brakes were off right.
Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment, and again in a
way that to a lifelong junk food adict seems to
be a bit cruel. He took away the American diet
and left them with nothing but the healthy food they've
grown up with. And he was pretty sure he knew
what would happen. That they would you eat more of

(16:16):
the healthy food than they had before, and this would
prove that junk food expands the number of calories you
eat in a day. That is not what happened. Something
much weirder happened. Once they'd had the American diet and
it was taken away, they refused to eat anything at all.
It was like they no longer recognized the healthy food
as food. It was only when they were really starving

(16:37):
that they finally went back and ate it. Now, what
this tells us, and there's loads of evidence in humans,
is the diet we're eating is profoundly undermining our ability
to ever feel full and to In fact, the key
word here both in explaining the rise of obest and
how these drugs work is satiety. It's not a word
we use that often in every day English, but it's
the feeling of being stated, the feeling of having had

(16:58):
enough and not wanting any more. And this kind of
food we eat profoundly steals our satiety. Right. And what
these drugs do is they give you back your sense
of society. They give you back your sense of being full,
but with a potential cost. Right.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, And it's so fascinating to hear how so much
of it has become stigmatized. You don't have enough self control,
you don't have enough willpower, you're not disciplined enough, and
that's why it's leading to these things. And as you're saying,
I mean, I've also read different work that talks about
how our portion sizes have increased. And I remember the

(17:32):
first time I came to the United States, I think
I was nine years old with my family, We'll come
into Orlando to go to Disney World. Yeah yeah, I
was going to get you to sing Theozenbic. So going
a second. But we come to Orlando, and I remember
like getting one of those you could get like this
jumbo size coke, like which was refillable at the gas station,

(17:55):
and then if you wanted, you could get the double
jumbo size coke, which is refill about every gas station.
And I couldn't believe. And that's all I wanted as
a kid, right, I was like, that's the coolest thing ever.
My parents got it for me, and then I was
drinking refillable cokes the whole time.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
That's when you've got diabetes the first time, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
And I'm pre disposed to diabetes because of my genetics,
so it's so interesting. And similarly for me, I grew
up as a chocolate addict, so I ate a chocolate bar,
a chocolate yogurt, a chocolate biscuit, and a chocolate ice
cream every day growing up. And I was very overweight
growing up. I lost a lot of weight. We really, Yeah,
I'm until age fourteen fifteen, and then at fifteen I

(18:32):
started playing a lot of sports. I soon after became
vegetarian and I lost a ton of weight. And for me,
what happened though, was I still had bad habits. So
I got through university having a sprite and a chocolate
bar every single day, and it wouldn't show up as
fat physically, but it would show up as you know now,

(18:54):
I see it as glucose spikes. Now I see it
as an increase in the chances of having diabetes. And
it had in that direction. And my wife has been
the one to coach me more on the side of
self control and discipline and finding alternatives. And I've seen
a huge shift in my life ever since I've stopped
refined sugars, ever since I've switched my diet to whole

(19:15):
foods less processed foods, and I've done it in a
very self controlled way. And how hard that is, I know,
how pro and I still am to having craving sometimes
and at the same time, I've lost taste for certain things. Anyway,
I'm saying all of that to ask you the question
of portion sizes have increased. We're eating fake foods that

(19:36):
are making us want them more. We don't feel satiated
when we're consuming. How does the drug actually make you
feel satiated, because I think it's important for people to
understand that what is happening in order for you to
feel satiated.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
It's the weirdest thing. I'll tell you how it feels
as an individual, and then the science of it. I'll
never forget. The second day, I took a zenpic woke
up and I was lying in bed and I thought, oh,
I feel something really weird. What is it? And I
couldn't locate in my body what it was. It took
me about five minutes and I suddenly realized I'd woken

(20:15):
up and I wasn't hungry. I don't remember that ever
happening before, right from when I was very young, you know,
grew up in a working class family. We ate constant
process and junk food. And I was in a bit
of a daze and I went to there's a cafe
just around the corner from where I live, and I
went in and I ordered what I used to order
every morning for breakfast when I'm in London. It was
a big brown roll with loads of chicken and loads

(20:35):
of mayo in it, and I I had like three
or four mouthfalls, and I just didn't want anymore. I
was full. I was following a way that I never
normally felt full. I thought, that's really weird, and I
went for lunch that day. I went to there's a
Turkish cafe next to my office, and I went in

(20:56):
and I ordered what I used to order every day
when I went there, which was a Mediterranean lamb. Again,
I had three or four mouthfuls and I was just full.
It was. It was so strange. It was like kind
of shutters had come down on my appetite. I can't
think of another way to describe it. Or it was
more like when I ate. So imagine you had just
had Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner and you were stuffed,

(21:17):
and then I came along and said, hey, j great news,
I've got your KFC bucket. Right You'd just be like,
oh no, But you get to that level really really quickly.
So obviously, I interviewed the people who made the breakthroughs
for the drug, scientists who'd worked on the key stages
of developing the drug. One of the weird things about
the drug is we don't actually know how it works,
but there's some things we know for sure. There's a

(21:37):
big amount of indeterminacy. But there's some things we know
for sure. If you ate something now, it doesn't matter
what it is, something healthy unhealthy. After a little while,
your pancreas would produce a hormone called GLP one, and
GLP one, we now know, is just part of the
natural signaling in your body saying hey, j it had enough. Stop.
It's like the breaks, right, But that natural GLP one

(21:58):
only stays around in your system for a couple of
minutes and it's just washed away. So what these drugs
do is they inject you with an artificial copy of
GLP one that, instead of being washed away in a
few minutes, stays around your system for a whole week.
It's why when I go to the cafe, I only
want three off our mouths because I'm already so close
to form my GLP one or this artificial beasting of
GLP one makes me feel full so quickly. So initially

(22:20):
it was thought when they were developing these drugs that
because this hormone is made in the gart, it has
an effect primarily on the gut. This must be a
drug that's changing your gut in some way. And it
clearly is right. And there's all sorts of ways. We
know that, but from interviewing the cutting edge scientists working
on this, particularly neuroscientists, it's increasingly clear that in fact,

(22:40):
these drugs work primarily on your brain. You don't just
have GLP one receptors in your gut. You've got them
in your thyroid, which is important for something else, and
your brain. And these drugs are profoundly changing your brain.
We know that if you give these drugs to rats
and then you kill them and cut their brains open,
which obviously you're not allowed to do with humans for
very good reasons, what you see is the drug go
everywhere in the rat's brain, everywhere, Right, So I remember

(23:04):
when I learned that, and I learned it quite a
while into, you know, a few months into taking the drugs.
It's just a concerting thing to learn it. You've reads,
how would I put it, It's a much more intimate transformation.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Saying that changes your gut, you're sort of like, oh, okay,
that's fine. Saying that's changing your brain, and profoundly changing
your brain partly explains why the effect is so powerful,
why these are so much more effective than all previous
diet drugs. It also potentially raises some other benefits in
terms of benefits for addiction. It also raises some other
risks around whether it may cause depression, because there's a
debate about what it's actually doing in your brain. But

(23:36):
for me, it just sort of made me realize, Oh,
this is a, like, I say, a much more intimate
change than a lot of people realize, I think when
they start taking it.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, who was it?

Speaker 1 (23:48):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Your nephew said, where is Joanne Harry? And what have
you done with him?

Speaker 1 (23:55):
To McDonald's. So I've had a long My relationship with
junk food is probably best typified by what are the
low points in my life? I was I could tell
you exactly when it happened. It was one pm on
Christmas Eve two thousand and nine and I went to
my local branch of KFC in East London and I
went in. I said, my standard order, which is so
disgusting I'm not going to repeat it. Healthy. It was

(24:18):
literally bucket of fried chicken, and.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
I love a bucket of fried chickens. He was such
a healthy glow, like you've never eaten a chicken drum
st plant based now, but back in the day that
popcorn chicken would have been my jab. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
The guy behind the counter said to me, oh yeah,
and I'm really glad you're here. I was like, all right,
and he went off behind where they fried the chicken
and everything, and he came back with a massive Christmas
card in which they'd written to our best customer and
everyone had written like personal messages to it. And one
of the reasons my heart sang is I thought, this

(24:52):
isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the
most how be happening to me? It was the second
lowest moment in my life as an overweight person. That
the worst was the time that I was fat shamed
by the Dalai lamos, But no, there was this moment
where it's not even a joke, by the way, the
horror of the dilarma another time. But so I'd had
this very intimate relationship with this food all all my life,

(25:17):
and to have it one of the There were many
good things that flowed from takeo ZMP for me, and
there are many benefits to it, as well as some
significant risks. But the weirdest moment for me actually was
another moment that happened in KFC. In fact, one of
my nephew said to me, a lot of the key
moments in your life seemed to happen in bright She's
a KFC I heard. I like that, good point. But

(25:39):
the I had a real epiphany about this because what
these drugs do is they profoundly interrupt your underlying eating patterns. Right,
you can't eat the way you did before. And this
is something I think people are not being warned about.
And I tried to take people through in a lot
of detail in the book, is you need to be
prepared that because of that, a lot of the underlying

(26:00):
emotional issues that drive your eating may well come to
the surface. So I had this moment for me. I
was in Vegas. I was, as you know, I'm writing
a book about a series of crimes that have been
happening in Vegas that I've been researching for a long time.
And I was researching the murder of someone that I
knew and loved, and it was obviously very painful, as
you can imagine, he was an incredible person. I was

(26:24):
working on this and I just, you know, felt bad,
and I went to this branch of KFC on West Sahara,
which is one of the grimmest KFCs in the world,
and believe me, I could write a book about all
of them. And I went in. I'm reading on autopilots.
It was like seven eight months into taking the drugs.
I I went in and I ordered what I would
have ordered a year before. Right. I ordered a bucket

(26:45):
of fried chicken, and I had a chicken and I
wasn't even really thinking about the eating or anything. I
was and I had a chicken drumstick. And I looked
at this bucket and I thought, I can't eat this right,
Like I would throw up if I tried to eat.
I remember Colonel Sanders was on the wall, and it's
like he was looking at me, going, hey, what happened
to my best customer? And I were thinking, Oh, you're

(27:08):
just going to have to feel your feelings right, And
it's interesally if you look at the scientific evidence, there's
scientific evidence for five reasons why we eat. One of
them is the obvious one, to sustain our bodies. And
I would have told you before I started taking this
drug that was why I ate, right, But here I am.
Then I ate maybe three thousand, two hundred calories a day.
Now I ate around a thousand eight hundred, So all

(27:29):
that other eating was doing something else right. And I
go through the four psychological reasons why we eat, they
don't obviously applies differently to different people, and those things
kind of get surfaced. And I remember going to one
of my closest friends when I got back from Vegas
and saying to hey, I've got to stop taking this.

