Speaker 1: I'll never forget the second day I took a zen pick,
Speaker 1: I woke up. Oh, I feel something really weird? What
Speaker 1: is it? I'd woken up and I wasn't hungry. I
Speaker 1: don't remember that ever happening before. One of the worst,
Speaker 1: most prolific.
Speaker 2: Authors, and he has a brand new book, Magic Pill.
Speaker 1: Award winning journalist yore Hand hiring forty seven percent of
Speaker 1: Americans want to take these drunks. They are going to
Speaker 1: change all our lives for better and for worse. And
Speaker 1: this is something I think people are not being warned about.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you.
Speaker 2: In the last ninety days, seventy nine point four percent
Speaker 2: of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are
Speaker 2: not subscribed to this channel. There's research that shows that
Speaker 2: if you want to create a habit, make it easy
Speaker 2: to access. By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a
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Speaker 1: The number one health and wellness podcast.
Speaker 2: Jay Sheety Jay Sheddy See yet Hey, everyone, Welcome back
Speaker 2: to On Purpose, the place you come to become a happier,
Speaker 2: healthier and more healed. You know that my goal here
Speaker 2: is to sit down with incredible thinkers, thought leaders, people
Speaker 2: who are crafting the way our mind works and defining culture,
Speaker 2: to have conversations that truly, truly matter. Today I get
Speaker 2: to interview one of my favorite authors. I've been wanting
Speaker 2: him to be on the show for such a long
Speaker 2: time and I can't believe he's finally, finally here. And
Speaker 2: this new book is one of the ones that I
Speaker 2: really hope that you take the time to read, because
Speaker 2: I promise you you, your friend, a family member is having
Speaker 2: to deal with the challenges that come with this theme
Speaker 2: and concept in their daily, weekly, and monthly life. Today's
Speaker 2: guest is none other than Joan Hari. His new book
Speaker 2: is called The Magic Pill The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing
Speaker 2: Risks of the new weight loss Drugs, and I can't
Speaker 2: wait to dive into it with them. If you don't
Speaker 2: have a copy of the book already, make sure you
Speaker 2: go and grab one. We'll put the link in the
Speaker 2: comments and caption below. Please welcome to On Purpose. Johann
Speaker 2: Hiri Johanne, thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: I'm ridiculously happy to be here. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I mean it. I was saying this to you offline,
Speaker 2: but I'd like to repeat it for my audience. You're
Speaker 2: one of the most gripping and captivating authors that have
Speaker 2: read in a long time in the nonfiction space. I
Speaker 2: enjoy your work so deeply. I feel completely enthralled when
Speaker 2: I'm reading your work. I love the way you tell stories,
Speaker 2: and you effortlessly, with so much grace and kindness, bring
Speaker 2: people into a universe that they can understand very complex
Speaker 2: things and make sense of how to apply them in
Speaker 2: their life, which is so hard hard to do. So
Speaker 2: thank you so much for all the work that you
Speaker 2: do and the experiments you do on yourself.
Speaker 1: Oh cheers. Thanks yea.
Speaker 2: And the fact that we're from very similar places with
Speaker 2: basically neighbors.
Speaker 1: We might go a little bit too British in this
Speaker 1: pub so I'm going to try and remember we are
Speaker 1: talking to mostly American audience. Yeah. I was once in
Speaker 1: a diner in fact, in an I hop in a
Speaker 1: place called Cactus, Arizona, and I was trying to order pancakes.
Speaker 1: I kept saying to have some pancakes please, just kept
Speaker 1: going what what And after a while she said to me,
Speaker 1: do you speak English? I was like, my people invented it.
Speaker 1: What do you mean? Right? So, I'm very conscious that,
Speaker 1: you know, we sound like weird refugees from downtown Abbey.
Speaker 1: I'm going to try and americanize slightly.
Speaker 2: Well. It's funny because every time i'm when I live
Speaker 2: in the United States, but everyone in the United States
Speaker 2: always tells me that they find the British accent quite
Speaker 2: authoritative and they see it as a sign of education
Speaker 2: and knowledge. And for me, when I heard ted talk
Speaker 2: in the American accent from a professor or a researcher,
Speaker 2: that's when I find that it's interesting. Do you feel
Speaker 2: that way or what's your date?
Speaker 1: Oh that's so interesting, I think because I spent I
Speaker 1: live here half the year. Yeah, I think I'm kind
Speaker 1: of torn between the value of our accents. But I'm
Speaker 1: conscious that we get given like we basically go in
Speaker 1: with the assumption of ten added IQ points in this situation.
Speaker 2: Right, So yeah, and I'm like, if you knew me,
Speaker 2: I'm not from a brush faring like I'm not anyway, we.
Speaker 1: Sound like hilariously part like I was ritually raised by
Speaker 1: my grandmother, whose job was to clean toilets. But we
Speaker 1: sound basically like the queen.
Speaker 2: Queen or not? But yeah, and so I want to
Speaker 2: dive straight into this, and I want to start off
Speaker 2: by saying, what are some of the biggest misconceptions you've
Speaker 2: heard about ozempic almost things that people may even be
Speaker 2: thinking as they're tuning into this or watching this right now.
Speaker 2: What are some of the things people already think they
Speaker 2: know that you actually believe in misconceptions.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest misconception is that we should either
Speaker 1: be yay, these drugs are amazing or do these drugs evil?
Speaker 1: The biggest misconception is that we can be certain or
Speaker 1: confident about these drugs at the moment. I never forget
Speaker 1: from the moment I learned about these drugs existence. I
Speaker 1: felt so conflicted. It's why I wrote the book, right.
Speaker 1: I remember the moment so vividly. It was the winter
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two, and it was that moment when
Speaker 1: the world was opening up again. And I got invited
Speaker 1: to a party for the first time and god knows
Speaker 1: how long, and I decided to go, and I was
Speaker 1: in an uber on the way there, and the party
Speaker 1: was thrown by an Oscar winning actor I think someone
Speaker 1: you know actually, And I'm not saying that just a
Speaker 1: name drop. It's relevant to what I had the next
Speaker 1: And on the way there, I was feeling gained quite
Speaker 1: a lot of weight during Lockdown. I was feeling kind
Speaker 1: of schlubby. I was quite fat start a lockdown, I
Speaker 1: was fatter then and I and I was thinking, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be awkward. And then I suddenly realized
Speaker 1: that kind of everyone I knew had gained some weight
Speaker 1: during Lockdown, and I thought, oh, this is going to
Speaker 1: be fascinating to see all these Hollywood stars with a
Speaker 1: bit of chub on them. Right, And I arrived and
Speaker 1: I started walking around, and it wasn't just that no
Speaker 1: one had gained weight. Everyone was gaunt, right. Everyone looked
Speaker 1: at their own Snapchat filter them they were like clearer
Speaker 1: and cleaner and sharper. And I was kind of wandering
Speaker 1: around a bit of a daze, and I bumped into
Speaker 1: a friend of mine on the dance floor and I
Speaker 1: said to her, WHOA, looks like everyone really did take
Speaker 1: up pilazas during lockdown, And she laughed, like, you just said,
Speaker 1: I must have looked puzzled, and she said, well, you
Speaker 1: know it's not Pilata's right, And I had no I
Speaker 1: did what she was talking about, and she pulled up
Speaker 1: on her phone and a zenpic pen And that was
Speaker 1: when I learned. I guess in the next couple of days,
Speaker 1: that we now have a new formal weight loss drug
Speaker 1: that works in a completely new way that causes the
Speaker 1: average person who uses it to lose fifteen percent of
Speaker 1: their body weight. In fact, with Munjiro, the next in
Speaker 1: this class of drugs, you lose twenty one percent of
Speaker 1: your body weight. And for the next, which will be
Speaker 1: available next year, Triple G, you lose twenty four percent
Speaker 1: of your body weight on average. And I remember, as
Speaker 1: soon as I heard that, just feeling this tremendous division
Speaker 1: in my own mind between. On the one hand, I
Speaker 1: could obviously see the benefits. I'm older now than my
Speaker 1: grandfather ever got to be. He died when he was
Speaker 1: forty four of her heart attack. Loads of the men
Speaker 1: in my family get heart problems. My dad had terrible
Speaker 1: heart problems. My uncle died of a heart attack. My
Speaker 1: other uncle had a heart attack that survived it. And
Speaker 1: I knew that Sadly, the evident scientific evidence is very
Speaker 1: clear that obesity makes it much more likely you'll have
Speaker 1: heart problems along with many other medical problems. So I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: if there's a drug that can reverse or really reduce obesity,
Speaker 1: that could have really big health benefits. I also thought,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, wait a minute, I've seen this story before. Right,
Speaker 1: Every twenty years or so, a new miracle weight loss
Speaker 1: drug is announced, We're told it's going to save us,
Speaker 1: all loads of people take it. They always discover it
Speaker 1: has some horrendous side effect that you know, means it
Speaker 1: has to be pulled from the market, leaving a wave
Speaker 1: of terribly damaged people in its way. So I thought,
Speaker 1: are we going to see that again? I also thought,
Speaker 1: what about the progress we've made with body positivity, what
Speaker 1: about the what about people with eating disorders? There were
Speaker 1: just so many doubts that came into my mind. So
Speaker 1: to really get to the bottom of this, I ended
Speaker 1: up going on this big journey all over the world,
Speaker 1: from Iceland to Minneapolis to Okinawa in the south of
Speaker 1: Japan to interview the leading experts in the world on it.
Speaker 1: The biggest defenders of the drugs, the people who made
Speaker 1: the breakthroughs that made them possible. The biggest critics of
Speaker 1: the drugs, and I learned a huge amount about the
Speaker 1: extraordinary benefits of these drugs. The disturbing risks of these
Speaker 1: drugs is twelve quite disturbing risks. How it's going to
Speaker 1: try transform the culture in all sorts of ways that
Speaker 1: even people who don't want to take these drugs, it's
Speaker 1: going to change the world around you in really fascinating ways.
Speaker 1: But at the end of all that, it's a slightly
Speaker 1: weird feeling. I still feel quite conflicted about it. So
Speaker 1: I guess the misconception is that we should be so sure, right,
Speaker 1: this is complicated, and we have to think through the complexity.
Speaker 2: Soya, and this idea that we have of or this
Speaker 2: misconception that you just mentioned that we have of this
Speaker 2: idea of that it's all good or all bad. I
Speaker 2: wondered through your research kind of how you felt about
Speaker 2: that type of thinking. I feel like, as humans, we
Speaker 2: have this very binary thinking about anything and everything. Right,
Speaker 2: that's a good person, they're a mean person. They're a
Speaker 2: healthy person, they are an unhealthy person. When it comes
Speaker 2: to drugs. Oh, this one's perfect, this one's going to
Speaker 2: ruin your life. What did you discover about people's binary
Speaker 2: types of thinking through the research of this drug.
