The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t seem to stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in new drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound mimics a natural hormone that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain. Around seven million Americans take these drugs, but estimates from Morgan Stanley suggest that number could increase to 24 million within the next decade. More than 100 million American adults are obese, and the drugs may eventually be rolled out to people who don’t have diabetes or obesity, as they seem to tame addictions beyond food — appearing to make cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes more resistible. Research is at an early stage, but the drugs may also cut the risk of stroke, heart and kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust. But for Mattson, which has invented products for the nation’s biggest food conglomerates for nearly 50 years, the Ozempic threat could be a boon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name's Thomas Weber, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:11.5	OZempec, Wagovi, Mungaro, Zepbound.
0:17.5	There's some of the brand names for weight loss drugs called GLP1 agonists.
0:23.6	In a nutshell, GLP1s reduce people's appetites.
0:28.6	We know they mimic the hormone that signals fullness to the brain.
0:33.6	But a couple of scientists I spoke to speculated that GLP1 drugs may also regulate the amount of dopamine that the brain releases.
0:44.3	And so, when it does that, the drugs make foods that have been engineered to trigger the dopamine hit, less appealing.
0:55.3	But researchers have also discovered something interesting about GLP-1s.
1:00.5	They change the kinds of foods that people are interested in eating.
1:05.8	So instead of packaged, processed foods, many users tend to gravitate towards fresh fruits and vegetables.
1:15.8	So for this week's Sunday read, which you'll hear in a moment, I wrote about how drugs like
1:22.0	OZempic have the potential to disrupt, even upend, the packaged food industry.
1:31.9	Early one morning last August, my reporting brought me to a glassy, airy office building in the
1:38.6	Bay Area to the headquarters of a company called Mattson.
1:43.0	Madison basically invents packaged foods and pitches them to the biggest food and drink
1:49.2	companies in the world.
1:51.0	I passed display cases of prototypes from years past.
1:56.3	Deep fried chocolate Twinkies, La Choy packaged Asian dinners, DiGiorno pizza, hungry man's
2:03.9	steakhouse meals, Marie Callender's frozen entrees. There were scientists in white coats all
2:11.1	around, and one of the projects they were working on was finding products that OZemPEC users would actually crave.
2:20.7	There was a cubed high-protein brownie bite, a citrusy chicken strip that was similar in form to a
2:28.5	mozzarella stick, and a taco with an andive leaf instead of a taco shell, which, I'll admit, was rather
	...

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