(27:50):
I can't take it. This is too upsetting. And she
said to me, go hand, stop taking it. If you
want to, that's fine, but you need to know these
drugs are not causing this issue. This issue was there
all along. In this case, what they're doing is giving
you an opportunity to deal with those issues in a
better way than drowning your feelings in saturated fats. Right,
And that's been a bumpy transitional that I'm glad. I'm

(28:11):
glad I stuck with it, although lots of people respect
the fact.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
They don't walk me through why people don't like, what
was their reasoning? What were they struggling with so much?

Speaker 1 (28:23):
There's a lot of things people struggle with the drugs,
but in relation to it, I'm sure we'll get into
lots of them if you think about this specific one.
If you want to think about the benefits and risks
of these drugs when it comes to obesity. I actually
think it's quite helpful to look at a parallel area
of science. We've only been giving these drugs to people
for obesti for a couple of years, but there's a
parallel area of science that can help us to think
about the benefits. And I think some of the answer

(28:44):
to your question. So, and it's barioatric surgery. Right up
to now, it's been very hard without some kind of
external intervention to lose huge amounts of weight and keep
it off. Clearly, you did it. There are lots of
people who do it, but it's actually a surprisingly small
percentage of the people who try it succeed. I go
through why in the book, and that reasons are really important.
So actually the most effective way up to now has

(29:06):
been bariatric surgery, things like you know, stomach stapling, gastric sleeves.
Baratric surgery is a horrific operation. It's really grueling. You know,
one in a thousand people die during operation. It's no joke, right,
But the reason people put themselves through that is because
of the extraordinary benefits to their health. Afterwards if you
have back Now bear in mind they were severely obese

(29:28):
at the start, otherwise you wouldn't qualify for the surgery.
But if you have this surgery, in the seven years
that follow, you are fifty six percent less likely to
die of a heart attack, you are sixty percent less
likely to die of cancer, you are ninety two percent
less likely to die of diabetes related causes. In fact,
it's so good for your health that you're forty percent

(29:48):
less likely to die at all in that seven year period. Right.
And we know similarly that these drugs are moving us
in a similar direction. So if you take these drugs
and your BMI is higher than twenty seven at the start,
you are twenty percent less likely to have a heart
attack or stroke right in the years that follow. That's
very that's gonna that. It's close to my heart. It
is literally close to my heart. Right. But you also,

(30:11):
when you look at bariatric surgery, begin to see some
of the drawbacks, and I think the key to what
you're asking might be there. So one of the things
that I think is really shocking is if you have
bariatric surgery, your suicide rate quadruples in the years that
follow right, it's still quite a low risk. Most people
are baratric surgery. Glad they did it quadrupling. That's that's

(30:33):
a big effect, right, Just think why would that be?
What's going on I think there's lots of things going
on there. Some of it is actually the after effects
of the surgery are pretty onerous. Some of it is
you can't comfort in it anymore, so that pain comes
to the surface. Some of it is a lot of
people who are overweight kind of think well, if only
I was thin, my life would be really great, exactly,

(30:56):
and they lose the weight, and you know, your husband's
still an asshole, and you'll hate your job. And I
think there's also some give an example of a really
deep psychological issue that I think is surfaced in some
cases by these drugs and baratory surgery. Something I learned
about from a wonderful man who should have on actually
called Dr Vincent Feliciti. It was really hard for me

(31:17):
to learn about this. So Dr Feliti was a doctor
in San Diego in the early nineteen eighties and he
was approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not for profit
medical provider in California, and they said, look, we've got
a problem. We don't know what to do. Please help us.
A problem they had was that obesity was hugely rising.
In fact, it was very low by our standards, but
it was rising. And they said, look, nothing we do work.

(31:39):
So we give people, you know, diet plans, we give
them personal trainers. It's not working. Can we give you
a load of money and just do Blue Sky's research
figure out what the hell we should do. So doctor
Felti took the money and was like, oh, what can
I do? So he started working with two hundred severely
obese people, people who weighed more than three hundred pounds
and had for a long time, and it's like what
could I do? And he had an idea that sounds
and in fact is kind of done. He said, what

(32:01):
would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and
we gave them like, you know, vitamin sea shots so
they didn't get scurvy or whatever. Would they just burn
through the fat supplies in their body and get down
to a healthy weight. So, with a ton of medical supervision,
they did it, and incredibly, at first it worked. There
was a woman, hard core Susan not her real name,

(32:21):
who went down from being more than four hundred pounds
to one hundred and thirty eight pounds, staggering transformation. And
you know, her family are calling the doctor and saying
you saved her life. She's thrilled. And then one day
she cracked. She went to KFC or actually think that's projection.
She went somewhere and you know, started hugely of eating

(32:43):
again and quite quickly got back to a dangerous way.
And Dotte Feltti called her in. He said, Susan, what happened?
What happened? As she looked down, she was really ashamed.
She said, I don't know, I don't know. He said, well,
tell me about the day you cracked. Did anything in
particular happen that day? They didn't happen some other day.

(33:06):
It turned out something had happened that day that had
never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and
a man hit on her, not in a nasty way,
in a nice way, and she felt completely freaked out
and went and started eating. That's when Dr Felti asked
hers something he'd never thought to ask her before. He said, Susan,
when did you gain your weight? In her case, it
was when she was eleven. He said, well, did anything
happen when you were eleven that didn't happen when you

(33:26):
were nine or when you were fourteen, anything in particular
happened that year and she looked down and she said, well,
that's when my grandfather started raping me. Dr Fillitti interviewed
everyone in the program. He discovered that sixty percent of
the women had made their extreme weight gain in the
aftermath of being sexually abused assaulted, And at first he

(33:47):
was like, what's going on. It doesn't make any sense,
and Susan explained it to him really well. She said,
overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be right. Clearly,
obesity for women has a protective sexual function. You are
somewhat it can still happen, of course, but you are
less likely to be sexually assaulted if you're goin a
lot of weight. And so for Susan, losing a huge

(34:10):
amount of weight made her really frightened and feel really
vulnerable and brought her back to that terrified place of abuse.
That there's lots of psychological things that go on. That's
only one of many, but I think and of course
it can give you an opportunity to deal with those feelings, right,
But again, it gives you a sense of like the
incredible psychological complexity of what's really going on here can

(34:31):
kind of come to the surface in complicated ways.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, And what's interesting about that is, no matter what
the psychological reason may be, you're almost dealing with that
feeling for the first time in three or four decades.
So it almost feels like a new feeling. Would that
be fair enough to say? It almost feels like what
I mean by that is there are certain feelings and

(34:55):
thoughts that we've had since we were young, and we've
found ways to cope with them. This is something that
you've been able to kind of put aside for ten
twenty thirty years, and all of a sudden, now that
this is blocking something which is giving rise to that,
it almost feels like, Wow, I haven't learned how to
deal with this for a long time.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
That's really right. I think you're right. It's even worse
than a new feeling. It's a buried feeling. Right. And
obesity is so laden with shame and the cruelty in
this culture towards you know, which I've experienced to some degree.
But women get it much much worse. If you have

(35:33):
a BMI higher than thirty five and you're a woman,
forty two percent of those women get insulted literally every day, right.
And I really wanted to think this through because I
was very conscious that we've made so much progress in
this culture. I mean, we were nowhere near where we
need to be. What we've made some progress. I think
about this in one of the things I really worry
about in relation to these drugs. But I think it's

(35:56):
really distilled in a moment, probably the worst moment in
the whole writing of the book for me. So, I've
got a niece called Erin, who's nineteen now, but in
my head she's fixed as a six year old, like
she's the baby of my family, she's the only girl.
She's the youngest of my brother's sister's children. But one
day I was facetiming with her. I'veter be taking the
drug for a while, and she was sort of praising
me in a teasing way. She was like, oh, I
never knew how to draw. Yeoh, I ne't ever knew

(36:17):
how to neck and I was kind of preening, and
then she looked down and she said, will you buy
me some mozampic and I laughed because I thought she
was kidding, and I realized she wasn't. And she's like
a perfectly healthy weight she always has been. And I thought,
I've undone all the messages I've ever tried to give

(36:39):
her right about valuing yourself about and I thought, you know,
she's grown up seeing a broader range of body types
and female celebrities than we ever grew up with, of course,
and now all of those women pretty much are boned thin, right.
And I really wanted to think this through because I
think this two categories here, which are quite different. There's

(37:04):
overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to
get down to a healthy weight. Right now, they're still
incurring the twelve big risks that I write about in
Magic Pill. There's still a lot to discuss there, but
I think there's a lot to defend there. Then you've
got people who were already a healthy weight or indeed skinny,
who are taken them to be super skinny. Now I
don't judge those people. We live in a culture that
makes women feel shit about their bodies whatever they do,

(37:25):
and there are tremendous pressures on them and I don't
judge where those women are coming from at all, but
they're incurring all the all the twelve risks for none
of the benefits, right, I mean, well, rather for esthetic benefits,
but not health benefits. And in fact they're endangering their
own health in all sorts of complicated ways. To give
an obvious example, as you age, you naturally lose muscle mass.

(37:47):
Muscle mass is the total masts soft tissue in your
body that you need to like get out of a chair,
walk the walk up the stairs, whatever it might be.
So as you age, you naturally lose muscle mass from
the age of thirty depressingly. So if you're going going
into the aging process already with quite low muscle mass,
which people who have taken the drugs to be super
skinny likely will be, it could cause you real problems.

(38:08):
When you're older. You know you'll be much less mobile,
You'll find it harder to walk up the stairs. You're
at risk of a condition called sarcopenia, which means poverty
of the flesh. It's where basically you just can't do
much because you're quite physically weak. So I think we've
got to sing which between those two things and then
we've got to think about also what this means for
body positivity and how we think about it in relationship.

(38:29):
That was a particular person who helped me to think
about that. I could tell you a bit about her
if you.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Like, yeah, please leave.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
So this is woman you probably remember her Jay because
we're from the same place. So when we were kids,
you only ever saw fat people on television as the
butt of a joke, right, particularly overweight women.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
It was vicious. And the first person I ever saw
challenge that I remember it blew my mind. It was
on Kilroy, which people don't know is like a if
you imagined a kind of dollar store version of Ricky Lake. Right.
The first person I ever saw challengehip was this woman
called Shelly Bovie, who basically introduced body positivity to Britain.
She was the first person to everuld talk about this
and write about it in Britain on a big public stage.

