Scientist Who Pioneered Drugs Like Ozempic Says They Make Life ‘So Miserably Boring’ After Two Years of Use
A scientist who took part in pioneering the development of Glucagon-like Peptide-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy is revealing why many people will likely give up the drugs after just a couple of years. Glucagon-like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a hormone utilized in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity, as it works in the brain to impact satiety by signalling the pancreas to increase the production of insulin and making the body more efficient at processing sugars.
In recent months, semaglutide — a GLP-1 receptor agonist sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy — has been trending on social media as some people in Hollywood circles have used it for weight loss, despite not having diabetes or clinical obesity.
In an interview with Wired, Jens Juul Holst — a scientist who was awarded the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2021 for his work discovering and developing treatments based on the GLP-1 hormone — explained that while the medications are effective, he thinks it’s unlikely that people will want to stay on the drugs for more than two years.
“What happens is that you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating, and so I think there’s a price to be paid when you do that,” Holst, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, explained. “If you like food, then that pleasure is gone. The craving for food for some people is taken away when they take GLP-1 drugs.”
“So you don’t eat through GLP-1 therapy because you’ve lost interest in food,” he continued. “That may eventually be a problem, that once you’ve been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life.”
Holst added that medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have been on the market since 2005, and studies have shown that people don’t stay on them for a long time.
“It’s just like every other drug, they don’t stay on it for many reasons,” he told the outlet, noting that even those who return to the drugs after stopping them are still unlikely to stay on them. “It’s simply because something happens that makes you uninterested in going on.”
“Maybe you think everything is alright now, and then it turns out later that it is not alright and maybe you come back on the therapy. But I don’t see that a huge part of the population will be put on Wegovy and will stay on Wegovy for the rest of their lives — I simply don’t see that picture, because this hasn’t happened with other GLP-1 drugs,” he added.
According to sources who previously spoke to Ania Jastreboff M.D., PhD., an obesity medicine physician scientist at Yale, about Ozempic, Wegovy and the rebound weight gain that can occur if the medication is stopped. She explained that those who use these drugs have to continue taking the medications if they want to maintain the weight loss because diabetes and obesity are chronic conditions.
“If you have a patient who has high blood pressure, they have hypertension, and you start them on an antihypertensive medication, and their blood pressure improves, what would happen if you stopped that medication? Well, their blood pressure would go back up — and we’re not surprised. It’s the same with anti-obesity medications,” Jastreboff said.