Speaker 1: I guess because if you think about this, this drug
Speaker 1: and the book is called magic, Pilker, there's three ways
Speaker 1: we could think about this as magic, and the first
Speaker 1: two are the kind of binary ways, right. The first
Speaker 1: way is these drugs could be magic in the sense
Speaker 1: that they could just solve the problem of obesity. And
Speaker 1: I've got to tell you, there are days it feels
Speaker 1: like that my whole life. I have hugely overeaten because
Speaker 1: I was screwed up by the food industry and various
Speaker 1: other things. And now, you know, to do the book.
Speaker 1: I've been taking a zempic for a year. There's been
Speaker 1: lots of ups and downs, but you know, now that
Speaker 1: problem has largely gone away. I've lost an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of weight forty two pounds. But also I've lost these
Speaker 1: a lot of these destructive habits. So you know, it
Speaker 1: could be magic in the sense of just like WHOA,
Speaker 1: the problem solved. The second way it could be magic,
Speaker 1: and I think this is a real possibility, is it
Speaker 1: could be like a magic trick. It could be like,
Speaker 1: you know, the conjurer who shows you a card trick
Speaker 1: while secretly picking your pocket. It could be that, in
Speaker 1: addition to giving you these benefits, the risks, and there
Speaker 1: are really significant risks here, are so substantial that they
Speaker 1: undo the good. I don't rule that out. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think it's a significant possibility. But the third way
Speaker 1: is actually the most likely, and I think it's the
Speaker 1: one that gets us out of that kind of binary thinking.
Speaker 1: And it's the think about the stories of magic that
Speaker 1: we grew up with as kids. Right, think about it,
Speaker 1: I'll add in, Right, you find the lamp, you rub it,
Speaker 1: the genie appears, and he grants your wishes, and your
Speaker 1: wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected. Right,
Speaker 1: You get what you wanted, but always at some weird
Speaker 1: right angle that you never anticipated. And we're already seeing
Speaker 1: that with these drugs. You've got to get out the
Speaker 1: binary good or bad to think about that. But you know,
Speaker 1: Barclay's Bank commissioned a really interesting, sober minded financial analyst
Speaker 1: called Emily Field to just look at these drugs to
Speaker 1: figure out, Okay, what's this going to mean for our
Speaker 1: investment decisions going forward? What should be investing in, what
Speaker 1: should be not investing in as she came back and said,
Speaker 1: if you want a comparison for the effect of these drugs,
Speaker 1: you've got to look at the invention of the smartphone. Right. So,
Speaker 1: if you and me had been speaking in whatever it
Speaker 1: was two thousand and seven when Steve Job's On veiled
Speaker 1: the iPhone, we would not have been able to game out,
Speaker 1: you know, door tod ash and TikTok and all these
Speaker 1: things that have transformed our lives that flowed from that.
Speaker 1: I think we're already beginning to see outside that kind
Speaker 1: of narrow binary, such an array of things that happening
Speaker 1: as a result of these forty seven percent of Americans
Speaker 1: want to take these drugs. They are going to change
Speaker 1: all our lives for better and for worse in a
Speaker 1: way that I think we need to take a moment,
Speaker 1: as this extraordinary transformation happens all around us, to really
Speaker 1: think through the benefits, the risks, and what it's going
Speaker 1: to mean for all of us and what we should
Speaker 1: do about it. Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about how we got here. You mentioned
Speaker 2: that the food industry has screwed us up, screwed you up.
Speaker 2: You mentioned just there. Let's talk about how we got here.
Speaker 2: How we even needed to turn towards these drugs, starting
Speaker 2: with some of the issues that you think the food
Speaker 2: industry has caused, and how we've been trained to almost
Speaker 2: eat more, eat worse, eat unhealthier for ourselves.
Speaker 1: For a long time, I thought when I was researching
Speaker 1: the book that I was looking at two separate topics,
Speaker 1: because I thought, at first, so I was looking at
Speaker 1: why did obesity explode in our lifetimes massively explode? And
Speaker 1: how do the drugs work? But actually I discovered these
Speaker 1: are not separate topics. The same thing explains both that
Speaker 1: it's core. So I would just urge everyone watching listening
Speaker 1: to just stop for a moment and google photographs of
Speaker 1: beaches in the United States or Britain in the year
Speaker 1: I was born, nineteen seventy nine. Just take a look
Speaker 1: at them. Right. If you look at them, they seem
Speaker 1: really weird to us, because almost everyone is what we
Speaker 1: would call skinny or jacked. Right, and you look at
Speaker 1: it and you think that's really weird. Where's everyone else?
Speaker 1: Was it like a skinny person convention in Atlantic City
Speaker 1: that day? And then you look at the population figures, No,
Speaker 1: that's what people look like in the year I was born,
Speaker 1: We basically humans have a bit more than three hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years in which obcity is extremely rare, and then
Speaker 1: essentially in your lifetime and mind, it absolutely blows up.
Speaker 1: Between the year I was born and the year I
Speaker 1: turned twenty one, obesity doubled in the United States, and
Speaker 1: then in the next twenty years severe obesity doubled again.
Speaker 1: And it seems really weird. What's going on? What would
Speaker 1: what could possibly explain this unprecedented transformation in our bodies
Speaker 1: where we got to the point where now forty two
Speaker 1: percent of Americans are obese, right, seems really weird. What happened?
Speaker 1: We know what happened. This change takes place everywhere where
Speaker 1: one thing happens. It's not where people become weak willed
Speaker 1: or lack will power, or become lazy or all the
Speaker 1: other cruel, stigmatizing things we say about overweight people. It
Speaker 1: always happens where people move from mostly eating fresh, whole
Speaker 1: foods that they prepared on the day to mostly eating
Speaker 1: processed and ultra processed foods which are constructed in factories
Speaker 1: out of chemicals in a process that actually isn't even
Speaker 1: cool cooking. It's called manufacturing food, and it turns out
Speaker 1: this new kind of food, which never existed before in
Speaker 1: human history, affects our bodies in a completely different way
Speaker 1: to the old kind of food that all humans before.
Speaker 1: And there's loads of ways that's true. I go through
Speaker 1: seven reasons in the book. But there's an experiment that
Speaker 1: was actually done here in New York that to me
Speaker 1: just totally distills what happened to us. Right. So it's
Speaker 1: done by a brilliant Irish scientists called Professor Paul Kenny,
Speaker 1: not just up the road from where we are. So
Speaker 1: he's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai here in
Speaker 1: New York. And he grew up in Dublin in Ireland,
Speaker 1: and when he was in his twenties he moved to
Speaker 1: San Diego in California to continue his scientific research. And
Speaker 1: he quickly clocked, WHOA, Americans don't eat like Irish people
Speaker 1: did at the time, much more process and ultra process food,
Speaker 1: much more sugary, salty food, right, And like many a
Speaker 1: good immigrant, he quickly assimilated. Within a year, he'd gained
Speaker 1: like thirty pounds and he was like, why, what's going on?
Speaker 1: And he felt like this new kind of food he
Speaker 1: was eating wasn't just affecting his gut, it was affecting
Speaker 1: his brain. It was changing what he wanted. So he
Speaker 1: designed this experiment to test it, which I have nicknamed
Speaker 1: a cheesecake Park. It's not the official name of it.
Speaker 1: It's very simple. He got load of rats and he
Speaker 1: raised them in a cage, and they had nothing to
Speaker 1: eat but the kind of healthy thing that rats evolved
Speaker 1: to eat over thousands of years, right in pellet form.
Speaker 1: So when the rats have got the kind of natural
Speaker 1: food they used to they would eat when they were hungry,
Speaker 1: and they would stop when they were full, and they
Speaker 1: never became overweight or obese. Given their kind of natural food.
Speaker 1: They had a kind of innate nutritional wisdom that meant
Speaker 1: they were gone, I've had enough now. Then Professor Kenny
Speaker 1: introduced them to the American diet. He fried up some
Speaker 1: baker and he bought a load of Sneakers' bars. Crucially,
Speaker 1: he bought a load of cheesecake and he put it
Speaker 1: in the cage alongside the option of the healthy food,
Speaker 1: and the rats went crazy for the American diet. They
Speaker 1: would literally hurl themselves into the cheesecake and eat their
Speaker 1: way out, just completely slicked with cheesecake, right, and they
Speaker 1: ate and ate and ate and ate, and all that
Speaker 1: nutritional wisdom they'd had before disappeared. They just rapidly became obese.
Speaker 1: In fact, the way Professor Kenny put it to me
Speaker 1: was within a couple of days they were different animals,
Speaker 1: and so this nutritional wisdom that they'd had before with
Speaker 1: their natural food just disappeared. The brakes were off right.
Speaker 1: Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment, and again in a
Speaker 1: way that to a lifelong junk food adict seems to
Speaker 1: be a bit cruel. He took away the American diet
Speaker 1: and left them with nothing but the healthy food they've
Speaker 1: grown up with. And he was pretty sure he knew
Speaker 1: what would happen. That they would you eat more of
Speaker 1: the healthy food than they had before, and this would
Speaker 1: prove that junk food expands the number of calories you
Speaker 1: eat in a day. That is not what happened. Something
Speaker 1: much weirder happened. Once they'd had the American diet and
Speaker 1: it was taken away, they refused to eat anything at all.
Speaker 1: It was like they no longer recognized the healthy food
Speaker 1: as food. It was only when they were really starving
Speaker 1: that they finally went back and ate it. Now, what
Speaker 1: this tells us, and there's loads of evidence in humans,
Speaker 1: is the diet we're eating is profoundly undermining our ability
Speaker 1: to ever feel full and to In fact, the key
Speaker 1: word here both in explaining the rise of obest and
Speaker 1: how these drugs work is satiety. It's not a word
Speaker 1: we use that often in every day English, but it's
Speaker 1: the feeling of being stated, the feeling of having had
Speaker 1: enough and not wanting any more. And this kind of
Speaker 1: food we eat profoundly steals our satiety. Right. And what
Speaker 1: these drugs do is they give you back your sense
Speaker 1: of society. They give you back your sense of being full,
Speaker 1: but with a potential cost. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's so fascinating to hear how so much
Speaker 2: of it has become stigmatized. You don't have enough self control,
Speaker 2: you don't have enough willpower, you're not disciplined enough, and
Speaker 2: that's why it's leading to these things. And as you're saying,
Speaker 2: I mean, I've also read different work that talks about
Speaker 2: how our portion sizes have increased. And I remember the
Speaker 2: first time I came to the United States, I think
Speaker 2: I was nine years old with my family, We'll come
Speaker 2: into Orlando to go to Disney World. Yeah yeah, I
Speaker 2: was going to get you to sing Theozenbic. So going
Speaker 2: a second. But we come to Orlando, and I remember
Speaker 2: like getting one of those you could get like this
Speaker 2: jumbo size coke, like which was refillable at the gas station,
Speaker 2: and then if you wanted, you could get the double
Speaker 2: jumbo size coke, which is refill about every gas station.