(39:08):
So I went and tracked her down because I really
want to think this through with her. She's seventy six
now and her story, I think really helps her to
think through the complexity of this. So she grew up
in a kind of big working class town in Britain
called Port Talbot. I guess the equivalent in the US
would be like Scranton. She would put it the only
fat girl at her school. This was the nineteen sixties

(39:29):
and one day after class, her teacher said to her, Bovy,
stay behind, I need to talk to you. So she's
sort of sitting there thinking, hey, what did I do?
And she goes up to the teacher and the teacher said,
you're much too fat. It's disgusting. Go see the school nurse.
She'll sort you out. So completely thrown, she goes to
see the school nurse and then I says, why are

(39:49):
you here? She said, well, the teacher saysn't too fat,
and then I said take off your clothes. I'm going
to look at you. And the nurse looked at her
and said, oh disgusting, you're too fat and just berated her,
said you're greedy, you're a pig eat less, and Shelley
completely throwing kind of leaves. And she was soaking up
this kind of abuse the whole time. Right, girls were
constantly saying to her, thank God, I don't look like you.

(40:10):
And really, her whole life she soak up this abuse.
When she got pregnant. She went to the doctor. First
thing the doctor said was shouldn't be pregnant when you're
as fat as you are. When she gave birth, she
had a very painful birth, difficult birth. She's lying there
covered in blood, and the midwife said to you know,
you really need to lose some weight. And when her
baby wouldn't attach he wasn't feeding properly, she went to

(40:30):
the doctor. The doctor said, what are you trying to do?
Make the baby as fat as you are? Over and
abest people are soaking this up all the time, and
most of them just internalize it. Shelley told me she
had never looked to her body naked, even in the shower.
She would sort of wash herself but not look because
she felt such hatred for her own body. And one

(40:50):
day she learned in the US there was this movement
which at the time called itself fat pride. There's still
some people who use that term. Now we would probably
call it more body positivity. Who just said, why are
we taking it? This is like, this is just cruelty,
This is like racism or homophobia or sexism. Just no,
we're not going to be treated like this. You're not
going to get to talk to us like that. And
so she wrote the first ever book advocating for body

(41:12):
positivity still stands up now, brilliant book call the Forbibven Body,
in which she argued against this stigma. And when I
tracked Shelly down, she stressed to me she's really proud
of everything she said about stigma, and I think she's
one hundred percent right to be. Stigma A is just
a form of bullying, and b makes the problem much worse.

(41:33):
Lindy West, is a brilliant body positivity advocate, said people
don't take good care of everything they hate. If you make
people hate their bodies, it doesn't make them take better
care of them. But something happened to Shelley next. I
think if we're going to be truthful and compassionate, we
have to talk about Shelley was very overweight. She was

(41:54):
not yet fifty, and she was losing the ability to
walk and so she had to be in a wheelchair.
And she went to her doctor and a doctor said, well,
because of your weight, because the strain that's putting, you've
got problems with your heart. And Shelley felt this profound
dilemma because she was so proud of everything she said
about stigma. At first she thought, well, I want to
talk about these health challenges, but is this contradictory. There

(42:15):
was at the time a newsletter in Britain called fat News,
which is like a body positivity newsletter, and she wanted
to write about this and they said, no, that's not
what we want. We're here to tell the positive news.
And she said, but if we love ourselves, don't we
want to tell the whole truth. She felt really conflicted
about this and for a long time she felt like
it was either or either you're again stigma or you're

(42:36):
in favor of reducing a b CD where you can.
But you know, she then and she's the first to
acknowledge this is extremely hard to do. But she lost
a lot of weight through dieting. She went from being
unable to walk to being able to run. Her health
massively improved. Her heart problems went away, which tends to
happen when you're reverse obesd like when we talked about
with the bariotric surgery and Shelley I thought put it

(42:59):
to me in a really way. She said, it's not
either or, it's both. And if you love someone who's obese,
as everyone watching will. I'm pretty sure you want to
protect them from two things. You want to protect them
from cruelty and bullying, and you want to protect them
if you possibly can, from the more than two hundred

(43:20):
diseases and health complications that are made much more likely
by being overweight or obese. And I was kind of
shocked when I looked at the science of this with
an open mind. I'm very happy to challenge scientific consensus.
I've done it before in my previous books. But when
you look at the scientific evidence, and I was trained
to assess scientific evidence at Cambridge University, I was kind

(43:40):
of taken aback by how bad obesity is for your
health on average. Of course, there are exceptions. My mother
smokes seventy cigarettes a day. She's alive and well at
there just seventy eight. But she's an outlier. I mean,
if you think about something as simple as diabetes, right,
I'm really embarrassed to say this, but I thought if
you'd asked me a couple of years ago, Okay, I
knew that obesiently makes diabetes much more likely. If you're

(44:00):
obese when you're eighteen, you have a seventy percent chance
of becoming diabetic in your life. But I thought, okay,
that's not good. But as long as you've got good
health insurance and you get insulin, you're basically like everyone else.
A diabetic with insulin is like me or you. That's
not true at all when I a'ter feed the leading
you know doctors who are leading people who treat diabetics.
When you look at the scientific evidence, diabetes knocks fifteen

(44:22):
years off your life on average. It's the biggest preventable
cause of blindness in this country. More people have to
have a limb or extremity amputated because of diabetes in
the US than because they got shot. And you will
have noticed a lot of us get shot right. In fact,
it's the effects are so bad that one of the
leading doctors in Britain who treats diabetics, Dr Max Pemberton,
said to me, if you gave me a choice between

(44:44):
becoming diabetic or becoming HIV positive, I would choose to
become HIV positive because if you're HIV positive and you
get treatment, you live as long as everyone else. That
is not true of diabetics. Type two diabetics. You have
a shorter life and you're much more likely to have
a terrible last few years where you're blind or you're
horribly you know, your body is mutilated. And I found

(45:06):
that so frightening to take on. And I'm conscious that
loads of people hearing that will experience that and as
very painful. It is extremely painful to hear, and it's
an extremely painful truth, and we have to communicate it
with great compassion and love and not as concern trolling.
And I hate even saying it because you can see
how it gives ammunition to the bullies in a way

(45:29):
because they use that. It's like, oh babe, I'm just
worried about your health. I get that. But Shelley really
taught me. Yeah, she put it. We have to live
in reality and we have to be as compassionate as
we can within that reality. We have to do both right.
And I'm conscious this is a long answer about you.
Give an example. One other person helping to think about
this as a brilliant guy interview called Jeff Parker's a

(45:52):
sixty seven year old retired lighting engineer in San Francisco,
and Jeff a couple of years ago was very severely overweight.
He was finding it painful to walk. He had doubt,
He had liver problems, kidney problems. He was taking fistfuls
of pills every day, and he started to take Munjaro,
which is one of the new weight loss drugs, and
he lost a lot of weight. All his health problems

(46:14):
went into remission, and doctor almost took him off the pills.
Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate Bridge
every day. He said, you know, I feel like I'm
gonna enjoy my retirement. Now. I don't think we can
say to someone like Jeff that that improvement is not meaningful. Right,
there are many Maybe the risks of the drugs will
outweigh that benefit to him and for others. That's a
real possibility. It's why I put a lot of weight

(46:35):
on the twelve risks of these drugs in the book.
But I do think we have to acknowledge that a
lot of people who do successfully reverse their OBESTI, which
is much easier to do now than it's been before,
do experience a massive improvement in the quality of their life.
I do think we're not being honest with people if
we don't explain that as well.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Thank you for going into the Actually it wasn't it,
It wasn't It was a very thoughtful Lansen. Those stories
give us an entry way into the psychology and the
mind of so many of us and what we're all
struggling with. With Shelley, I'm intrigued. How is she now
perceived by her community that she was the face for

(47:15):
having now dieted lost weight. It sounds like and may
appear different visually. How is she now perceived and how
does she feel about reconnecting with that community and talking
about it with them?

Speaker 1 (47:27):
So as she would say, there's a she speaks for
herself much better than I can. I don't want too
much triloquisis, but because she's a very articulate person, I
think it's really complicated, and I understand why it's complicated.
Some people saw her as a sellout, and I think
Shelley's attitude was what kind of body positivity would it
be that would shame me for keeping my body alive?

(47:49):
And there's a big division going on now among body
positivity advocates. Well, they have many good arguments, and it's
worth stressing. So if we think about the history of
diet drugs, think about the seventies. One of the things
that one of the first things the Fat Private movement
did was point out, so there were diet drugs in
the seventies that were in fetamins. Right, They're hugely popular.
There were staggering figures like more than ten million and

(48:11):
fetamine prescriptions were written in nineteen seventy in this country
for weight loss, right. And it turns out taking loads
of speed to lose weight not a good idea. Who knew,
and they had to be taken off the market because
it screws you up, right, partly because you developed tolerance
to these drugs. You have to take higher and higher
doses to get the same effect. And if you're taking
really high doses of speed, as anyone who knows any

(48:32):
recreational drug users well know, don't end so well for you.
You know, skinny but psychotic is not a great trade off.
I hope for some people it is, but not for me.
And so a lot of the Fat Private movement very
presciently warned at the time, you know, this is really
good to screw people up, don't do it right. And
they've been entirely vindicated by that. And it may be

(48:53):
and I think there's a significant chance of this. I
don't think it's the most likely option, but I do
think it's a significant chance that they'll be vindicated on
these drugs as well. Going Look, this is a big
risk right for me, especially with the history of my
own family. What I felt I had to do was
waigh two risks, and I think that's what most people

(49:17):
watching and listening, this will be the position they're in. Realistically,
I was going to remain obese. I'd tried dieting many times.
I always ended up fatter than I was at the start.
I tried insane and tense diets. I'd gone to diet
camps in Austria where they give you tea for I
done it all right. Realistically, I was going to carry
on being obese to some level. So for me, the

(49:40):
choice was what are the risks of continuing to be
obese versus what are the risks of these drugs? That
is not an easy calculation. There's a lot we don't know.
We're learning more and more. There's a lot of detail
in the book that I think people don't know about.
It's a hard calculation, and I don't know if I've
made the right choice for myself. It may well be

(50:01):
there's a significant chance that they will that their caution
about this will be vindicated, and they're right that they're
also right to say it's clearly not the case that
we're only taking this to deal with health problems, right,
And that's true to me as well. There's a significant
amount of just relief from the stigma being fat, vanity.

