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The news has been littered with stories these days about people losing weight using GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic. Now, the junk food industry, AKA Big Food, is fighting back against Big Pharma in a battle for the bulge.
According to a report by New York Times Magazine, these junk food companies, like McDonald’s, White Castle, PepsiCo and Hostess, are not messing around either. They are literally having people follow Ozempic users as they shop at supermarkets so they can learn their shopping behaviors.
With around seven million Americans now taking a GLP-1 drug, a number that is expected to go up to around 24 million by 2035, the junk food industry is rather worried.
GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”
Of course, trying to trick people into eating their junk food, and more of it, is nothing new for Big Food, according to the New York Times Magazine report. They have been doing things like sealing aromas in packaging, making chips noisier, amplifying the intensity of artificial sweeteners, engineering fats to melt at precisely the right temperature in the mouth, and changing the structure of salt crystals so they absorb into chemical pathways quicker, all in an effort to get people to eat more. They have even made food like potato chips, popcorn and mac-and-cheese bland on purpose because they found people will eat more if they are bland because the more someone eats a strongly flavored food, the less they want to do so.
Companies like Nestle have already started a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1 drugs. Fairlife, a line of sweet protein shakes owned by Coca-Cola, has also become popular among GLP-1 users.
When asked if Big Food could eventually create food products that render GLP-1 drugs less effective, Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, replied that it is plausible. Buyer beware.
Content shared from brobible.com.