Speaker 2: And I couldn't believe. And that's all I wanted as
Speaker 2: a kid, right, I was like, that's the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 2: My parents got it for me, and then I was
Speaker 2: drinking refillable cokes the whole time.
Speaker 1: That's when you've got diabetes the first time, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I'm pre disposed to diabetes because of my genetics,
Speaker 2: so it's so interesting. And similarly for me, I grew
Speaker 2: up as a chocolate addict, so I ate a chocolate bar,
Speaker 2: a chocolate yogurt, a chocolate biscuit, and a chocolate ice
Speaker 2: cream every day growing up. And I was very overweight
Speaker 2: growing up. I lost a lot of weight. We really, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm until age fourteen fifteen, and then at fifteen I
Speaker 2: started playing a lot of sports. I soon after became
Speaker 2: vegetarian and I lost a ton of weight. And for me,
Speaker 2: what happened though, was I still had bad habits. So
Speaker 2: I got through university having a sprite and a chocolate
Speaker 2: bar every single day, and it wouldn't show up as
Speaker 2: fat physically, but it would show up as you know now,
Speaker 2: I see it as glucose spikes. Now I see it
Speaker 2: as an increase in the chances of having diabetes. And
Speaker 2: it had in that direction. And my wife has been
Speaker 2: the one to coach me more on the side of
Speaker 2: self control and discipline and finding alternatives. And I've seen
Speaker 2: a huge shift in my life ever since I've stopped
Speaker 2: refined sugars, ever since I've switched my diet to whole
Speaker 2: foods less processed foods, and I've done it in a
Speaker 2: very self controlled way. And how hard that is, I know,
Speaker 2: how pro and I still am to having craving sometimes
Speaker 2: and at the same time, I've lost taste for certain things. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm saying all of that to ask you the question
Speaker 2: of portion sizes have increased. We're eating fake foods that
Speaker 2: are making us want them more. We don't feel satiated
Speaker 2: when we're consuming. How does the drug actually make you
Speaker 2: feel satiated, because I think it's important for people to
Speaker 2: understand that what is happening in order for you to
Speaker 2: feel satiated.
Speaker 1: It's the weirdest thing. I'll tell you how it feels
Speaker 1: as an individual, and then the science of it. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget. The second day, I took a zenpic woke
Speaker 1: up and I was lying in bed and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: I feel something really weird. What is it? And I
Speaker 1: couldn't locate in my body what it was. It took
Speaker 1: me about five minutes and I suddenly realized I'd woken
Speaker 1: up and I wasn't hungry. I don't remember that ever
Speaker 1: happening before, right from when I was very young, you know,
Speaker 1: grew up in a working class family. We ate constant
Speaker 1: process and junk food. And I was in a bit
Speaker 1: of a daze and I went to there's a cafe
Speaker 1: just around the corner from where I live, and I
Speaker 1: went in and I ordered what I used to order
Speaker 1: every morning for breakfast when I'm in London. It was
Speaker 1: a big brown roll with loads of chicken and loads
Speaker 1: of mayo in it, and I I had like three
Speaker 1: or four mouthfalls, and I just didn't want anymore. I
Speaker 1: was full. I was following a way that I never
Speaker 1: normally felt full. I thought, that's really weird, and I
Speaker 1: went for lunch that day. I went to there's a
Speaker 1: Turkish cafe next to my office, and I went in
Speaker 1: and I ordered what I used to order every day
Speaker 1: when I went there, which was a Mediterranean lamb. Again,
Speaker 1: I had three or four mouthfuls and I was just full.
Speaker 1: It was. It was so strange. It was like kind
Speaker 1: of shutters had come down on my appetite. I can't
Speaker 1: think of another way to describe it. Or it was
Speaker 1: more like when I ate. So imagine you had just
Speaker 1: had Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner and you were stuffed,
Speaker 1: and then I came along and said, hey, j great news,
Speaker 1: I've got your KFC bucket. Right You'd just be like,
Speaker 1: oh no, But you get to that level really really quickly.
Speaker 1: So obviously, I interviewed the people who made the breakthroughs
Speaker 1: for the drug, scientists who'd worked on the key stages
Speaker 1: of developing the drug. One of the weird things about
Speaker 1: the drug is we don't actually know how it works,
Speaker 1: but there's some things we know for sure. There's a
Speaker 1: big amount of indeterminacy. But there's some things we know
Speaker 1: for sure. If you ate something now, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what it is, something healthy unhealthy. After a little while,
Speaker 1: your pancreas would produce a hormone called GLP one, and
Speaker 1: GLP one, we now know, is just part of the
Speaker 1: natural signaling in your body saying hey, j it had enough. Stop.
Speaker 1: It's like the breaks, right, But that natural GLP one
Speaker 1: only stays around in your system for a couple of
Speaker 1: minutes and it's just washed away. So what these drugs
Speaker 1: do is they inject you with an artificial copy of
Speaker 1: GLP one that, instead of being washed away in a
Speaker 1: few minutes, stays around your system for a whole week.
Speaker 1: It's why when I go to the cafe, I only
Speaker 1: want three off our mouths because I'm already so close
Speaker 1: to form my GLP one or this artificial beasting of
Speaker 1: GLP one makes me feel full so quickly. So initially
Speaker 1: it was thought when they were developing these drugs that
Speaker 1: because this hormone is made in the gart, it has
Speaker 1: an effect primarily on the gut. This must be a
Speaker 1: drug that's changing your gut in some way. And it
Speaker 1: clearly is right. And there's all sorts of ways. We
Speaker 1: know that, but from interviewing the cutting edge scientists working
Speaker 1: on this, particularly neuroscientists, it's increasingly clear that in fact,
Speaker 1: these drugs work primarily on your brain. You don't just
Speaker 1: have GLP one receptors in your gut. You've got them
Speaker 1: in your thyroid, which is important for something else, and
Speaker 1: your brain. And these drugs are profoundly changing your brain.
Speaker 1: We know that if you give these drugs to rats
Speaker 1: and then you kill them and cut their brains open,
Speaker 1: which obviously you're not allowed to do with humans for
Speaker 1: very good reasons, what you see is the drug go
Speaker 1: everywhere in the rat's brain, everywhere, Right, So I remember
Speaker 1: when I learned that, and I learned it quite a
Speaker 1: while into, you know, a few months into taking the drugs.
Speaker 1: It's just a concerting thing to learn it. You've reads,
Speaker 1: how would I put it, It's a much more intimate transformation.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Saying that changes your gut, you're sort of like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: that's fine. Saying that's changing your brain, and profoundly changing
Speaker 1: your brain partly explains why the effect is so powerful,
Speaker 1: why these are so much more effective than all previous
Speaker 1: diet drugs. It also potentially raises some other benefits in
Speaker 1: terms of benefits for addiction. It also raises some other
Speaker 1: risks around whether it may cause depression, because there's a
Speaker 1: debate about what it's actually doing in your brain. But
Speaker 1: for me, it just sort of made me realize, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a, like, I say, a much more intimate
Speaker 1: change than a lot of people realize, I think when
Speaker 1: they start taking it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who was it?
Speaker 1: Was it?
Speaker 2: Your nephew said, where is Joanne Harry? And what have
Speaker 2: you done with him?
Speaker 1: To McDonald's. So I've had a long My relationship with
Speaker 1: junk food is probably best typified by what are the
Speaker 1: low points in my life? I was I could tell
Speaker 1: you exactly when it happened. It was one pm on
Speaker 1: Christmas Eve two thousand and nine and I went to
Speaker 1: my local branch of KFC in East London and I
Speaker 1: went in. I said, my standard order, which is so
Speaker 1: disgusting I'm not going to repeat it. Healthy. It was
Speaker 1: literally bucket of fried chicken, and.
Speaker 2: I love a bucket of fried chickens. He was such
Speaker 2: a healthy glow, like you've never eaten a chicken drum
Speaker 2: st plant based now, but back in the day that
Speaker 2: popcorn chicken would have been my jab. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The guy behind the counter said to me, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm really glad you're here. I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: and he went off behind where they fried the chicken
Speaker 1: and everything, and he came back with a massive Christmas
Speaker 1: card in which they'd written to our best customer and
Speaker 1: everyone had written like personal messages to it. And one
Speaker 1: of the reasons my heart sang is I thought, this
Speaker 1: isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the
Speaker 1: most how be happening to me? It was the second
Speaker 1: lowest moment in my life as an overweight person. That
Speaker 1: the worst was the time that I was fat shamed
Speaker 1: by the Dalai lamos, But no, there was this moment
Speaker 1: where it's not even a joke, by the way, the
Speaker 1: horror of the dilarma another time. But so I'd had
Speaker 1: this very intimate relationship with this food all all my life,
Speaker 1: and to have it one of the There were many
Speaker 1: good things that flowed from takeo ZMP for me, and
Speaker 1: there are many benefits to it, as well as some
Speaker 1: significant risks. But the weirdest moment for me actually was
Speaker 1: another moment that happened in KFC. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: my nephew said to me, a lot of the key
Speaker 1: moments in your life seemed to happen in bright She's
Speaker 1: a KFC I heard. I like that, good point. But
Speaker 1: the I had a real epiphany about this because what
Speaker 1: these drugs do is they profoundly interrupt your underlying eating patterns. Right,
Speaker 1: you can't eat the way you did before. And this
Speaker 1: is something I think people are not being warned about.
Speaker 1: And I tried to take people through in a lot
Speaker 1: of detail in the book, is you need to be
Speaker 1: prepared that because of that, a lot of the underlying
Speaker 1: emotional issues that drive your eating may well come to
Speaker 1: the surface. So I had this moment for me. I
Speaker 1: was in Vegas. I was, as you know, I'm writing
Speaker 1: a book about a series of crimes that have been
Speaker 1: happening in Vegas that I've been researching for a long time.