(50:23):
I like being thinner, right, because of the culture we
live in. Some of that is the health benefits and
the risk to my heart, of course, but some of
that isn't a big part of it isn't. We've got
a level with people about that, so it's possible that
they'll they'll be vindicated, and even if they aren't, we've
really got to understand where it comes from. If you

(50:45):
are soaking up abuse your whole life, that cruelty, that bullying,
I totally get. You know, there's an analogy I always
think of, which is I'm gay the height of the
age crime. When doctors explained to gay men, look, because

(51:06):
of the nature of anal sex and because gay men
tend to have a lot more sexual partners than other
sexual combinations, this is going to affect gay men much
worse than other communities. So they wanted to you know,
shut down the bath houses in San Francisco. Really warm
people say while we don't know, you shouldn't have sex, right,
and a lot of gay men were like, our whole lives,

(51:26):
we've been told our sexuality is disgusting, we're diseased, we're evil,
and now you come along and tell us this as well.
We're going to carry on going to the bath houses.
We're going to carry on. And I get where they're
coming from. I might well have been like that myself
at the time, but now we realize looking back where
you have to separate the stigma from the scientific advice. Right,
there was I'm sure there were lots of homophobes picking
up those arguments and fullying gay people exactly, but equally

(51:48):
there was the scientific reality, which is it was much
more likely to affect gay people, and lots of those
people who refuse that advice. Tragically, I'm not here now
because they refused it, so I think. And that doesn't
mean I stand over those people people and go what fools.
I totally get it, But I do think we have to,
as Shelley says, we have to separate out two things.
We have to separate out the stigmatizing, cruel things that

(52:11):
are said from things that are just physic Think about cancer, right,
The leading cancer group in Europe, Cancer Research UK, explain,
if you carry excess weight in your body, it doesn't
just sit there. It's not inert it's active. Right. It
sends signals through your body, and one of those signals
is for your cells to divide more rapidly, which can
cause cancer. This is why obst is one of the

(52:31):
biggest causes of cancer in the developed world. Right. That's true.
Even if we've got rid of all the stigma in
the world, which we passionately should fight to do, it's
still going to make you more like to get cancer. Right.
We can't. That's not something we can undo with an argument,
and therefore we do need to think about this. Also,
though I'm very conscious the most important thing we've got

(52:53):
to do, so people like me are in a shitty trap. Right.
You've got to choose risky medical condition, risky drug. But
that is not inevitable and we should not tolerate that
being the choice for our children. Right Japan, for example. Right,
I can explain how they did it, but the key
thing to understand is the way one expert put it.
For me, A brilliant man named Professor Michael Lowe at

(53:14):
Drexel University in Philly is processed and ultra process feeds
dug this hole. They stole our satiety and the drugs
fill it. In the way he put it was, so
you've got to see that these drugs are an artificial
solution to an artificial problem. Right, So we've got to
pull back. In addition to the dilema about the drugs
for people like me, we've got to pull back and
go how did we get here and how do we

(53:36):
make sure the next generation of kids are not in
that position? And absolutely this is the dilemma a lot
of ours face, but it doesn't have to be the
dilemma for our children and grandchildren. And I went to
places that have solved this dilemma that show us the
way out. So that's the kind of broader argument which
I think is so important to stress as well.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah. Absolutely, before we get to Japan and before we
get to those So the bugle's back and produced to
report to guys investors, and it told them to get
out of investing in fast food and ice cream because
those markets are going to tank. Financial advisors are also
expecting a decline in the demand for knee and hip replacement.
But when you look at investment, I found that fascinating.

(54:15):
I'm like, do I believe that fast food is growing
or is shrinking? And while I see the rise of
organic vegetables, while I see but still expensive, while I
see the rise in people proposing a largely plant based diet,
if not not not full, but a larger plant based diet,
again more expensive, harder to access, maybe maybe difficult to

(54:39):
know what to do. I don't see fast food shrinking
as an industry. Did you see that? Are you seeing
that through your research where you seeing investment shift and
redirect or is that a myth as well?

Speaker 1 (54:50):
Crispy Kreme stock is down. The head of Nesle Mark
Schneider has been making very nervous noises about that ice
cream and confectionery market. So we've got to look at
the longer term trend. Forty seven percent of Americans, so
they want to take these drugs, and there's a big
access question at the moment. But eight years from now
a ZEMPI goes out of patent. At that point it

(55:11):
will be a daily pill and it will cost about
a dollar a day. I would anticipate forty seven percent
as an underestimate for how how many people will take it.
Provided some of the twelve big risks that I write
about in the book don't blow up, which is a
real problem. I think about Jeff Parker, the guy I
just talked about in San Francisco. Everyone like Jeff becomes
a walking advertisement for the drug and goes what happened
to Jeff? He looks completely different. My god, he's so

(55:33):
much healthier. So you can see how it creates a
huge growth, growth effect. So you're right, at the moment,
we've got two trends. We've got the ongoing explosion of
fast food, which is, you know, blowing up and blowing
up and is implanted in us from the moment we're born.
More three year old children in this country know what
the McDonald's M means and know their own last name.
More people, yeah, more people in the world recognize the

(55:54):
McDonald's M as a symbol of McDonald's than recognize the
cross as a symbol of Christianity. Right, So this is
really deep at out of consciousness. So you've got that
huge explosion in fast food, which is growing and growing
and growing, and you've got huge numbers of people who
want to take these drugs. Now, one of those trends
is going to win, right, So as more and more
people take the drugs, we're already seeing effects. And I think,

(56:16):
in a way, the best some of the best predictors
are the financial markets. Jeffrey's Financial just a big report
for the US airlines saying you're going to have to
spend a lot less money on jet fuel pretty soon
because a lighter population takes less jet fuel to fly.
There's even just like crazy little things, there's been a
huge run on duelers in Los Angeles because people's fingers

(56:38):
have shrunk so much that they need their wedding bands refitted.
Or think about you mentioned the hip and knee replacements.
Companies that manufacture knee hip replacements, the joints for them,
their stock is going down because the main driver of
ne and hip replacements is obesity. And if there's a
lot less obesity, there's going to be a lot fewer
knee and hip replacement operations. So I do think we're
we're You're right. The trend you're seeing, which is the

(57:00):
growth of fast food, which any more and more, I mean,
thank god, when I was a child. You couldn't just
push a button on a device and they bring that
good olds to you, right yet to actually leave your
house at least I imagine however, I would have become
of that have been the case. That trend is driving
the other trend as well, right, so that they're they're
densely interconnected.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
It's also a big question comes out as and like
you kept saying, like you keep saying, we don't know enough.
And I want to talk about the risks now, because
we've talked about somewhat of how we've got here, the
challenges that we're facing mentally, psychologically, societally, into why we're
in this situation in the first place. But what's fascinating
to me is are a lot of the twelve Big

(57:43):
twelve which I want to dive into. The big twelve
risks and the issues with the drugs are a lot
of them more long term than short term, and based
on your own personal experience, are the short term ones
tolerable and the long term ones the ones that we
would consider intolerable and complicated.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
So I would distinguish between the well known side effects
and these twelve big risks. So the things like nausea.
Almost everyone who takes these drugs feels nauseous at first
throughout the day, no, different people have different experiences, so
some people have horrible experiences. Interview someone called Sunny Newton
and Beamont who you know. She had like she said,
it was like there was an alien living inside her
and it was like thrashing about and she just wanted

(58:20):
to vomit the whole time. That's rare but not unheard of.
I mean, in the clinical trialst about five percent of
people did just stop because the nausea was so bad.
For me, it was like it was mild. It was
like when I would get on the bus or something,
I would get a little bit of exaggerated travel sickness.
But like if I'd got that feeling just randomly on

(58:41):
a normal day, it wouldn't have stopped me going about
my day. It just would have been a bit unpleasant.
And after a few months you generally you get it
worse the day you take it or the day after,
and then you're okay for the rest of the week,
and then again you ject yourself and it gets.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
And the regularity of injecting yourself. Is it the same
for everyone, or can you accelerate the dose. Is there
a slower version?

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, I should just say because a lot of people
get horrified by injection, and I am a complete worse.
I'm the kind of person who when you give me
a blood test, I like.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
I don't want to look at it.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
I literally look away, and you know, do Katie Perry
songs to pretend it's not happening. But and my singing
is not pleasant. But this is an EpiPen. It's the
tiny and I wish someone had told me at the start.
I didn't know this at first. You can inject yourself
in the leg or the stomach, and for some reason
they do injecting in your stomach seems to be so horrifying.
For the first month I was injecting my stomach, it's
like ah, And actually the leg is just the same. No,

(59:33):
I mean it's it's literally like the tiniest scratch. It's
like a mosquito bite. That are their different doses in
Everyone starts at zero point two. Five milligrams is to
get you used to the nausea, and the effect is
quite mild, and most people go up and up and up,
so generally you go up to one milligram you can
go as high as two point four milligrams. It would

(59:54):
depend on your level of obesity. I think a lot
of people are on two higher dose.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
And who's advising you on there does?

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
I mean the official guidance from Nova, Naudousk and Eli Lily,
the companies that own it is you know, build up
to one milligrammar and then you can go higher if
you need greater effects.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
But because you're self medicing, we're not self medicating.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
I mean, part of the problem is people are buying
you online right, not actually getting it from a doctor.
And that's a really big problem that particularly relates to
probably my single biggest worry about these drugs. There's a lot,
but the thing I'm most concerned about, not for myself
but for the society is eating disorders. We went into
the pandemic with an unprecedentedly high level of eating disorders,

(01:00:34):
probably because of social media and what it's doing to
young girls. You're interviewing my friend Jonathan Hight. He can
tell you much more about that, and everyone should read
his brilliant, amazing work. Then during the pandemic he just
sort of went up even further, which is mind blowing.
And what these drugs do is they give you an
unprecedented tool to amputate your appetite. Right, And anyone who
knows anyone who's got eating disorders, imagine, I'm sure you do.

(01:00:56):
Pretty much everyone does. They're in a conflict. There's the
psychological part of them that wants to starve themselves for
complex reasons created by the sick culture we have mostly
and then there's the biological part of them that wants
to live and wants to eat. And what these drugs
do is they, you know, if you take them and
you're in that position, they massively empower the part of

(01:01:18):
you that wants to starve yourself. So I am and
people like doctor Kimberly Dennis, who's one of the leading
eating disorders experts in Britain, another person you should interview,
a very wise and brilliant person, are really worried about this.
My biggest fear is that we could have an opioid
like death toll of huge numbers of young girls. And unfortunately,
these disorders do mostly affect young girls, or there are

(01:01:39):
of course some young men and boys. I mean, I'm
really really worried about that. Now there are things we
could do right, now, as Dr Dennis says, we need
to I got them on zoom, you know when I
got them in Britain, initially in Vegas had to go
in person. They're meant to check you'll BMI on zoom.
I mean, good luck with that. Yeah, Basically, you are

(01:02:00):
very visibly not eligible for these drugs, right, You clearly
have a BMI lower than twenty seven, and yet I
have no doubt you could go on zoom. Literally, your
lovely team here could arrange in half an hour we
get a Zoom call and you would get it delivered
in the you know, biked over to you today. Right.
We need to stop that, As Dr Dennis says, we
should only have in person prescription, and the in person

(01:02:23):
prescription should be done by doctors who are given clear
guidance about how to spot eating disorders and how to
prevent the prescription of these things to eat disorders. It's
not perfect. People might still buy it online, but it
would put at least some barrier between these drugs and
people who should not be getting them. At the moment,
there is basically no barrier.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
Is that one of the big risks?

