27 June

Ozempic now costs $15 per month, in India. Uptake is slower than was expected. What’s going on here is that people have been trained by decades of ignorance from the diet and fitness industries that their weight problems are down to laziness and poor food choices. That ignorance made both of those industries incredibly rich. There’s always massive resistance to ditching the status quo. When people get access to these new drugs, they treat them like a new fad diet. That’s learned behaviour. ‘Give me 3 months of it, then I’m back to normal.’ That’s dieting behaviour. It will take time to shift those behavioural prejudices. A person with metabolic disease will likely need to be on these drugs for life. But as a doctor friend said, they’d expect that for diabetes, or heart disease, or any other chronic condition. And here, they will need a lot LESS drugs for all the other conditions they suffer from, as a result.