Speaker 1: And I was researching the murder of someone that I
Speaker 1: knew and loved, and it was obviously very painful, as
Speaker 1: you can imagine, he was an incredible person. I was
Speaker 1: working on this and I just, you know, felt bad,
Speaker 1: and I went to this branch of KFC on West Sahara,
Speaker 1: which is one of the grimmest KFCs in the world,
Speaker 1: and believe me, I could write a book about all
Speaker 1: of them. And I went in. I'm reading on autopilots.
Speaker 1: It was like seven eight months into taking the drugs.
Speaker 1: I I went in and I ordered what I would
Speaker 1: have ordered a year before. Right. I ordered a bucket
Speaker 1: of fried chicken, and I had a chicken and I
Speaker 1: wasn't even really thinking about the eating or anything. I
Speaker 1: was and I had a chicken drumstick. And I looked
Speaker 1: at this bucket and I thought, I can't eat this right,
Speaker 1: Like I would throw up if I tried to eat.
Speaker 1: I remember Colonel Sanders was on the wall, and it's
Speaker 1: like he was looking at me, going, hey, what happened
Speaker 1: to my best customer? And I were thinking, Oh, you're
Speaker 1: just going to have to feel your feelings right, And
Speaker 1: it's interesally if you look at the scientific evidence, there's
Speaker 1: scientific evidence for five reasons why we eat. One of
Speaker 1: them is the obvious one, to sustain our bodies. And
Speaker 1: I would have told you before I started taking this
Speaker 1: drug that was why I ate, right, But here I am.
Speaker 1: Then I ate maybe three thousand, two hundred calories a day.
Speaker 1: Now I ate around a thousand eight hundred, So all
Speaker 1: that other eating was doing something else right. And I
Speaker 1: go through the four psychological reasons why we eat, they
Speaker 1: don't obviously applies differently to different people, and those things
Speaker 1: kind of get surfaced. And I remember going to one
Speaker 1: of my closest friends when I got back from Vegas
Speaker 1: and saying to hey, I've got to stop taking this.
Speaker 1: I can't take it. This is too upsetting. And she
Speaker 1: said to me, go hand, stop taking it. If you
Speaker 1: want to, that's fine, but you need to know these
Speaker 1: drugs are not causing this issue. This issue was there
Speaker 1: all along. In this case, what they're doing is giving
Speaker 1: you an opportunity to deal with those issues in a
Speaker 1: better way than drowning your feelings in saturated fats. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's been a bumpy transitional that I'm glad. I'm
Speaker 1: glad I stuck with it, although lots of people respect
Speaker 1: the fact.
Speaker 2: They don't walk me through why people don't like, what
Speaker 2: was their reasoning? What were they struggling with so much?
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things people struggle with the drugs,
Speaker 1: but in relation to it, I'm sure we'll get into
Speaker 1: lots of them if you think about this specific one.
Speaker 1: If you want to think about the benefits and risks
Speaker 1: of these drugs when it comes to obesity. I actually
Speaker 1: think it's quite helpful to look at a parallel area
Speaker 1: of science. We've only been giving these drugs to people
Speaker 1: for obesti for a couple of years, but there's a
Speaker 1: parallel area of science that can help us to think
Speaker 1: about the benefits. And I think some of the answer
Speaker 1: to your question. So, and it's barioatric surgery. Right up
Speaker 1: to now, it's been very hard without some kind of
Speaker 1: external intervention to lose huge amounts of weight and keep
Speaker 1: it off. Clearly, you did it. There are lots of
Speaker 1: people who do it, but it's actually a surprisingly small
Speaker 1: percentage of the people who try it succeed. I go
Speaker 1: through why in the book, and that reasons are really important.
Speaker 1: So actually the most effective way up to now has
Speaker 1: been bariatric surgery, things like you know, stomach stapling, gastric sleeves.
Speaker 1: Baratric surgery is a horrific operation. It's really grueling. You know,
Speaker 1: one in a thousand people die during operation. It's no joke, right,
Speaker 1: But the reason people put themselves through that is because
Speaker 1: of the extraordinary benefits to their health. Afterwards if you
Speaker 1: have back Now bear in mind they were severely obese
Speaker 1: at the start, otherwise you wouldn't qualify for the surgery.
Speaker 1: But if you have this surgery, in the seven years
Speaker 1: that follow, you are fifty six percent less likely to
Speaker 1: die of a heart attack, you are sixty percent less
Speaker 1: likely to die of cancer, you are ninety two percent
Speaker 1: less likely to die of diabetes related causes. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's so good for your health that you're forty percent
Speaker 1: less likely to die at all in that seven year period. Right.
Speaker 1: And we know similarly that these drugs are moving us
Speaker 1: in a similar direction. So if you take these drugs
Speaker 1: and your BMI is higher than twenty seven at the start,
Speaker 1: you are twenty percent less likely to have a heart
Speaker 1: attack or stroke right in the years that follow. That's
Speaker 1: very that's gonna that. It's close to my heart. It
Speaker 1: is literally close to my heart. Right. But you also,
Speaker 1: when you look at bariatric surgery, begin to see some
Speaker 1: of the drawbacks, and I think the key to what
Speaker 1: you're asking might be there. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that I think is really shocking is if you have
Speaker 1: bariatric surgery, your suicide rate quadruples in the years that
Speaker 1: follow right, it's still quite a low risk. Most people
Speaker 1: are baratric surgery. Glad they did it quadrupling. That's that's
Speaker 1: a big effect, right, Just think why would that be?
Speaker 1: What's going on I think there's lots of things going
Speaker 1: on there. Some of it is actually the after effects
Speaker 1: of the surgery are pretty onerous. Some of it is
Speaker 1: you can't comfort in it anymore, so that pain comes
Speaker 1: to the surface. Some of it is a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are overweight kind of think well, if only
Speaker 1: I was thin, my life would be really great, exactly,
Speaker 1: and they lose the weight, and you know, your husband's
Speaker 1: still an asshole, and you'll hate your job. And I
Speaker 1: think there's also some give an example of a really
Speaker 1: deep psychological issue that I think is surfaced in some
Speaker 1: cases by these drugs and baratory surgery. Something I learned
Speaker 1: about from a wonderful man who should have on actually
Speaker 1: called Dr Vincent Feliciti. It was really hard for me
Speaker 1: to learn about this. So Dr Feliti was a doctor
Speaker 1: in San Diego in the early nineteen eighties and he
Speaker 1: was approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not for profit
Speaker 1: medical provider in California, and they said, look, we've got
Speaker 1: a problem. We don't know what to do. Please help us.
Speaker 1: A problem they had was that obesity was hugely rising.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was very low by our standards, but
Speaker 1: it was rising. And they said, look, nothing we do work.
Speaker 1: So we give people, you know, diet plans, we give
Speaker 1: them personal trainers. It's not working. Can we give you
Speaker 1: a load of money and just do Blue Sky's research
Speaker 1: figure out what the hell we should do. So doctor
Speaker 1: Felti took the money and was like, oh, what can
Speaker 1: I do? So he started working with two hundred severely
Speaker 1: obese people, people who weighed more than three hundred pounds
Speaker 1: and had for a long time, and it's like what
Speaker 1: could I do? And he had an idea that sounds
Speaker 1: and in fact is kind of done. He said, what
Speaker 1: would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and
Speaker 1: we gave them like, you know, vitamin sea shots so
Speaker 1: they didn't get scurvy or whatever. Would they just burn
Speaker 1: through the fat supplies in their body and get down
Speaker 1: to a healthy weight. So, with a ton of medical supervision,
Speaker 1: they did it, and incredibly, at first it worked. There
Speaker 1: was a woman, hard core Susan not her real name,
Speaker 1: who went down from being more than four hundred pounds
Speaker 1: to one hundred and thirty eight pounds, staggering transformation. And
Speaker 1: you know, her family are calling the doctor and saying
Speaker 1: you saved her life. She's thrilled. And then one day
Speaker 1: she cracked. She went to KFC or actually think that's projection.
Speaker 1: She went somewhere and you know, started hugely of eating
Speaker 1: again and quite quickly got back to a dangerous way.
Speaker 1: And Dotte Feltti called her in. He said, Susan, what happened?
Speaker 1: What happened? As she looked down, she was really ashamed.
Speaker 1: She said, I don't know, I don't know. He said, well,
Speaker 1: tell me about the day you cracked. Did anything in
Speaker 1: particular happen that day? They didn't happen some other day.
Speaker 1: It turned out something had happened that day that had
Speaker 1: never happened to Susan. She was in a bar and
Speaker 1: a man hit on her, not in a nasty way,
Speaker 1: in a nice way, and she felt completely freaked out
Speaker 1: and went and started eating. That's when Dr Felti asked
Speaker 1: hers something he'd never thought to ask her before. He said, Susan,
Speaker 1: when did you gain your weight? In her case, it
Speaker 1: was when she was eleven. He said, well, did anything
Speaker 1: happen when you were eleven that didn't happen when you
Speaker 1: were nine or when you were fourteen, anything in particular
Speaker 1: happened that year and she looked down and she said, well,
Speaker 1: that's when my grandfather started raping me. Dr Fillitti interviewed
Speaker 1: everyone in the program. He discovered that sixty percent of
Speaker 1: the women had made their extreme weight gain in the
Speaker 1: aftermath of being sexually abused assaulted, And at first he
Speaker 1: was like, what's going on. It doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 1: and Susan explained it to him really well. She said,
Speaker 1: overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be right. Clearly,
Speaker 1: obesity for women has a protective sexual function. You are
Speaker 1: somewhat it can still happen, of course, but you are
Speaker 1: less likely to be sexually assaulted if you're goin a
Speaker 1: lot of weight. And so for Susan, losing a huge
Speaker 1: amount of weight made her really frightened and feel really
Speaker 1: vulnerable and brought her back to that terrified place of abuse.
Speaker 1: That there's lots of psychological things that go on. That's
Speaker 1: only one of many, but I think and of course
Speaker 1: it can give you an opportunity to deal with those feelings, right,
Speaker 1: But again, it gives you a sense of like the
Speaker 1: incredible psychological complexity of what's really going on here can
Speaker 1: kind of come to the surface in complicated ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And what's interesting about that is, no matter what
Speaker 2: the psychological reason may be, you're almost dealing with that
Speaker 2: feeling for the first time in three or four decades.
Speaker 2: So it almost feels like a new feeling. Would that
Speaker 2: be fair enough to say? It almost feels like what
Speaker 2: I mean by that is there are certain feelings and
Speaker 2: thoughts that we've had since we were young, and we've
Speaker 2: found ways to cope with them. This is something that
Speaker 2: you've been able to kind of put aside for ten
Speaker 2: twenty thirty years, and all of a sudden, now that
Speaker 2: this is blocking something which is giving rise to that,
Speaker 2: it almost feels like, Wow, I haven't learned how to
Speaker 2: deal with this for a long time.