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah? Massive? I mean if you said to me, what
are the risks that most that's the risk that most
worries me for the society. The one that most worries
me for myself is quite different. So put it weird,
I feel a way of anxiety. As I said it,

(01:03:04):
We don't know the long term effects of these drugs
at all. No one knows. We know they're chronically activating
key parts of your brain. So a brilliant expert called
Dr Greg Stanward, who works on these drugs at Florida
State University, said to me, Now he's stressed to me,
he's broadly in favor of these drugs. He's considering taking
them himself, but as a responsible scientist, he has to

(01:03:27):
warn people. So he gave an analogy. I want to
be clear, he's not suggesting these drugs will have this effect,
but it's an analogy that helps us to think about it.
If you look at antipsychotic drugs, if you go back
to when they were first given to people in the
late nineteen fifties, at the time, doctors judged that the
benefits outweighed the risk. It's always been controversial, but they
judge that. So loads of people will give an antipsychotics

(01:03:48):
for really long periods of time, and it was only
what forty to fifty years later that they discovered if
you take these drugs for decade after decade, you are
much more likely to get dementia or some In fact,
all forms of dementia are much more likely. It's not
that the doctors were being negligent in the nineteen fifties.
You couldn't know that, right. You had to have people
take it for a really long time to know that.

(01:04:11):
What could these drugs do over the long term, We
don't know right now. Against that, Dr Shaan O. Levy,
a brilliant obesity specialist at at Tulane University School of
Medicine in New Orleans, said to me, well, look, we
don't know the long term effects of these drugs. We
do know the long term effects of obesity, and they
are very serious. But you know, I'm forty five, right

(01:04:36):
If you stop taking the drugs, for almost everyone they stopped,
you just go back to where you were before. And
there's a big debate about that, but for most people
that seems to be happening. So I'm assuming I'm going
to be taking these drugs for forty years. That's anxiety provoking.
I asked Dr Clements Blue, who's one of the leading
obesity specialists at Cambridge University, So, what brain areas do

(01:04:57):
these drugs activate? And she taught me through it at
the he and so on. I said, well, what else
do those areas of the brain do? She said, oh,
were they memory? Processing, taste processing, got motility like not
this is me speaking now, but not trivial things, right,
So for me that was of the twelve, that was
the one where I thought shit. So I'm trying to

(01:05:19):
a more eloquent way to say shit, but that was yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Once the debate you were saying there about the idea
of if you stop taking these drugs, you'll go back
to the same way you were. What's them?

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
So we don't have that much research on it. What
the drug companies say is these drugs are like statins.
Are you take statins lowest your cholesterol. If you stop
taking statins, your cholesterol goes back to what it was.
The drugs are not a cure. There are treatment and
ongoing treatment, right, So they say these drugs are like that.
Now they have a vested interest in saying that. They
want you to carry on buying the drugs forever. It

(01:05:49):
would not be good news for them if they discovered
that actually you can take the drugs for a short
time stop and then you'd stay at the lower way
some people. This is anecdotal because we don't have any
research on it yet. Other people are studying it, so
we'll know in a while. Like I give an example,
someone I know, Tukman Jarro, lost loads of weight, interrupted
their relationship with junk food, started exercising a lot in

(01:06:11):
a way they felt too embarrassed to do when they
were obese, and has now stopped and seems to be
maintaining that lower weight. So how many people will there
be like that? We don't know. I mean, the early
studies we have we're just looking at if you take
it and then stop. But what about motivated people who
change use it as a tool to promote change. We

(01:06:31):
just don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
How long will it How long does it take to
measure for us to realize how long do you need
to be on it for to have those long term
implications like how long will we have to study research
and measure.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
I mean when you talk about the medium term effects
and it get it's important to be balanced about this
because it's a complicated truth. So a lot of people,
a lot of the experts will say, and there's a
really good scientist, and that's a good point. Actually, we
know loads about the medium term effects of these drugs
because diabetics have been taking them for eighteen nearly nineteen years, right,

(01:07:02):
So for people who don't know, these drugs, in addition
to having this effect on your appetite, also stimulate the
creation of insulin, which is what diabetics, by type one
anti two diabetics are lacking. It's why it's a diabetes treatment.
And so actually we've got eighteen years of data on diabetics,
so I mean, I'm putting it more crudely than they would.
But if the drugs made you grow horns, the diabetics

(01:07:23):
would have grown horns by now, right. And that's a
good and important point, and it should give people some
degree of security that some other people say, some other
leading experts say, well, hang on, if we're going to
base a lot of our confidence on these drugs on
the diabetics, let's dig a bit deeper into the diabetics.
So give an example. There's a brilliant scientist call Professor

(01:07:45):
Jean luc Faye, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier
in France, and he was commissioned by the French Medicines
Agency to look at the safety of these drugs for
the French market. As we started looking at what's called
the preclinical research, which is on animals, and something really
took him aback, which is, if you give these drugs
to rats, they're much more likely to get thyroid cancer.

(01:08:07):
And it's like, huh, okay, let's do some digging. So
what he did is they have very very good medical
databases in France. He compared a large number of diabetics
who'd been taking these drugs between I think twenty six
and twenty twelve with a large number of diabetics who
were similar in every other way but hadn't taken these drugs.
And what he calculated with his colleagues was, if he's right,

(01:08:29):
and it's highly contested, these drugs increase your thyroid cancer
risk by between fifty to seventy five percent. And he
said to it, we've got to understand what it doesn't mean.
Doesn't mean if you take the drugs you have a
fifty to seventy five percent chance of getting thyrocncer. If
that was the case, we'd be having bonfires of ozenpic
all over the world. What it means is, if he's right,
whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, these

(01:08:52):
drugs increase it by fifty to seventy five percent. Now,
thyro cancer is an overall low risk. One point two
percent of people get it in their lives, eighty two
percent of them survive, so it's a relative, but it's
a big increase in a small risk, right, And I'm
very conscious a that you got to weigh that against
just the cancer risk of continue to be abast But

(01:09:13):
also one of the things that really worries me about
that is, so you think about the history of diet drugs,
very often they began to unravel based on small warnings.
So if you think about it, there was a diet
drug in the nineties called fenfen, the most popular diet
drug ever before a zenpic. So if you look at
how it was a combination of two drugs. It was
an appetite suppressant called flex fluoramine and an a fetamine

(01:09:37):
called fentromine, and it really worked. People who took it
got the same level of weight loss as people get
on a zenpic and people talked about it in a
very similar way. Front page of Time magazine was the
new miracle weight loss drug, right, very similar. In nineteen
ninety five, there were eighteen million Fenfen prescriptions in this country.
It was huge. It was discovered a small group of

(01:10:02):
doctors in a practice in Fargo in North Dakota noticed, huh,
a lot of people using this drug in our practice
seemed to be having trouble breathing. Wow, And so they
raised what's called a safety signal. It was then investigated.
It turned out these drugs caused in a lot of

(01:10:24):
people something called primary pulmonary hypertension, a horrific condition where
the blood vessels and your lungs contracted and you can't breathe.
It it kills you. It can kill you. If not,
you're an oxygen the rest of your life. It's horrendous.
So it obviously got withdrawn from the market, led to
the biggest pay out in the history of the pharmaceutical
industry twelve be and it does actually emerge the drug

(01:10:44):
companies had known about this risk all along. You look
at the stuff the drug companies, you know. One of
the one of the documents that was presented at the
civil case was just someone saying one of the people
at the drug company saying, oh am, I going to
have to spend my retirement writing check compensation checks for silly,
fat women with lung brew can't breathe. I mean horrendous.

(01:11:05):
Right now, I want to stress Eli Lilly and Novo Nordous.
I'm very happy to criticize drug companies. I do it
a lot. But they are not shysters like those people were.
They are reputable drug companies. There's no reason to believe
that they're like that. But I'm conscious that small things
could lead to the whole thing unraveling. We need to
be vigilant. I'm alert to that. It's why if you

(01:11:29):
have thyroid cancer in your family, I mean, I'm gonna
say I recommend it. Don't really matter why I recommend.
The FDA recommends don't take the drugs. It's not a
good idea.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
Are there any others in that line, any oh?

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
Loads? I mean yeah, I mean I would there's all
sorts of things, all sorts of categories of people. I
would say, shouldn't take it. If your BMI is lower
than twenty seven, don't take it. You're incurring all the
risks for none of the benefits. If you have thyroid
cancer in your family, if you're a history of eating disorders.
There's a whole array of people who should not be
taking it, who currently are take it. Another big one,

(01:12:02):
which obviously doesn't apply to me, is if you think
you might get pregnant. So one of the things that
really worries me is we have really no data on
what it does to people are pregnant. Obviously you're told
to not take it if you think you might get pregnant,
but people get pregnant and all sorts of ways that
you don't expect. So we know rats when they're given

(01:12:25):
some agualatide the active component. I'm much more like to
have children with birth deformities fetuses with birth deformities. Dr Stamward,
who I mentioned before a Florida State said to me
again stressed he's broadly confident, but has to alert people
to potential concerns because he's a very responsible scientist. He said,

(01:12:46):
to think about this, you might want to look at
the long term research on mothers who are exposed to
contaminants when they're pregnant. So think about, for example, mothers
who are exposed to lead. This happens scandalously frequently in
this country because a lot of poor people still live
in housing that still has a lending it and still
get water from We know about Flint, Michigan, but actually

(01:13:07):
lots of places get water from pipes that are made
of lead. It's insane that in the richest country in
the world we allow that the poisoning of children. But anyway,
if you look at the if you look at mothers
who are pregnant and get exposed to lead during pregnancy,
actually their babies look like all the other babies. There's
no it seems like there's no difference. But when those
kids get to be twelve thirteen, we know that they
have less impulse control, they're more likely to have attention problems.

(01:13:30):
So it seems to have affected their developmental trajectory, even
though that wasn't immediately obvious at first. Could that happen
with these drugs, Yes, I mean it might not in
might effect their trajectory in a positive way. We don't know.
Maybe they'd be less likely to become obesie kind of
a protective effect on that. But it's just disturbing when
you when you look it's a really weird feeling to
go all around the world into feel these leading experts,

(01:13:50):
sit with them and to realize, oh, this is an
experiment on millions of people, and I'm one of the
guinea pigs. Shit right, it's a weird feeling, right, and
it makes me angry that we've been put in the
position where we have to make these choices. Like I say,
there are countries that don't have to make these choices
because they didn't allow their population to be put up
with process and ultra process food in the first place.

(01:14:12):
And that pissed me off.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
What has been the most horrific a Zempi stories so far?

