Photograph by Eylul Aslan / Connected Archives
Words by Jake Hall
It’s undeniable: Ozempic is everywhere.
Social media timelines are filled with investigations of celebrity faces, their features examined for signs of “Ozempic face.” Some headlines wax lyrical about the weight-loss effects of the “miracle” drug; others center the stories of models hospitalized for severe dehydration and illness, after taking an excessively high dosage.
In March 2023, The New Yorker declared we were living in the “Ozempic Era.” Things have escalated since then. Both Ozempic and Wegovy, which includes the same active ingredient, semaglutide, are almost always on the “shortage” list of the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), meaning that patients with a desperate medical need for these drugs are often left without. Usually, this would enable compounding pharmacies to create their own versions. In this case, Novo Nordisk—the pharmaceuticals company responsible for Ozempic—has patented semaglutide, potentially until 2033, leading to dangerous, off-brand versions of the drug being sold, sometimes with disastrous effects.
So, what actually is Ozempic?
In a nutshell, it’s an injectable medicine approved by the FDA to treat patients with type 2 diabetes. Ozempic contains the aforementioned semaglutide, which mimics the GLP-1 hormone released in our gastrointestinal tract when we eat. GLP-1 prompts the body to produce insulin, thereby reducing blood sugar levels, and at higher levels, it communicates a sense of fullness and a reduction of appetite to our brains. Ozempic is prescribed solely for type 2 diabetes, but Wegovy—essentially the same drug in a higher dosage, also FDA-approved—is prescribed for weight loss. Both Ozempic and Wegovy are wildly expensive in the U.S., but studies indicate that they’re also effective, at least in the short term.
The last couple of years have seen a wave of environmental research which points to weight loss as a so-called “solution” to global warming.
In 2023, United Airlines declared it could save $80million on jet fuel if every passenger lost 4.5 kilograms, a stat then used to declare Ozempic as a tool for lowering carbon emissions. Not only does this argument scapegoat fat people as a covert cause of the climate crisis, it ignores the high-profile lawsuits against “greenwashing” airlines, which have long relied on passing the cost of carbon offset to their consumers. It’s notable that the focus here is on finance, not the planet; there’s nothing to say the cash wouldn’t then be pumped into building more airplanes, canceling out the predicted environmental gains.
In a 2022 Guardian article, journalists Austin Bryniarski and Samara Brock analyzed a study published that year by Nature. Researchers calculated the “excess calories consumed by obese and overweight people,” and then the greenhouse gas emissions from the production and consumption of this food. The conclusion was that eating less food would produce less food waste, and thus reduce our carbon footprint. As Bryniarski and Brock point out, this methodology presumes overeating to be the sole cause of obesity, which leaves out countless factors, including poverty, illness, metabolic rates, and food production systems. The study also implies that individuals are responsible for global warming, a position that is both reductive and misleading.
“When we see a wave of media like we have seen around Ozempic, we also tend to see a wave of increased anti-fat bias.”
Meanwhile, there are genuine concerns within the food industry that Ozempic will shrink our collective appetites over the coming years—and reduce our demand for food. Following the logic of these studies, lower global food consumption and widespread weight loss means less pollution from food production, and lighter loads for aircrafts. That can only be a good thing for the climate crisis—right?
Well, not exactly. “The issue is far more complex than that,” explains Carlo Genova, author of recently-published research on food consumption and sustainability. “There are many social contexts today where most individuals consume more food than necessary, or even more food than their bodies can process without resulting in health problems. However, the question is not just how much is eaten, but also—or more importantly—what is eaten, and how what is eaten is produced, distributed, and managed.”
In discussions of drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic, there’s undeniable anti-fat bias—and the same stigma is creeping into discussions of sustainability.
Podcasters Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes delved deep into this stigma in an episode of Maintenance Phase focused entirely on Ozempic. Not only do they highlight that most people surveyed in Ozempic studies gained weight back after coming off the drug, they underline how this wider discourse simply repackages old arguments to scapegoat fat people. “When we see a wave of media like we have seen around Ozempic, we also tend to see a wave of increased anti-fat bias,” explains Gordon, in the episode’s conclusion. “The reporting that I have seen so far, the think-pieces that I have seen so far, none of them are grappling with that.”