Speaker 1: That's really right. I think you're right. It's even worse
Speaker 1: than a new feeling. It's a buried feeling. Right. And
Speaker 1: obesity is so laden with shame and the cruelty in
Speaker 1: this culture towards you know, which I've experienced to some degree.
Speaker 1: But women get it much much worse. If you have
Speaker 1: a BMI higher than thirty five and you're a woman,
Speaker 1: forty two percent of those women get insulted literally every day, right.
Speaker 1: And I really wanted to think this through because I
Speaker 1: was very conscious that we've made so much progress in
Speaker 1: this culture. I mean, we were nowhere near where we
Speaker 1: need to be. What we've made some progress. I think
Speaker 1: about this in one of the things I really worry
Speaker 1: about in relation to these drugs. But I think it's
Speaker 1: really distilled in a moment, probably the worst moment in
Speaker 1: the whole writing of the book for me. So, I've
Speaker 1: got a niece called Erin, who's nineteen now, but in
Speaker 1: my head she's fixed as a six year old, like
Speaker 1: she's the baby of my family, she's the only girl.
Speaker 1: She's the youngest of my brother's sister's children. But one
Speaker 1: day I was facetiming with her. I'veter be taking the
Speaker 1: drug for a while, and she was sort of praising
Speaker 1: me in a teasing way. She was like, oh, I
Speaker 1: never knew how to draw. Yeoh, I ne't ever knew
Speaker 1: how to neck and I was kind of preening, and
Speaker 1: then she looked down and she said, will you buy
Speaker 1: me some mozampic and I laughed because I thought she
Speaker 1: was kidding, and I realized she wasn't. And she's like
Speaker 1: a perfectly healthy weight she always has been. And I thought,
Speaker 1: I've undone all the messages I've ever tried to give
Speaker 1: her right about valuing yourself about and I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: she's grown up seeing a broader range of body types
Speaker 1: and female celebrities than we ever grew up with, of course,
Speaker 1: and now all of those women pretty much are boned thin, right.
Speaker 1: And I really wanted to think this through because I
Speaker 1: think this two categories here, which are quite different. There's
Speaker 1: overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to
Speaker 1: get down to a healthy weight. Right now, they're still
Speaker 1: incurring the twelve big risks that I write about in
Speaker 1: Magic Pill. There's still a lot to discuss there, but
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot to defend there. Then you've
Speaker 1: got people who were already a healthy weight or indeed skinny,
Speaker 1: who are taken them to be super skinny. Now I
Speaker 1: don't judge those people. We live in a culture that
Speaker 1: makes women feel shit about their bodies whatever they do,
Speaker 1: and there are tremendous pressures on them and I don't
Speaker 1: judge where those women are coming from at all, but
Speaker 1: they're incurring all the all the twelve risks for none
Speaker 1: of the benefits, right, I mean, well, rather for esthetic benefits,
Speaker 1: but not health benefits. And in fact they're endangering their
Speaker 1: own health in all sorts of complicated ways. To give
Speaker 1: an obvious example, as you age, you naturally lose muscle mass.
Speaker 1: Muscle mass is the total masts soft tissue in your
Speaker 1: body that you need to like get out of a chair,
Speaker 1: walk the walk up the stairs, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: So as you age, you naturally lose muscle mass from
Speaker 1: the age of thirty depressingly. So if you're going going
Speaker 1: into the aging process already with quite low muscle mass,
Speaker 1: which people who have taken the drugs to be super
Speaker 1: skinny likely will be, it could cause you real problems.
Speaker 1: When you're older. You know you'll be much less mobile,
Speaker 1: You'll find it harder to walk up the stairs. You're
Speaker 1: at risk of a condition called sarcopenia, which means poverty
Speaker 1: of the flesh. It's where basically you just can't do
Speaker 1: much because you're quite physically weak. So I think we've
Speaker 1: got to sing which between those two things and then
Speaker 1: we've got to think about also what this means for
Speaker 1: body positivity and how we think about it in relationship.
Speaker 1: That was a particular person who helped me to think
Speaker 1: about that. I could tell you a bit about her
Speaker 1: if you.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, please leave.
Speaker 1: So this is woman you probably remember her Jay because
Speaker 1: we're from the same place. So when we were kids,
Speaker 1: you only ever saw fat people on television as the
Speaker 1: butt of a joke, right, particularly overweight women.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It was vicious. And the first person I ever saw
Speaker 1: challenge that I remember it blew my mind. It was
Speaker 1: on Kilroy, which people don't know is like a if
Speaker 1: you imagined a kind of dollar store version of Ricky Lake. Right.
Speaker 1: The first person I ever saw challengehip was this woman
Speaker 1: called Shelly Bovie, who basically introduced body positivity to Britain.
Speaker 1: She was the first person to everuld talk about this
Speaker 1: and write about it in Britain on a big public stage.
Speaker 1: So I went and tracked her down because I really
Speaker 1: want to think this through with her. She's seventy six
Speaker 1: now and her story, I think really helps her to
Speaker 1: think through the complexity of this. So she grew up
Speaker 1: in a kind of big working class town in Britain
Speaker 1: called Port Talbot. I guess the equivalent in the US
Speaker 1: would be like Scranton. She would put it the only
Speaker 1: fat girl at her school. This was the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: and one day after class, her teacher said to her, Bovy,
Speaker 1: stay behind, I need to talk to you. So she's
Speaker 1: sort of sitting there thinking, hey, what did I do?
Speaker 1: And she goes up to the teacher and the teacher said,
Speaker 1: you're much too fat. It's disgusting. Go see the school nurse.
Speaker 1: She'll sort you out. So completely thrown, she goes to
Speaker 1: see the school nurse and then I says, why are
Speaker 1: you here? She said, well, the teacher saysn't too fat,
Speaker 1: and then I said take off your clothes. I'm going
Speaker 1: to look at you. And the nurse looked at her
Speaker 1: and said, oh disgusting, you're too fat and just berated her,
Speaker 1: said you're greedy, you're a pig eat less, and Shelley
Speaker 1: completely throwing kind of leaves. And she was soaking up
Speaker 1: this kind of abuse the whole time. Right, girls were
Speaker 1: constantly saying to her, thank God, I don't look like you.
Speaker 1: And really, her whole life she soak up this abuse.
Speaker 1: When she got pregnant. She went to the doctor. First
Speaker 1: thing the doctor said was shouldn't be pregnant when you're
Speaker 1: as fat as you are. When she gave birth, she
Speaker 1: had a very painful birth, difficult birth. She's lying there
Speaker 1: covered in blood, and the midwife said to you know,
Speaker 1: you really need to lose some weight. And when her
Speaker 1: baby wouldn't attach he wasn't feeding properly, she went to
Speaker 1: the doctor. The doctor said, what are you trying to do?
Speaker 1: Make the baby as fat as you are? Over and
Speaker 1: abest people are soaking this up all the time, and
Speaker 1: most of them just internalize it. Shelley told me she
Speaker 1: had never looked to her body naked, even in the shower.
Speaker 1: She would sort of wash herself but not look because
Speaker 1: she felt such hatred for her own body. And one
Speaker 1: day she learned in the US there was this movement
Speaker 1: which at the time called itself fat pride. There's still
Speaker 1: some people who use that term. Now we would probably
Speaker 1: call it more body positivity. Who just said, why are
Speaker 1: we taking it? This is like, this is just cruelty,
Speaker 1: This is like racism or homophobia or sexism. Just no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to be treated like this. You're not
Speaker 1: going to get to talk to us like that. And
Speaker 1: so she wrote the first ever book advocating for body
Speaker 1: positivity still stands up now, brilliant book call the Forbibven Body,
Speaker 1: in which she argued against this stigma. And when I
Speaker 1: tracked Shelly down, she stressed to me she's really proud
Speaker 1: of everything she said about stigma, and I think she's
Speaker 1: one hundred percent right to be. Stigma A is just
Speaker 1: a form of bullying, and b makes the problem much worse.
Speaker 1: Lindy West, is a brilliant body positivity advocate, said people
Speaker 1: don't take good care of everything they hate. If you make
Speaker 1: people hate their bodies, it doesn't make them take better
Speaker 1: care of them. But something happened to Shelley next. I
Speaker 1: think if we're going to be truthful and compassionate, we
Speaker 1: have to talk about Shelley was very overweight. She was
Speaker 1: not yet fifty, and she was losing the ability to
Speaker 1: walk and so she had to be in a wheelchair.
Speaker 1: And she went to her doctor and a doctor said, well,
Speaker 1: because of your weight, because the strain that's putting, you've
Speaker 1: got problems with your heart. And Shelley felt this profound
Speaker 1: dilemma because she was so proud of everything she said
Speaker 1: about stigma. At first she thought, well, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about these health challenges, but is this contradictory. There
Speaker 1: was at the time a newsletter in Britain called fat News,
Speaker 1: which is like a body positivity newsletter, and she wanted
Speaker 1: to write about this and they said, no, that's not
Speaker 1: what we want. We're here to tell the positive news.
Speaker 1: And she said, but if we love ourselves, don't we
Speaker 1: want to tell the whole truth. She felt really conflicted
Speaker 1: about this and for a long time she felt like
Speaker 1: it was either or either you're again stigma or you're
Speaker 1: in favor of reducing a b CD where you can.
Speaker 1: But you know, she then and she's the first to
Speaker 1: acknowledge this is extremely hard to do. But she lost
Speaker 1: a lot of weight through dieting. She went from being
Speaker 1: unable to walk to being able to run. Her health
Speaker 1: massively improved. Her heart problems went away, which tends to
Speaker 1: happen when you're reverse obesd like when we talked about
Speaker 1: with the bariotric surgery and Shelley I thought put it
Speaker 1: to me in a really way. She said, it's not
Speaker 1: either or, it's both. And if you love someone who's obese,
Speaker 1: as everyone watching will. I'm pretty sure you want to
Speaker 1: protect them from two things. You want to protect them
Speaker 1: from cruelty and bullying, and you want to protect them
Speaker 1: if you possibly can, from the more than two hundred
Speaker 1: diseases and health complications that are made much more likely
Speaker 1: by being overweight or obese. And I was kind of
Speaker 1: shocked when I looked at the science of this with
Speaker 1: an open mind. I'm very happy to challenge scientific consensus.