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
It's terrific aszempic story by I interview people had gone
through rough experiences. I want to stress this is very rare,
but there's a condition called pancreatitis which is excruciatingly painful.
It's basically where your pancreast doesn't work properly. Doctors compare
the pain of pancreatitis to being stabbed, and it makes
you nine times more likely to get pancreatitis these when
you take these drugs. So paratise is very rare, but

(01:14:41):
it's obviously a huge increase in this very rare thing.
I interviewed a woman called Michelle Sterziak, who lives in
Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, which is a place I
only thought existed in country songs until I interviewed her.
And Michelle said to me, you know, she went for
a zmpic for weight loss. The doctor said, oh, this
is rare side effects, one of those pancreatitis. She said, no,
my life, I'll probably get it. She started taking it,

(01:15:02):
lost loads away. Six weeks later, she went to visit
a daughter in Pittsburgh and she woke up, she said,
in the most excruciating angony she'd ever been in. She
felt like she like she was being stabbed all over
her body, and she was rushed to hospital and they
hadn't know if I pancreatics. In the first thing they
said was are you an alcoholic? She said no. Then
they said are you taking her zempic? She was like yes,

(01:15:24):
So that was probably the person. Michelle said to me,
you know I've had children. It was much worse than
the pain of childbirth, right so, which thank god you
and I will never have to go through. But unless
you've got something you want to announce, Jay, But there's
some real horror stories, and most people are not having
these horror stories. Most people are having I want to

(01:15:45):
be responsible. Most people's experience is more like Jeff Parker
or Oprah than it is like you know, Michelle. Yeah,
but that's now twenty years from now, thirty years from now,
forty years from now. We don't know what the picture
will be, which which puts us in this difficult position.

Speaker 2 (01:16:03):
So we've got some questions from the team. Yeah tell
me referred to team. This is the team. So what
is your view on when a zempic should be used
for kids? If at all?

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
For me, the debate about a zempic for kids through
open the whole thing for me because for so many reasons,
Because it's when you look at kids that you realize
how this is a crisis created by the fast feed industry, right,
and by processed food industry, and by the fact that
we as a society have allowed that industry to poison

(01:16:37):
our kids. Right. Think about where we are in Brooklyn.
Try walking around Brooklyn with a kid and them not
seeing ads the whole time saying you don't feel good, Hey,
stuff your face with our shit. Right. The first thing
I want to say is this is a crisis created
by them, and we need to stop them doing that,
and we can do that, and I went to places
that have done it. But given that's where we are,

(01:16:59):
I think people are in a really tough position because
there's so I'm very sympathetic to both sides of that debate. So,
for example, I interviewed a really lovely woman called Deborah
Tyler who's a nurse in Connecticut. Her daughter was very
severely obese from when she was very young, and she

(01:17:21):
took a daughter to the doctor when I think she
was eight, and the doctor said she had liver problems,
and she's like, can you imagine when you've been told
your child is of the problems at the age of eight,
And she faced this agonizing decision about whether to put
her daughter on ozm PIC And in the end she
decided to do it, and her daughter's liver problems have
gone away. So I have a lot and she's still

(01:17:42):
very agonized about it. All the problems are accentuated when
it comes to children. I mean, there are benefits. Dr
Charles you, who's one of the leading experts at Cambridge
University on obest, explain to me if you are obese
when you're a child. It is very hard to become unobese.
I mean, you're unusual, right, it happens. You'll proof of that.
There are other people approve that. Most people don't. Right.

(01:18:04):
It's really partly because as you become obese, all sorts
of changes happen in your brain that make it very
hard to go back that I go through in the book.
So there's a case for dealing with it early. Right,
And we know childhood obesity, I mean has really devastating
impacts on your health throughout your life and radically shortens

(01:18:25):
your life on average. There are other people who have
a lot of sympathy for like Professor Dan Cooper who's
at UC Irvine, who say, well, A and I can't
believe anyone would disagree with this. We need to deal
with the underlying causes, but the environmental factors. But be
children are not miniature adults, right. This could affect children
in different ways. For example, of one of the things
children use calories for is bone mineralization, and if you

(01:18:47):
don't have enough calories, maybe your bones don't form it properly.
Maybe they'll become austereoporotic as they get older, So it's
really complicated. Novo Nordisk is currently doing a trial on
giving these drugs to chill as young as six years old.
It turns my stomach. It's a sign of a six
society that we've reached this point. We need to fix

(01:19:09):
the society. But if you're trapped in the choice that
Debra Tayler is trapped in, honestly, I think I would
probably do what she's done and I would feel as
anguished as she does about it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):
So this came up with what you're just mentioning now,
like what is your view on Oprah's ZMPIG special and
what would the benefits and some of the challenges that
came from it on people's perspectives.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
So I can't think just passionately about Oprah, right, Like
I know everyone loves Oprah and a kind of oh
we love Oprah. Oprah is what are the two or
three humans alive for his most influenced be Like when
I was a kid, do you remember this when your
kids remember? It's so vividly the Oprah Show of you
on at five pm on Channel four. Right, and no
one in Britain when we were kids spoke like Oprah, Right,
no one spoke about their no one spoke about their emotions,

(01:19:49):
no one spoke about in this extraordinary and profound way
that Oprah does. And I really think one of the
reasons I get on well with Oprah, I think is
because I've I've so entitalized her voice that I sort
of I mean, clearly, as a British person, you can't
talk like Oprah, but like, well, clearly no one can
talk like Oprah, but you know what I mean. So
I can't think dispassionately about it because I love her

(01:20:11):
so much and I'm weirdly friends with her, which is
like still to me the most surreal, whether she emails
me or texts me. And my friend I was like,
shut up, everyone Oprah needs us. But I thought her
special was incredible and I cried a lot for the
minute it started. I cried, and my friend said, thank
God Oprah has not brought her show back, because if
you had this emotional reaction every day, you've been a

(01:20:33):
psychiatric hospital because of seeing op profront of an audience
may be emotional, but I thought it was amazing, and
I think part of it made me really sad, because
you think about how much Oprah has given us, right,
how much she's given to the culture, people forget, you know,
I mean even just think about the incredible work she
did on breaking the taboos around sexual abuse right where.

(01:20:55):
What she's done is incredible. And I could list like
fifteen things like that that Oprah has done transform the culture.
And you think, all that time she was doing that
and rising, she was being bullied in the most hateful ways.
I really recommend people watch. And this is someone else
who I admire and was a damaged person. So I

(01:21:16):
don't want to say this in a spirit of judgment,
but you can watch it on YouTube. There's an interview
between Oprah and Joan Rivers from I think nineteen eighty five,
and I'll preface this by saying, a Joan Rivers was
the funniest comedian I've ever seen, and be Joan Rivers
was someone who hated her own body and was at
war with her own body. So she's externalizing something that's
an internal, horrifying battle. But it's viscerally shocking when you

(01:21:40):
watch it now. She says to Oprah something like, I
haven't watched it in a long time, so I'm going
to be get the exact wording wrong. But she says
something like, you can't be this fat, you need to
lose weight. And it's not said as a joke. It's
not framed as like I mean, it would be would
be acceptable as a joke, but it's not even framed
as a joke. And you can see just looks really

(01:22:00):
thrown and make some joke about herself because what else
could she do? But you think, God, that's the Tonight Shows.
They're on the Tonight Show, right, that's because Joan was
the guest host. How many people watch that? Twenty five
million people? That's been brutally shamed in front of twenty
five million people. You think Oprah's carrying that the whole
time she's torturing herself. You know that famous the famous
image of her with the you know, the thing that

(01:22:21):
represents as much fat as she's lost. And you think, God,
I feel so sad if you, even if your Oprah,
you get tortured about it, right, you just realize. So
to see her overcome that and see her looking so well,
and to see her given a space beyond that stigma,
I found incredibly moving. But that's tied up for me

(01:22:44):
with so many other feelings about Oprah that I can't
really you know.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
No for sure. And do you feel like some of
that stigma's now going the other way too? Right? Oh,
you lost weight because of a zambic so then that
stigma creeping in, have you.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
I think what's happening is a complicated thing. Just like
the drugs interrupt the way we eat and bring to
the surface these emotional feelings we didn't know were there.
I think culturally, as zen pick is leeching out some
deep underlying ideas about obesity. So, for example, I'm a
feeling experience in them to myself. When I was taking

(01:23:18):
the drug, I kept thinking I'm cheating, I'm doing something wrong.
I think that's really weird. One of my best friends
to take statins right to lower's cholesterol. I've never once
thought cheating to get lower cholesterol than me. You think
I was crazy if I said that, Right, that's really
weird what's going on here? And I think it lies
with that. It looks a lot into the history of
obesity and how we talk and think about it. So
if you look back in the sixth century, the pope

(01:23:39):
Pope Gregory the First was the first one to lay
out the seven Deadly sins, and one of them is gluttony,
and it's always depicted with like some hugely fat person
picking out It's very deep in our kind of psychees
to think of obesity as a sin, right, And one
of the ways you know that is what are the
forms of weight loss we had? There's basically only one form,

(01:24:02):
and it follows the classic Catholic pattern of like the sinner,
you're sinner. You've got to be tormented, you've got to
go through hell and purgatory, and then we'll forgive you.
So think about that game show the world. It's called
the Biggest Loser, repulsive and wicked show in my view,
but it's where people haven't seen it. People are very unwell,

(01:24:22):
very seriously overweight, are humiliated, made to take part in
very extreme and in fact dangerous forms of exercise and
starve themselves, and whoever loses the most weight is the
biggest loser and therefore wins. It's like, oh yeah, if
you torture yourself and go through agony, then we'll forgive
you for your sin. Then we'll go, well done, good job, Joe. Right.

(01:24:43):
But I think one of the things that's weird with
those sen because it's so easy, right. So it's like
I think a lot of people look at it and go, well,
you haven't paid for your sin, right, you haven't suffered.
If you suffer, we might forgive you suffer with bariatric surgery.
I also think it underlies can you think about right
in this culture which makes it so easy to be

(01:25:05):
to over eat and be obese, and so hard to
be healthy, lots of people are making daily sacrifices to
not gain weight, particularly women. They're starving themselves, they're denying themselves,
they're going hungry, they're doing extreme forms of exercise, and
I think to them, people like me must look a
bit like Lance Armstrong looks to a cyclist. It's what you, you, bastard.

(01:25:30):
I work so hard for this and you just inject
yourself once in the leg a week and you get
the same benefit as me. Screw you. I can see
where that impulse comes from, and I think we have
to re I think we have to acknowledge those feelings
are there. They were there in me, they're in everyone.
I think it's you can't live in this culture and
not absorb those ideas at some level. But then we
have to say, okay, well, A, I don't think of

(01:25:50):
these people are sinners. I think we're typical products of
this environment, and i'd hope we can move beyond the
ideas of with sixth century pope. But also in terms
of being in a race and competing against each other, well,
we are competing, but it's not me against you. It's
all of us against the forces driving up obesity, which

(01:26:10):
are the processed food industry. If we reframe it that way,
we can get out. Look, we live in, as you
know very well, a toxic age where you know, every
conversation turns toxic very quickly, partly because of social media
algorithms which prioritize negativity, all sorts of factors that are
going on. If we want to have a non toxic
conversation about obesity and about a zenpic, I think we've

(01:26:31):
got to acknowledge those ideas about sin and cheating are there,
and then we've got a move beyond them.