Here, it’s worth outlining a brief history of the “carbon footprint,” a topic that journalist Mark Kaufman wrote about in an in-depth piece for Mashable. In 2004, he writes, British Petroleum—one of the world’s largest, most pollutant, oil companies—hired a PR team to create a carbon footprint calculator, which analyzed the environmental impact of our individual choices. There is, obviously, merit to this. We can all make small, sustainable tweaks to our lives, and in a world that’s literally burning, these can ease our consumer guilt. Yet, this framing distracts from the fact that just 57 companies are linked to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016—and to nobody’s surprise, BP features on that list.
This same logic is at play when obesity is linked to the climate crisis. It frames the issue as both linear, oversimplified, and individual—we eat and weigh too much, which is bad for the planet—rather than systemic.
Meanwhile, there’s a growing body of research which recognizes that “food production is… one of the main processes responsible for climate change,” says Genova.
The United Nations published an in-depth primer with visuals depicting the hugely disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions of meat, cheese, and fish. There’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that plant-based foods are better for the planet, and that rethinking current food production systems could be game-changing not just in terms of food insecurity, but in climate terms, too. “Food production methods are primarily a consequence of broader production models, and of predominant economic models,” Genova explains. “Therefore, the starting point should perhaps be a critical examination of these models, particularly the principle of continuous economic growth.”
Much like the so-called “obesity epidemic,” the climate crisis needs a scapegoat. What links these two issues is that individual people are blamed for systemic failures.
Someone who understands the impact of these models more than most is Gabrielle Inès Souza, executive director of New York-based food justice organization, The Okra Project. As well as offering vital mutual aid to Black trans communities across the United States, The Okra Project programs initiatives rooted in food insecurity, housing instability, and mental health challenges. “Food systems are major contributors to environmental degradation, while marginalized communities often bear the brunt of climate impacts,” says Souza.
The collective tendency to focus on individual consumption means that discussions of weight loss—and therefore, of drugs like Ozempic—and the climate crisis are often missing one key component: food justice. Souza defines food justice as “not only ensuring access to healthy, sustainable food for all, but also transforming how we produce food to reduce its environmental footprint, ensuring that vulnerable populations aren’t left behind in climate mitigation strategies.”
As it stands, the impacts of the climate crisis—drought, cyclones, rising ocean acidity—are destroying food systems in lower-income countries across the world, and upon which wealthy countries are essentially reliant. It’s one thing to hypothesize that global appetites could shrink on Ozempic—already a hyperbolic claim, given the exorbitant cost of these drugs—but it’s another to do so without examining the financial impact this could have on industries like fishing and farming. It’s the countries already scarred by colonization bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, their economies often reliant on global exports.
As always, the conversation around sustainability isn’t just as simple as lowering carbon emissions; it’s about ensuring a fair transition to more sustainable industries, and creating new models which ensure that people can afford to live, eat, and survive, too.
The current framing of Ozempic as a “miracle drug” with the potential to lower global carbon emissions does nothing to address broader, systemic issues tied to the climate crisis. According to Souza, this is because “the discourse is often shaped by those with access to abundance,” she explains “Food justice addresses systemic inequities that make basic, nutritious meals inaccessible to marginalized communities, and focusing on reduced consumption due to a drug doesn’t tackle those underlying inequalities.” In the U.S., the effects of food deserts—low-income areas without grocery stores—are well-documented, and they’re just one of the many reasons you’re more likely to suffer health problems if you’re poor; you’re a person of color; you’re marginalized in some other way.
Much like the so-called “obesity epidemic,” the climate crisis needs a scapegoat. What links these two issues is that individual people are blamed for systemic failures, with an additional serving of anti-fat bias. What is fair to say is that the impacts of climate change are worsening global public health, especially in the lower-income countries which, paradoxically, do the least to fuel environmental collapse. We’re seeing ecosystems ravaged by erratic, extreme weather patterns; meanwhile, there’s a near-constant shortage of life-saving medications because they’ve been co-opted as desirable weight-loss drugs.
These conversations have common denominators, but the real crux of the issue is that poor communities worldwide are being ravaged by overconsumption. The Ozempic Era will pass, but its impacts will linger.
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