Speaker 1: I've done it before in my previous books. But when
Speaker 1: you look at the scientific evidence, and I was trained
Speaker 1: to assess scientific evidence at Cambridge University, I was kind
Speaker 1: of taken aback by how bad obesity is for your
Speaker 1: health on average. Of course, there are exceptions. My mother
Speaker 1: smokes seventy cigarettes a day. She's alive and well at
Speaker 1: there just seventy eight. But she's an outlier. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about something as simple as diabetes, right,
Speaker 1: I'm really embarrassed to say this, but I thought if
Speaker 1: you'd asked me a couple of years ago, Okay, I
Speaker 1: knew that obesiently makes diabetes much more likely. If you're
Speaker 1: obese when you're eighteen, you have a seventy percent chance
Speaker 1: of becoming diabetic in your life. But I thought, okay,
Speaker 1: that's not good. But as long as you've got good
Speaker 1: health insurance and you get insulin, you're basically like everyone else.
Speaker 1: A diabetic with insulin is like me or you. That's
Speaker 1: not true at all when I a'ter feed the leading
Speaker 1: you know doctors who are leading people who treat diabetics.
Speaker 1: When you look at the scientific evidence, diabetes knocks fifteen
Speaker 1: years off your life on average. It's the biggest preventable
Speaker 1: cause of blindness in this country. More people have to
Speaker 1: have a limb or extremity amputated because of diabetes in
Speaker 1: the US than because they got shot. And you will
Speaker 1: have noticed a lot of us get shot right. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's the effects are so bad that one of the
Speaker 1: leading doctors in Britain who treats diabetics, Dr Max Pemberton,
Speaker 1: said to me, if you gave me a choice between
Speaker 1: becoming diabetic or becoming HIV positive, I would choose to
Speaker 1: become HIV positive because if you're HIV positive and you
Speaker 1: get treatment, you live as long as everyone else. That
Speaker 1: is not true of diabetics. Type two diabetics. You have
Speaker 1: a shorter life and you're much more likely to have
Speaker 1: a terrible last few years where you're blind or you're
Speaker 1: horribly you know, your body is mutilated. And I found
Speaker 1: that so frightening to take on. And I'm conscious that
Speaker 1: loads of people hearing that will experience that and as
Speaker 1: very painful. It is extremely painful to hear, and it's
Speaker 1: an extremely painful truth, and we have to communicate it
Speaker 1: with great compassion and love and not as concern trolling.
Speaker 1: And I hate even saying it because you can see
Speaker 1: how it gives ammunition to the bullies in a way
Speaker 1: because they use that. It's like, oh babe, I'm just
Speaker 1: worried about your health. I get that. But Shelley really
Speaker 1: taught me. Yeah, she put it. We have to live
Speaker 1: in reality and we have to be as compassionate as
Speaker 1: we can within that reality. We have to do both right.
Speaker 1: And I'm conscious this is a long answer about you.
Speaker 1: Give an example. One other person helping to think about
Speaker 1: this as a brilliant guy interview called Jeff Parker's a
Speaker 1: sixty seven year old retired lighting engineer in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and Jeff a couple of years ago was very severely overweight.
Speaker 1: He was finding it painful to walk. He had doubt,
Speaker 1: He had liver problems, kidney problems. He was taking fistfuls
Speaker 1: of pills every day, and he started to take Munjaro,
Speaker 1: which is one of the new weight loss drugs, and
Speaker 1: he lost a lot of weight. All his health problems
Speaker 1: went into remission, and doctor almost took him off the pills.
Speaker 1: Now he walks his dog over the Golden Gate Bridge
Speaker 1: every day. He said, you know, I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna enjoy my retirement. Now. I don't think we can
Speaker 1: say to someone like Jeff that that improvement is not meaningful. Right,
Speaker 1: there are many Maybe the risks of the drugs will
Speaker 1: outweigh that benefit to him and for others. That's a
Speaker 1: real possibility. It's why I put a lot of weight
Speaker 1: on the twelve risks of these drugs in the book.
Speaker 1: But I do think we have to acknowledge that a
Speaker 1: lot of people who do successfully reverse their OBESTI, which
Speaker 1: is much easier to do now than it's been before,
Speaker 1: do experience a massive improvement in the quality of their life.
Speaker 1: I do think we're not being honest with people if
Speaker 1: we don't explain that as well.
Speaker 2: Thank you for going into the Actually it wasn't it,
Speaker 2: It wasn't It was a very thoughtful Lansen. Those stories
Speaker 2: give us an entry way into the psychology and the
Speaker 2: mind of so many of us and what we're all
Speaker 2: struggling with. With Shelley, I'm intrigued. How is she now
Speaker 2: perceived by her community that she was the face for
Speaker 2: having now dieted lost weight. It sounds like and may
Speaker 2: appear different visually. How is she now perceived and how
Speaker 2: does she feel about reconnecting with that community and talking
Speaker 2: about it with them?
Speaker 1: So as she would say, there's a she speaks for
Speaker 1: herself much better than I can. I don't want too
Speaker 1: much triloquisis, but because she's a very articulate person, I
Speaker 1: think it's really complicated, and I understand why it's complicated.
Speaker 1: Some people saw her as a sellout, and I think
Speaker 1: Shelley's attitude was what kind of body positivity would it
Speaker 1: be that would shame me for keeping my body alive?
Speaker 1: And there's a big division going on now among body
Speaker 1: positivity advocates. Well, they have many good arguments, and it's
Speaker 1: worth stressing. So if we think about the history of
Speaker 1: diet drugs, think about the seventies. One of the things
Speaker 1: that one of the first things the Fat Private movement
Speaker 1: did was point out, so there were diet drugs in
Speaker 1: the seventies that were in fetamins. Right, They're hugely popular.
Speaker 1: There were staggering figures like more than ten million and
Speaker 1: fetamine prescriptions were written in nineteen seventy in this country
Speaker 1: for weight loss, right. And it turns out taking loads
Speaker 1: of speed to lose weight not a good idea. Who knew,
Speaker 1: and they had to be taken off the market because
Speaker 1: it screws you up, right, partly because you developed tolerance
Speaker 1: to these drugs. You have to take higher and higher
Speaker 1: doses to get the same effect. And if you're taking
Speaker 1: really high doses of speed, as anyone who knows any
Speaker 1: recreational drug users well know, don't end so well for you.
Speaker 1: You know, skinny but psychotic is not a great trade off.
Speaker 1: I hope for some people it is, but not for me.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of the Fat Private movement very
Speaker 1: presciently warned at the time, you know, this is really
Speaker 1: good to screw people up, don't do it right. And
Speaker 1: they've been entirely vindicated by that. And it may be
Speaker 1: and I think there's a significant chance of this. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's the most likely option, but I do
Speaker 1: think it's a significant chance that they'll be vindicated on
Speaker 1: these drugs as well. Going Look, this is a big
Speaker 1: risk right for me, especially with the history of my
Speaker 1: own family. What I felt I had to do was
Speaker 1: waigh two risks, and I think that's what most people
Speaker 1: watching and listening, this will be the position they're in. Realistically,
Speaker 1: I was going to remain obese. I'd tried dieting many times.
Speaker 1: I always ended up fatter than I was at the start.
Speaker 1: I tried insane and tense diets. I'd gone to diet
Speaker 1: camps in Austria where they give you tea for I
Speaker 1: done it all right. Realistically, I was going to carry
Speaker 1: on being obese to some level. So for me, the
Speaker 1: choice was what are the risks of continuing to be
Speaker 1: obese versus what are the risks of these drugs? That
Speaker 1: is not an easy calculation. There's a lot we don't know.
Speaker 1: We're learning more and more. There's a lot of detail
Speaker 1: in the book that I think people don't know about.
Speaker 1: It's a hard calculation, and I don't know if I've
Speaker 1: made the right choice for myself. It may well be
Speaker 1: there's a significant chance that they will that their caution
Speaker 1: about this will be vindicated, and they're right that they're
Speaker 1: also right to say it's clearly not the case that
Speaker 1: we're only taking this to deal with health problems, right,
Speaker 1: And that's true to me as well. There's a significant
Speaker 1: amount of just relief from the stigma being fat, vanity.
Speaker 1: I like being thinner, right, because of the culture we
Speaker 1: live in. Some of that is the health benefits and
Speaker 1: the risk to my heart, of course, but some of
Speaker 1: that isn't a big part of it isn't. We've got
Speaker 1: a level with people about that, so it's possible that
Speaker 1: they'll they'll be vindicated, and even if they aren't, we've
Speaker 1: really got to understand where it comes from. If you
Speaker 1: are soaking up abuse your whole life, that cruelty, that bullying,
Speaker 1: I totally get. You know, there's an analogy I always
Speaker 1: think of, which is I'm gay the height of the
Speaker 1: age crime. When doctors explained to gay men, look, because
Speaker 1: of the nature of anal sex and because gay men
Speaker 1: tend to have a lot more sexual partners than other
Speaker 1: sexual combinations, this is going to affect gay men much
Speaker 1: worse than other communities. So they wanted to you know,
Speaker 1: shut down the bath houses in San Francisco. Really warm
Speaker 1: people say while we don't know, you shouldn't have sex, right,
Speaker 1: and a lot of gay men were like, our whole lives,
Speaker 1: we've been told our sexuality is disgusting, we're diseased, we're evil,
Speaker 1: and now you come along and tell us this as well.
Speaker 1: We're going to carry on going to the bath houses.
Speaker 1: We're going to carry on. And I get where they're
Speaker 1: coming from. I might well have been like that myself
Speaker 1: at the time, but now we realize looking back where
Speaker 1: you have to separate the stigma from the scientific advice. Right,
Speaker 1: there was I'm sure there were lots of homophobes picking
Speaker 1: up those arguments and fullying gay people exactly, but equally
Speaker 1: there was the scientific reality, which is it was much
Speaker 1: more likely to affect gay people, and lots of those
Speaker 1: people who refuse that advice. Tragically, I'm not here now
Speaker 1: because they refused it, so I think. And that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean I stand over those people people and go what fools.
Speaker 1: I totally get it, But I do think we have to,
Speaker 1: as Shelley says, we have to separate out two things.
Speaker 1: We have to separate out the stigmatizing, cruel things that
Speaker 1: are said from things that are just physic Think about cancer, right,
Speaker 1: The leading cancer group in Europe, Cancer Research UK, explain,
Speaker 1: if you carry excess weight in your body, it doesn't
Speaker 1: just sit there. It's not inert it's active. Right. It
Speaker 1: sends signals through your body, and one of those signals
Speaker 1: is for your cells to divide more rapidly, which can
Speaker 1: cause cancer. This is why obst is one of the
Speaker 1: biggest causes of cancer in the developed world. Right. That's true.