Speaker 2 (01:26:38):
Well said, Well said, yeah, I wonder whether you saw
did you do it into any research on investors in
fast foods and weight loss drugs, did you find any patterns?

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
I didn't, but I'd be surprised if and there was
some reporting in the Washington Post, which I only read briefly,
so I don't want to get it wrong. But if
I remember rightly, I suspect I don't know this, but
I suspect the fast food industry will soon be funding
antio zen pic propaganda, just like the tobacco industry used
to fund, you know, claims that smoking isn't bad for

(01:27:10):
you for yearsnars, or like the oil industry still funds
claims that global warming isn't happening or is actually a
good thing, or you know, over amazed if that isn't.
I mean, they're going to lose a lot of money,
and they are some of the most profitable companies in
the whole world, so i'd be I suspect they're already
doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
I don't know, Yeah, yeah, No. It's an interesting to
think about because I feel like part of our part
of the environment we all live in, is somewhat of
an illusion and ignorance of not understanding who's behind the
narrative storytelling. You know, when fast food first came around,
how did everyone not go, wait a minute, this is
going to ruin the world, Like, how did we not

(01:27:45):
do that? Or when, as you said, we're trying to
find artificial solutions to artificial problems, and now that we're
living in an artificial world, it's like, well, where did
we allow that to happen? And I want to talk
about Japan in that vein, because that was a place
where you found that at least tried to deal with
this in a much healthier, smarter way.

Speaker 1 (01:28:06):
This completely blew up. Have you been to Japan?

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
So that's number one on my list right now.

Speaker 1 (01:28:10):
Okay, if there's one thing you take away from this
conversation going to Japan, go to Japan. It I expected
it to be great, and it massively exceeded by expectations.
But it's completely amazing. I give your list of things
to do. But the so Japan is really important because
some people say about these drugs. Look, if the country
gets to be rich, people are going to have more
food than they can eat. Obesity is just inevitable, right,

(01:28:33):
and therefore these drugs become inevitable. But actually, Japan is
the third richest country in the world in the history
of the world, and now is the third rich country
in the world, and they have almost no obesity at all.
Forty two point five percent of Americans are obese. It
is four percent of people in Japan. Right, there's almost
no childhood obesity in Japan. I went to a school
in Tokyo, typical middle class school. When several schools, it's

(01:28:57):
the weirdest thing walking around a school with a thousand
children and they're being not one overweight child anywhere. It's
as weird if you're used to going to British and
American schools. So I wanted to understand how did Japan
do it because I remember at first I read about
you know, a zepic has been approved in Japan and

(01:29:18):
are in any sales because there's no one to take it, right,
almost nobody. It's a tiny, tiny market for it. And
it's kind of weird that we expect Japanese people to
look like sumo wrestlers. It would be like expecting an
American to look like a bald eagle. And at first
I thought it must just be that Japanese people won
the genetic lottery, right, But that's not true. We know
that because in the late nineteenth century lots of Japanese

(01:29:38):
people moved to Hawaii. I was just there and they've
been there ever since, and Japanese Hawaiians are almost as
overweight as other Hawaiians. So and it's not that their
genes suddenly mutated in one hundred and twenty years since.
So something else is going on, right, There's something in
the environment that's that's driving up obesity in our societies
and hasn't in Japan. And there's so many fascinating things

(01:30:00):
about this. I went to. The most important to understand
is Japan deliberately created an environment in which it is
hard to get fat and hard to eat badly. If
you go back to the nineteen twenties, Japanese people had
one of the worst diets in the world. They only
ate protein on average once a week. Right, they were
quite unwell. They had poor life expectancy, and the Japanese
government at the time deliberately transformed the society. Not for

(01:30:24):
a good reason, it's because they were They wanted to
have an army to go and invade the rest of Asia.
So we all got our motives for weight loss. Not
the best run, but you know whatever, it worked, right
they and they deliberately created this new new diet in
this new way being which is now continued in policy
in Japan. So I went to school, like I say,
in Tokyo to see how does it begin. There's lots

(01:30:46):
of layers at which they do this. And I was
greeted at the door by a woman called Harumi to
t Bay who's the nutritionist at this school, Coenji School.
Every school, by law in Japan has to employ a
professional nutritionists. It's a difficult qualification to get. It's three years.
On top of your teaching qualification. Your job is to
design the food that the kids eat. By law, the

(01:31:08):
kids can't bring back lunches. They have to eat what's
prepared there, and they can only that food has to
be fresh, prepared on the day and have no processed
ingredients at all. And then they use this healthy food
which has to contain all the food groups every day
to educate the kids about how to make their bodies healthy.
So still, you know, they're eating this food. And Japanese

(01:31:30):
people love food. It's not a place people deny themselves food.
They love it. Right, So with these group of kids,
they're eating the school lunch, which literally is more like
something from Nobu than like anything we ever ate at school, right,
and they're eating it. And I say to these kids
through my translator Chier, I said to these kids and
never forget it the class I think of in particularly
we're nine ten year olds. I said, what's your favorite food?

(01:31:54):
The first kid said broccoli. I love broccoli. I was like, okay,
little freak. So to the next kid, what's your favorite food?
She said white fish. I said to the next kid,
and she said, I boiled white rice. And I turned
to cheer and I said, are these kids trolling me?

Speaker 2 (01:32:07):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:32:07):
Their favorite foods are broccoli and a cheer Like all
Japanese people could not understand why. I was puzzled and said, well,
what do you mean. We teach our kids to eat
healthy food? Don't you do that? And every food group
they have they have a rope, a colored rope, so
they like when they're eating the calcium shells up the
white rope, she goes, this is calcium. What does it

(01:32:28):
do when someone yells at It makes your bone strong?
And she goes the red rope, this is carbs. What
do they do give you energy? And she ties the
ropes together in every lesson and that surrounded meal that
you should have in every meal. Right, So they teach
kids from a very young age how to nuture their bodies.
And I was with these kids, and I couldn't help.
I couldn't resist the temptation. I pulled up on my
phone videos of British and American school meals, and these

(01:32:53):
kids reacted like I had shown them an Isis beheading video.
They like screamed, they were like what are They said
to me, where are the vegetables? Said, there are no vegetables.
Where's the salad? I said, there is no salad. They
were just complete and it was very touching. My little
girl put her hand on my shoulder and said, I'm
worried about you. Well it like it was completely adorable. Right.
It begins there and then all through the society. There

(01:33:15):
are measures taken to make processed food. You can buy
it if you want to, but it's very much a
minority pursuit. It exists, but it's a tiny part of
the Japanese diet, overwhelming the fish, fresh food, vegetables. Most
people eat fresh food that's prepared on the day. And
I think probably the most moving conversation I had for

(01:33:36):
the whole book was in Okinawa, which is an archipelago
of islands in the south of Japan, where I really
saw what you win if you get this right. So
Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Women
live to be eighty eight. Men I think it's eighty two.
But not just that. They have the healthiest lifespan in
the world. So the average British person is in poor health.

(01:33:58):
I think it's sixteen years before they die. In Japan,
it's like a few years. So it's a very different relationship.
And so I went to this place that sounds almost mythical.
It's called Ogeemi. It's the oldest village in the whole world.
It has two hundred and fifteen houses and one hundred
and ninety two have someone older than the age older
than the age of ninety living there. And I went

(01:34:20):
there and I went to they' got this little community center.
And the first person I met, the first woman who
walked through the door, was the one hundred and two
year old woman called Matsufakucci, who walked there on her
own from her home down the hill. And she said,
I can't stay long because I'm looking after my son
who fell off the roof fixing it the other day.
I was like, Jesus, how old is your son? But okay,

(01:34:40):
and we sat down and we talked and she talked
about how much she loved life. It was volleyball season.
She's been watching a great grandchildren play volleyball. I actually
loved volleyball. You could see how much joy she took
in life. Two into all these old women. And then
someone put on some older Okinawan music and she put
on a kimono and she started dancing. And so I

(01:35:02):
start dancing with this one hundred and two year old woman,
and I thought, wow, you were born before they started
doing radio broadcasts in Japan. And here I am dancing
with you and recording it on my iPhone. That's what
you get if you solve obesity. You don't get destroyed.
Clearly not everyone will live to one hundred and two,
but you don't get your knees destroyed and your heart

(01:35:22):
destroyed and your you know, you get to live, and
you get more years of joy and more years of laughter,
and more years of dancing. That's what we get if
we solve this crisis, and it is within our grasp
to solve it. These drugs are one tool. They are
a difficult and controversial tool, and I'm not sure I've
made the right decision to carry on taking them. It

(01:35:43):
was the heart benefits. That did it for me. But
we absolutely can deal with this wider crisis. They've done
it in Japan. Think about smoking. Right, when we were kids,
people smoked everywhere. People smoked on the subway, people smoked
on the bus, people smoked on the plane. Doctors to
smoke while they examined you. I remember it happening. There's
a photo of me and my mother where she's breastfeeding

(01:36:05):
me when I'm a baby, obviously smoking and resting the
ashtray on my stomach. When I found this photo a
few years ago, I thought she'd feel guilty. I showed
it to She said, you were a difficult baby. I
needed that cigarette. Right. If you think about how normal
that was then. Right now, if you saw that, you'd
call the police. Right, we've gone from you know, more
than fifty percent of people with smokers when we were kids,
it's now twelve percent. You very rarely see a young

(01:36:27):
persons smoking cigarettes now, Ka, we've gotn issue with vaping.
But you know that's an enormous transformation that's happened in
our lifetimes through concerted action. Right, we can do the
same with food. We can free future generations from this
shitty choice. Japan showed me you can do it with joy. Right,
Japanese people aren't sitting there being miserable. They love food.
Their food is grabbed, never eaten, better than in the

(01:36:48):
two and a half weeks I was in Japan. Right,
literally never right. It's not about depriving yourself. It's about
making better choices and empowering everyone to be in an
environment where we can make better choices.

Speaker 2 (01:37:00):
Still have a stigma around body shape, size, weight and
all of that as well.

