On godspeed - Max Alexander in TLS:

‘There is no mystery to long life: don’t smoke, don’t drink too much, get a good night’s sleep, stay active, stay married and eat a healthy diet, ideally emphasizing fruits and vegetables cooked from scratch. Why, then, do the people of South Kensington have a life expectancy of ninety-one years, while the residents of Blackpool barely make it to seventy-three? (And that isn’t the whole story for Blackpool, where healthy life expectancy – free from meaningful disability or chronic disease – is a miserable 53.7 years.) Part of the answer lies increasingly in how much and what we eat.
A lot has been written lately about obesity and the interaction between a society that values low prices, familiarity and immediate gratification over variety, nutrition and health. Much has been written, too, about the businesses that fulfil those desires without accounting for the consequent harms. So it has been with some fanfare that, in the past eighteen months, pharmaceutical companies have offered a solution to an aspect of this problem in the form of drugs that reduce appetite. The most famous of these is marketed under the brand name Ozempic, originally developed as a treatment for diabetes. On average people who take the drug lose 10-15 per cent of their body weight. The manufacturer, the Danish company Novo Nordisk, is now Europe’s largest business by market capitalization at $600 billion, and has tripled in size since it repurposed the drug.
Johann Hari’s new book, Magic Pill: The extraordinary benefits and hidden harms of the new weight loss drugs, begins by setting up an ironic antagonism between the food manufacturing industry making fortunes by selling us the stuff that makes us fat and/or ill, and the pharmaceutical industry making even vaster fortunes by selling us drugs to make us slim and healthier.’

(…)

‘Magic Pill’s overarching narrative is Hari’s own struggle with his weight and his complex relationship with Ozempic. He was skirting the obese category (BMI 30) when he began taking the drug, but over six months he lost almost 10kg and substantially reduced his body fat. “I felt lighter and quicker on my feet,” he writes, “and that boosted my confidence, enough that I started to strut a little.”’

(…)

‘“Why can’t I just put down the burger?”, Hari asks himself again and again.’

(…)

‘About 45 per cent of American women have postponed important life decisions until they lose weight.’

(…)

‘Johann Hari is right to fulminate on that topic: “The real housewives of New Jersey will be thin while the real schoolkids of New Jersey will develop diabetes at 12”. But we must deal with the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. In the end, with some sadness, Hari acknowledges that – while also committing himself to a more optimistic scenario in which the need for these drugs spurs the creation of a movement to deal with the underlying factors that caused the crisis in the first place. To which I say, good luck and godspeed.’

Read the article here.

Addicted to the burger, it could be worse. Or not? I never felt attracted to the burger, but then again, I was a bad eater since early childhood.

Maybe people are looking for excuses to postpone life decisions? And what is a life decision?

According to a scientist with whom I had a cup of eat a couple of weeks ago, Ozempic is the best vaccin against Covid. After all, it’s the combination of obesitats and Covid that’s killing.

He also said: ‘Not eating hamburgers anymore is less effective, probabaly too late.’

Too late for life after the hamburger. It’s never too late for Ozempic.