Speaker 1: Even if we've got rid of all the stigma in
Speaker 1: the world, which we passionately should fight to do, it's
Speaker 1: still going to make you more like to get cancer. Right.
Speaker 1: We can't. That's not something we can undo with an argument,
Speaker 1: and therefore we do need to think about this. Also,
Speaker 1: though I'm very conscious the most important thing we've got
Speaker 1: to do, so people like me are in a shitty trap. Right.
Speaker 1: You've got to choose risky medical condition, risky drug. But
Speaker 1: that is not inevitable and we should not tolerate that
Speaker 1: being the choice for our children. Right Japan, for example. Right,
Speaker 1: I can explain how they did it, but the key
Speaker 1: thing to understand is the way one expert put it.
Speaker 1: For me, A brilliant man named Professor Michael Lowe at
Speaker 1: Drexel University in Philly is processed and ultra process feeds
Speaker 1: dug this hole. They stole our satiety and the drugs
Speaker 1: fill it. In the way he put it was, so
Speaker 1: you've got to see that these drugs are an artificial
Speaker 1: solution to an artificial problem. Right, So we've got to
Speaker 1: pull back. In addition to the dilema about the drugs
Speaker 1: for people like me, we've got to pull back and
Speaker 1: go how did we get here and how do we
Speaker 1: make sure the next generation of kids are not in
Speaker 1: that position? And absolutely this is the dilemma a lot
Speaker 1: of ours face, but it doesn't have to be the
Speaker 1: dilemma for our children and grandchildren. And I went to
Speaker 1: places that have solved this dilemma that show us the
Speaker 1: way out. So that's the kind of broader argument which
Speaker 1: I think is so important to stress as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, before we get to Japan and before we
Speaker 2: get to those So the bugle's back and produced to
Speaker 2: report to guys investors, and it told them to get
Speaker 2: out of investing in fast food and ice cream because
Speaker 2: those markets are going to tank. Financial advisors are also
Speaker 2: expecting a decline in the demand for knee and hip replacement.
Speaker 2: But when you look at investment, I found that fascinating.
Speaker 2: I'm like, do I believe that fast food is growing
Speaker 2: or is shrinking? And while I see the rise of
Speaker 2: organic vegetables, while I see but still expensive, while I
Speaker 2: see the rise in people proposing a largely plant based diet,
Speaker 2: if not not not full, but a larger plant based diet,
Speaker 2: again more expensive, harder to access, maybe maybe difficult to
Speaker 2: know what to do. I don't see fast food shrinking
Speaker 2: as an industry. Did you see that? Are you seeing
Speaker 2: that through your research where you seeing investment shift and
Speaker 2: redirect or is that a myth as well?
Speaker 1: Crispy Kreme stock is down. The head of Nesle Mark
Speaker 1: Schneider has been making very nervous noises about that ice
Speaker 1: cream and confectionery market. So we've got to look at
Speaker 1: the longer term trend. Forty seven percent of Americans, so
Speaker 1: they want to take these drugs, and there's a big
Speaker 1: access question at the moment. But eight years from now
Speaker 1: a ZEMPI goes out of patent. At that point it
Speaker 1: will be a daily pill and it will cost about
Speaker 1: a dollar a day. I would anticipate forty seven percent
Speaker 1: as an underestimate for how how many people will take it.
Speaker 1: Provided some of the twelve big risks that I write
Speaker 1: about in the book don't blow up, which is a
Speaker 1: real problem. I think about Jeff Parker, the guy I
Speaker 1: just talked about in San Francisco. Everyone like Jeff becomes
Speaker 1: a walking advertisement for the drug and goes what happened
Speaker 1: to Jeff? He looks completely different. My god, he's so
Speaker 1: much healthier. So you can see how it creates a
Speaker 1: huge growth, growth effect. So you're right, at the moment,
Speaker 1: we've got two trends. We've got the ongoing explosion of
Speaker 1: fast food, which is, you know, blowing up and blowing
Speaker 1: up and is implanted in us from the moment we're born.
Speaker 1: More three year old children in this country know what
Speaker 1: the McDonald's M means and know their own last name.
Speaker 1: More people, yeah, more people in the world recognize the
Speaker 1: McDonald's M as a symbol of McDonald's than recognize the
Speaker 1: cross as a symbol of Christianity. Right, So this is
Speaker 1: really deep at out of consciousness. So you've got that
Speaker 1: huge explosion in fast food, which is growing and growing
Speaker 1: and growing, and you've got huge numbers of people who
Speaker 1: want to take these drugs. Now, one of those trends
Speaker 1: is going to win, right, So as more and more
Speaker 1: people take the drugs, we're already seeing effects. And I think,
Speaker 1: in a way, the best some of the best predictors
Speaker 1: are the financial markets. Jeffrey's Financial just a big report
Speaker 1: for the US airlines saying you're going to have to
Speaker 1: spend a lot less money on jet fuel pretty soon
Speaker 1: because a lighter population takes less jet fuel to fly.
Speaker 1: There's even just like crazy little things, there's been a
Speaker 1: huge run on duelers in Los Angeles because people's fingers
Speaker 1: have shrunk so much that they need their wedding bands refitted.
Speaker 1: Or think about you mentioned the hip and knee replacements.
Speaker 1: Companies that manufacture knee hip replacements, the joints for them,
Speaker 1: their stock is going down because the main driver of
Speaker 1: ne and hip replacements is obesity. And if there's a
Speaker 1: lot less obesity, there's going to be a lot fewer
Speaker 1: knee and hip replacement operations. So I do think we're
Speaker 1: we're You're right. The trend you're seeing, which is the
Speaker 1: growth of fast food, which any more and more, I mean,
Speaker 1: thank god, when I was a child. You couldn't just
Speaker 1: push a button on a device and they bring that
Speaker 1: good olds to you, right yet to actually leave your
Speaker 1: house at least I imagine however, I would have become
Speaker 1: of that have been the case. That trend is driving
Speaker 1: the other trend as well, right, so that they're they're
Speaker 1: densely interconnected.
Speaker 2: It's also a big question comes out as and like
Speaker 2: you kept saying, like you keep saying, we don't know enough.
Speaker 2: And I want to talk about the risks now, because
Speaker 2: we've talked about somewhat of how we've got here, the
Speaker 2: challenges that we're facing mentally, psychologically, societally, into why we're
Speaker 2: in this situation in the first place. But what's fascinating
Speaker 2: to me is are a lot of the twelve Big
Speaker 2: twelve which I want to dive into. The big twelve
Speaker 2: risks and the issues with the drugs are a lot
Speaker 2: of them more long term than short term, and based
Speaker 2: on your own personal experience, are the short term ones
Speaker 2: tolerable and the long term ones the ones that we
Speaker 2: would consider intolerable and complicated.
Speaker 1: So I would distinguish between the well known side effects
Speaker 1: and these twelve big risks. So the things like nausea.
Speaker 1: Almost everyone who takes these drugs feels nauseous at first
Speaker 1: throughout the day, no, different people have different experiences, so
Speaker 1: some people have horrible experiences. Interview someone called Sunny Newton
Speaker 1: and Beamont who you know. She had like she said,
Speaker 1: it was like there was an alien living inside her
Speaker 1: and it was like thrashing about and she just wanted
Speaker 1: to vomit the whole time. That's rare but not unheard of.
Speaker 1: I mean, in the clinical trialst about five percent of
Speaker 1: people did just stop because the nausea was so bad.
Speaker 1: For me, it was like it was mild. It was
Speaker 1: like when I would get on the bus or something,
Speaker 1: I would get a little bit of exaggerated travel sickness.
Speaker 1: But like if I'd got that feeling just randomly on
Speaker 1: a normal day, it wouldn't have stopped me going about
Speaker 1: my day. It just would have been a bit unpleasant.
Speaker 1: And after a few months you generally you get it
Speaker 1: worse the day you take it or the day after,
Speaker 1: and then you're okay for the rest of the week,
Speaker 1: and then again you ject yourself and it gets.
Speaker 2: And the regularity of injecting yourself. Is it the same
Speaker 2: for everyone, or can you accelerate the dose. Is there
Speaker 2: a slower version?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I should just say because a lot of people
Speaker 1: get horrified by injection, and I am a complete worse.
Speaker 1: I'm the kind of person who when you give me
Speaker 1: a blood test, I like.
Speaker 2: I don't want to look at it.
Speaker 1: I literally look away, and you know, do Katie Perry
Speaker 1: songs to pretend it's not happening. But and my singing
Speaker 1: is not pleasant. But this is an EpiPen. It's the
Speaker 1: tiny and I wish someone had told me at the start.
Speaker 1: I didn't know this at first. You can inject yourself
Speaker 1: in the leg or the stomach, and for some reason
Speaker 1: they do injecting in your stomach seems to be so horrifying.
Speaker 1: For the first month I was injecting my stomach, it's
Speaker 1: like ah, And actually the leg is just the same. No,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's literally like the tiniest scratch. It's
Speaker 1: like a mosquito bite. That are their different doses in
Speaker 1: Everyone starts at zero point two. Five milligrams is to
Speaker 1: get you used to the nausea, and the effect is
Speaker 1: quite mild, and most people go up and up and up,
Speaker 1: so generally you go up to one milligram you can
Speaker 1: go as high as two point four milligrams. It would
Speaker 1: depend on your level of obesity. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are on two higher dose.
Speaker 2: And who's advising you on there does?
Speaker 1: I mean the official guidance from Nova, Naudousk and Eli Lily,
Speaker 1: the companies that own it is you know, build up
Speaker 1: to one milligrammar and then you can go higher if
Speaker 1: you need greater effects.
Speaker 2: But because you're self medicing, we're not self medicating.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of the problem is people are buying
Speaker 1: you online right, not actually getting it from a doctor.
Speaker 1: And that's a really big problem that particularly relates to
Speaker 1: probably my single biggest worry about these drugs. There's a lot,
Speaker 1: but the thing I'm most concerned about, not for myself
Speaker 1: but for the society is eating disorders. We went into
Speaker 1: the pandemic with an unprecedentedly high level of eating disorders,
Speaker 1: probably because of social media and what it's doing to
Speaker 1: young girls. You're interviewing my friend Jonathan Hight. He can
Speaker 1: tell you much more about that, and everyone should read
Speaker 1: his brilliant, amazing work. Then during the pandemic he just
Speaker 1: sort of went up even further, which is mind blowing.
Speaker 1: And what these drugs do is they give you an
Speaker 1: unprecedented tool to amputate your appetite. Right, And anyone who
Speaker 1: knows anyone who's got eating disorders, imagine, I'm sure you do.