Speaker 1 (01:37:05):
Yeah, this is one of the complexities, so I don't
want to shy away from it. These people are horrifically
stigmatizing towards overweight people, and that informs some of their policies,
which are just so strange to us that they sound
like a kind of just bizarre parallel universe. Give an example,
So in two thousand and eight, they had their obesity
level went up by like zero point four percent, and

(01:37:26):
they had a massive, like national freak out, and it
was like this huge debate intopad. It was from like
you know, I can't remember, it's literally for it saying
like three percent to three point four percent or like
saying that like we wouldn't even notice it in the
US if that happened, right, And there's a huge debate,
and they introduced something that I, frankly just when I

(01:37:47):
read about it, thought this can't be true. It's so
called the Matabo law. It's named after metabolic syndrome, which
is a kind of combination of problems you can get
when you're obese. This has very bad health effect. The
introduced this rule. I actually kin'd even say it without
like it decided insaid in Japan, every single employee once

(01:38:09):
a year has to be weighed by their employer. If
your weight has gone up, you have to, by law
drop a plan with your employer to bring your weight down.
And a company overall has to report its weight levels
to the government, and if your overall workforce got fatter,
you can be fined by the government. Right, So it's like,
how can this work? So I went to this company

(01:38:30):
that does it. I mean every company does it, but
this is a company that agreed to show me, partly
because they manufacture products to keep you healthy, so they
can't want people to know about it, and they're super
nice people, but it was freaky. So you arrive the
first thing you see when you arrive at work is
a face recognition thing. It says, hij you walked one
three hundred steps yesterday whatever, because you have to wear

(01:38:52):
a fitbit equivalent and a fitbit, and then it says
you were number one hundred and twenty one in the company.
By the way, Susie who said two deaths away from
you hasn't weighed herself this week. Tell her to weigh herself.
You're like, ohh And then so every you're encouraged. It's
not required, but you're encouraged to take a photograph of

(01:39:12):
every meal you take and post it so you can
literally go, oh, I wonder what Bobby sits next to
me eight yesterday and you can look at it all.
It's just bizarre. And I was interviewing people there, so
in to be the boss, who's this fifty eight year
old man, I have to say, incredibly hot boss? And
he was like talking about yeah, this is you know,
it's great, it's really good for everyone. And I was
interviewing the employees and they would go, yeah, this really

(01:39:37):
helps me be healthy, and I would kind of go, right,
So if you did this in the US or Britain,
we would burn the office building down. And they genuinely
didn't understand we're saying. They would kind of go, well,
why they just it was. It really was a moment
I thought I could profound cultural chasm, right, I thought,
this is you're not like us.

Speaker 2 (01:39:56):
And we're not like and we can't Yeah. Yeah, just
as they can't understand us, we can't understand that exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:40:01):
So there are lots of things about the Japanese model
I definitely would not I mean, we couldn't integrate that
even if we want to. But if we could, I
wouldn't want to. So there's lots of things about the
Japanese model we can't integrate, including just shame. Right, it's
a very particularly to women who are overweight. It's really
brutal the shaming there. So yeah, there's lots of things
we wouldn't want to integrate, and lots of things we would.

Speaker 2 (01:40:20):
Yeah. Yeah, it's one thing that has stayed with me
as we've been on this beautiful journey together. Today, I
feel like we've you know, I've learned so much from you,
or less much from the book. I really want people
to read the book, to dive into it. We've kind
of nicely kind of visited different chapters and different sections
insides of the book. But there's one thing that stayed
with me, and it's this idea of even after being

(01:40:43):
on a zebig, if people are unable to change their
eating habits even though they're satiated quicker, does that not
necessarily double up on the health problems too?

Speaker 1 (01:40:57):
So inevitably changes you're eating patterns one key way you
eat much less. Right, But an issue, and this was
definitely true of me for the first six months, is
to put it crudely, I was eating smaller.

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
Portions of the same old I mean, yeah, yes, I was.

Speaker 1 (01:41:10):
Going to McDonald's been Instead of getting like a large
big macmeal and nine nuggets, I was getting a hamburger. Right,
And that's a move in the right direction, but still
very imperfect. As Robert Kushner, one of the scientists who's
involved in the studies about these drugs, explained to me, Look,
there's an issue about nutrition just separate to wait. If
you're eating food that doesn't give your body what it needs,
even if you're not obese, that's still really bad for you. Right.

(01:41:34):
So for me, it made me realize I had to
do it. I'm super embarrassed to say it, but I
didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to
do really basic things. I learned that partly because I
realized I had to make that change. But you could
I could have just carried on eating smaller portions. And frankly,
I'm on the road at the moment, I am eating
smaller portions of the same shit. This morning I had
travelers travel is really tough, or even try living in
Las Vegas, no idea, But you're worried about portion size

(01:41:57):
in this country, generally you want to try Vegas. But yeah, so, yeah,
the issue A pointed to is real. I mean, you're
still moving in a positive direction, but it can leave you, yeah,
far from from the ideal position.

Speaker 2 (01:42:11):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah, And it's been such a joy
talking to you today, deeply insightful and appreciate the honesty
of just what a challenging, nuanced, layered subject matter this is.
And I feel your analysis, research and thought through it
is actually so so so helpful in that if people
are confused in their decision making for themselves their family,

(01:42:33):
I think you've at least given them every angle possible
to think about, which is I think sometimes what's missing, right,
Sometimes we are just presented a binary angle, which is
where we started and now we're ending today feeling like
we can look at this from twelve different angles and
twelve different points of view. We end every episode of
On Purpose with a fast five or a final five.

(01:42:55):
These have to be answered in one word to one
sentence maximize.

Speaker 1 (01:42:58):
Okay, this is very hard for me, as you can
tell you my brutal your final should someone to tell
you your colleage should taze me? If I be on
the sentence, you should why you are here exactly? The
first question is what is the best health advice you've
ever heard or received? It's what Lindy West said that
I quoted before. You can't it's hard to treat well

(01:43:19):
and object you hate. You've got to learn to love
your body.

Speaker 2 (01:43:21):
That's great advice. I love that. One second question, what
is the worst advice health advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:43:27):
I went to an Austrian diet clinic in clarg and
Fort where they made me eat nothing but tea for
like days and days and days.

Speaker 2 (01:43:39):
Yeah, not good advice, yeah, just tea. Exactly how did
that end up? Tell us?

Speaker 1 (01:43:43):
I was surrounded by people I would go like, so
there were people there who'd have been there for like
three weeks, and they were on the tea diet, and
I said, how do you feel? And they said terrible.
I was like, yeah, you're gonna die. I felt like
Jack Nicholson did what over the cookers there, flung out
it's gonna buy a bratfirst? Not their own.

Speaker 2 (01:44:01):
Question Number three, what's something that surprised you about this
journey that you went on with the magic pill?

Speaker 1 (01:44:09):
How hard it is, how complicated it's not. I'm not
normally such an even handed person. It's really complicated, and
that surprised you.

Speaker 2 (01:44:17):
You would be a lot more clear.

Speaker 1 (01:44:18):
I thought every other book I've ever written, I've come
to a more firm conclusion at the end than this.
You know, with this, it's sort of like you've really
got to go down the list of the risk and
benefits for yourself, and it will really help you to
know all these risk and benefits. But I can't tell
you at the end. And now, dear reader, do it
or don't do it? Or do these things? You know,
I'm completely failing at these one sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:44:38):
That's great, I'm asking you, yes, exactly, angry face when
I go to squ is the Number four, if you
had to ask people to reflect on three things while
they're making their decision. There are many things in the
book that they need to read and study, but three
things while they're reading the book that you'd like them
to reflect on as they're making their own decision. What
would they be that are not related to be am

(01:44:59):
I or or some of those more tactical elements and
not attactical those tangible elements you shared with us earlier.

Speaker 1 (01:45:07):
Think about what your relationship with food was in your
family when you were a child, because all sorts of
issues around that will come to the surface in which
we haven't touched on, but is really important. Number two
is think about how important pleasure in food is for you,
because a lot of people experience a huge reduction in it.
Although I didn't, a lot of people do. Number three
is these drugs might be significantly reducing addiction. This is

(01:45:29):
hugely contested, but there are serious scientists who think they are,
and that's the whole dimension when need to think about
not just food addiction, but actually like cocaine addiction, ventimal
addiction across the board. Those would I guess be the
three things that we haven't covered that would be the
things I mean, there's about one hundred things from book.

Speaker 2 (01:45:45):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, okay, great. Fifth and final question, if
you could create one law that everyone in the world
had to follow, what would it be?

Speaker 1 (01:45:53):
Oh, one law? Can I get rid of a law?

Speaker 2 (01:46:01):
Be the first person to do. I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:03):
The law I would get rid of would be the
criminalization of addiction. You know a lot of addiction in
my family. Punishing people we've got addiction problems makes the
problem worse. Most of the money we spend on drug
policy in this country is shaming, humiliating, and literally caging

(01:46:24):
people with addiction problems. In Portugal, when they took all
that money they spent on putting people in prison, shaming
them and humiliating them, and spent it instead on like
helping them, addiction massively fell. Deaths massively fell. We could
do the same and we'd get the same results. So
it would be I guess, take the current law on
criminalizing addiction and drug use more generally and transfer all

(01:46:49):
that money to helping people instead.

Speaker 2 (01:46:51):
Brilliant. You're the first person ever to get get rid.

Speaker 1 (01:46:53):
Of the law. Normally, so libertarian, but there I go.

Speaker 2 (01:46:57):
Every one. The book is called the Magic Bill, the
extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs.
Yohan Hari, thank you so much. Make sure you go
and grab and order a copy right now. I really
want this make this the book of your book clubs,
the book that you're reading with your friends, your family.
I think it will. As Johan said, there's so many
parts of it that we didn't even get to cover.

(01:47:18):
I hope you'll come back and we'll dissect it a
second time. But I really believe that this book is
so significantly important at this time, especially and especially for
the younger generations to follow, so highly highly recommend Magic
Pill that I really mean it.

Speaker 1 (01:47:36):
I feel quite emotional here you said that, thank youself.

Speaker 2 (01:47:38):
Really mean it. I think there's so many things, like
you said, that we still haven't covered, and I hope
you'll come back to do those anytime, because Yeah, I
think this is it's it's the biggest thing right now,
and especially with the way you've dived into it, when
you're talking about just the amount of stigma there is
from day one, and it seems to never go, like

(01:48:00):
you said, even with Oprah, like whether you're here or
you're here, it's like that experience of that stigma doesn't disappear.
And so if you're living with that for your whole
life and it was created by a system, that that
needs to be addressed, and I think you're addressing it
in a really deep and profound way. So thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:48:18):
I think I meant to say, my lovely publicist is
in the corner, so sure taze me if I don't
say this that anyone who wants to know anything more
about the book can go to magic pillbook dot com
than get the audiobook, which I read the e book
physical book, And I think I'm meant to say you
can get it from good bookshops or good bookshops, but
you coul also get it from shilly book shops as well.
Never understood that like a quality. So let's go order

(01:48:44):
some KFC on.

Speaker 2 (01:48:47):
Weve got some for you and bring you hope buckets
a k I hope that served you, you felt, I
hope you felt You've got to share what you wanted
to show. Thanks everyone, Thank you. If if you love
this episode, you'll enjoy my conversation with Megan Trainer on
breaking generational trauma and how to be confident from the

(01:49:08):
inside out. My therapist told me stand in the mirror
naked for five minutes. It was already tough for me
to love my body, but after the C section scar
with all the stretch marks. Now I'm looking at myself
like I've been hacked. But day three, when I did it,
I was like, you know what, her thighs are cute

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