Speaker 1: Pretty much everyone does. They're in a conflict. There's the
Speaker 1: psychological part of them that wants to starve themselves for
Speaker 1: complex reasons created by the sick culture we have mostly
Speaker 1: and then there's the biological part of them that wants
Speaker 1: to live and wants to eat. And what these drugs
Speaker 1: do is they, you know, if you take them and
Speaker 1: you're in that position, they massively empower the part of
Speaker 1: you that wants to starve yourself. So I am and
Speaker 1: people like doctor Kimberly Dennis, who's one of the leading
Speaker 1: eating disorders experts in Britain, another person you should interview,
Speaker 1: a very wise and brilliant person, are really worried about this.
Speaker 1: My biggest fear is that we could have an opioid
Speaker 1: like death toll of huge numbers of young girls. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: these disorders do mostly affect young girls, or there are
Speaker 1: of course some young men and boys. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: really really worried about that. Now there are things we
Speaker 1: could do right, now, as Dr Dennis says, we need
Speaker 1: to I got them on zoom, you know when I
Speaker 1: got them in Britain, initially in Vegas had to go
Speaker 1: in person. They're meant to check you'll BMI on zoom.
Speaker 1: I mean, good luck with that. Yeah, Basically, you are
Speaker 1: very visibly not eligible for these drugs, right, You clearly
Speaker 1: have a BMI lower than twenty seven, and yet I
Speaker 1: have no doubt you could go on zoom. Literally, your
Speaker 1: lovely team here could arrange in half an hour we
Speaker 1: get a Zoom call and you would get it delivered
Speaker 1: in the you know, biked over to you today. Right.
Speaker 1: We need to stop that, As Dr Dennis says, we
Speaker 1: should only have in person prescription, and the in person
Speaker 1: prescription should be done by doctors who are given clear
Speaker 1: guidance about how to spot eating disorders and how to
Speaker 1: prevent the prescription of these things to eat disorders. It's
Speaker 1: not perfect. People might still buy it online, but it
Speaker 1: would put at least some barrier between these drugs and
Speaker 1: people who should not be getting them. At the moment,
Speaker 1: there is basically no barrier.
Speaker 2: Is that one of the big risks?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Massive? I mean if you said to me, what
Speaker 1: are the risks that most that's the risk that most
Speaker 1: worries me for the society. The one that most worries
Speaker 1: me for myself is quite different. So put it weird,
Speaker 1: I feel a way of anxiety. As I said it,
Speaker 1: We don't know the long term effects of these drugs
Speaker 1: at all. No one knows. We know they're chronically activating
Speaker 1: key parts of your brain. So a brilliant expert called
Speaker 1: Dr Greg Stanward, who works on these drugs at Florida
Speaker 1: State University, said to me, Now he's stressed to me,
Speaker 1: he's broadly in favor of these drugs. He's considering taking
Speaker 1: them himself, but as a responsible scientist, he has to
Speaker 1: warn people. So he gave an analogy. I want to
Speaker 1: be clear, he's not suggesting these drugs will have this effect,
Speaker 1: but it's an analogy that helps us to think about it.
Speaker 1: If you look at antipsychotic drugs, if you go back
Speaker 1: to when they were first given to people in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties, at the time, doctors judged that the
Speaker 1: benefits outweighed the risk. It's always been controversial, but they
Speaker 1: judge that. So loads of people will give an antipsychotics
Speaker 1: for really long periods of time, and it was only
Speaker 1: what forty to fifty years later that they discovered if
Speaker 1: you take these drugs for decade after decade, you are
Speaker 1: much more likely to get dementia or some In fact,
Speaker 1: all forms of dementia are much more likely. It's not
Speaker 1: that the doctors were being negligent in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: You couldn't know that, right. You had to have people
Speaker 1: take it for a really long time to know that.
Speaker 1: What could these drugs do over the long term, We
Speaker 1: don't know right now. Against that, Dr Shaan O. Levy,
Speaker 1: a brilliant obesity specialist at at Tulane University School of
Speaker 1: Medicine in New Orleans, said to me, well, look, we
Speaker 1: don't know the long term effects of these drugs. We
Speaker 1: do know the long term effects of obesity, and they
Speaker 1: are very serious. But you know, I'm forty five, right
Speaker 1: If you stop taking the drugs, for almost everyone they stopped,
Speaker 1: you just go back to where you were before. And
Speaker 1: there's a big debate about that, but for most people
Speaker 1: that seems to be happening. So I'm assuming I'm going
Speaker 1: to be taking these drugs for forty years. That's anxiety provoking.
Speaker 1: I asked Dr Clements Blue, who's one of the leading
Speaker 1: obesity specialists at Cambridge University, So, what brain areas do
Speaker 1: these drugs activate? And she taught me through it at
Speaker 1: the he and so on. I said, well, what else
Speaker 1: do those areas of the brain do? She said, oh,
Speaker 1: were they memory? Processing, taste processing, got motility like not
Speaker 1: this is me speaking now, but not trivial things, right,
Speaker 1: So for me that was of the twelve, that was
Speaker 1: the one where I thought shit. So I'm trying to
Speaker 1: a more eloquent way to say shit, but that was yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Once the debate you were saying there about the idea
Speaker 2: of if you stop taking these drugs, you'll go back
Speaker 2: to the same way you were. What's them?
Speaker 1: So we don't have that much research on it. What
Speaker 1: the drug companies say is these drugs are like statins.
Speaker 1: Are you take statins lowest your cholesterol. If you stop
Speaker 1: taking statins, your cholesterol goes back to what it was.
Speaker 1: The drugs are not a cure. There are treatment and
Speaker 1: ongoing treatment, right, So they say these drugs are like that.
Speaker 1: Now they have a vested interest in saying that. They
Speaker 1: want you to carry on buying the drugs forever. It
Speaker 1: would not be good news for them if they discovered
Speaker 1: that actually you can take the drugs for a short
Speaker 1: time stop and then you'd stay at the lower way
Speaker 1: some people. This is anecdotal because we don't have any
Speaker 1: research on it yet. Other people are studying it, so
Speaker 1: we'll know in a while. Like I give an example,
Speaker 1: someone I know, Tukman Jarro, lost loads of weight, interrupted
Speaker 1: their relationship with junk food, started exercising a lot in
Speaker 1: a way they felt too embarrassed to do when they
Speaker 1: were obese, and has now stopped and seems to be
Speaker 1: maintaining that lower weight. So how many people will there
Speaker 1: be like that? We don't know. I mean, the early
Speaker 1: studies we have we're just looking at if you take
Speaker 1: it and then stop. But what about motivated people who
Speaker 1: change use it as a tool to promote change. We
Speaker 1: just don't know.
Speaker 2: How long will it How long does it take to
Speaker 2: measure for us to realize how long do you need
Speaker 2: to be on it for to have those long term
Speaker 2: implications like how long will we have to study research
Speaker 2: and measure.
Speaker 1: I mean when you talk about the medium term effects
Speaker 1: and it get it's important to be balanced about this
Speaker 1: because it's a complicated truth. So a lot of people,
Speaker 1: a lot of the experts will say, and there's a
Speaker 1: really good scientist, and that's a good point. Actually, we
Speaker 1: know loads about the medium term effects of these drugs
Speaker 1: because diabetics have been taking them for eighteen nearly nineteen years, right,
Speaker 1: So for people who don't know, these drugs, in addition
Speaker 1: to having this effect on your appetite, also stimulate the
Speaker 1: creation of insulin, which is what diabetics, by type one
Speaker 1: anti two diabetics are lacking. It's why it's a diabetes treatment.
Speaker 1: And so actually we've got eighteen years of data on diabetics,
Speaker 1: so I mean, I'm putting it more crudely than they would.
Speaker 1: But if the drugs made you grow horns, the diabetics
Speaker 1: would have grown horns by now, right. And that's a
Speaker 1: good and important point, and it should give people some
Speaker 1: degree of security that some other people say, some other
Speaker 1: leading experts say, well, hang on, if we're going to
Speaker 1: base a lot of our confidence on these drugs on
Speaker 1: the diabetics, let's dig a bit deeper into the diabetics.
Speaker 1: So give an example. There's a brilliant scientist call Professor
Speaker 1: Jean luc Faye, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier
Speaker 1: in France, and he was commissioned by the French Medicines
Speaker 1: Agency to look at the safety of these drugs for
Speaker 1: the French market. As we started looking at what's called
Speaker 1: the preclinical research, which is on animals, and something really
Speaker 1: took him aback, which is, if you give these drugs
Speaker 1: to rats, they're much more likely to get thyroid cancer.
Speaker 1: And it's like, huh, okay, let's do some digging. So
Speaker 1: what he did is they have very very good medical
Speaker 1: databases in France. He compared a large number of diabetics
Speaker 1: who'd been taking these drugs between I think twenty six
Speaker 1: and twenty twelve with a large number of diabetics who
Speaker 1: were similar in every other way but hadn't taken these drugs.
Speaker 1: And what he calculated with his colleagues was, if he's right,
Speaker 1: and it's highly contested, these drugs increase your thyroid cancer
Speaker 1: risk by between fifty to seventy five percent. And he
Speaker 1: said to it, we've got to understand what it doesn't mean.
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean if you take the drugs you have a
Speaker 1: fifty to seventy five percent chance of getting thyrocncer. If
Speaker 1: that was the case, we'd be having bonfires of ozenpic
Speaker 1: all over the world. What it means is, if he's right,
Speaker 1: whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, these
Speaker 1: drugs increase it by fifty to seventy five percent. Now,
Speaker 1: thyro cancer is an overall low risk. One point two
Speaker 1: percent of people get it in their lives, eighty two
Speaker 1: percent of them survive, so it's a relative, but it's
Speaker 1: a big increase in a small risk, right, And I'm
Speaker 1: very conscious a that you got to weigh that against
Speaker 1: just the cancer risk of continue to be abast But
Speaker 1: also one of the things that really worries me about
Speaker 1: that is, so you think about the history of diet drugs,
Speaker 1: very often they began to unravel based on small warnings.
Speaker 1: So if you think about it, there was a diet
Speaker 1: drug in the nineties called fenfen, the most popular diet
Speaker 1: drug ever before a zenpic. So if you look at
Speaker 1: how it was a combination of two drugs. It was
Speaker 1: an appetite suppressant called flex fluoramine and an a fetamine
Speaker 1: called fentromine, and it really worked. People who took it
Speaker 1: got the same level of weight loss as people get
Speaker 1: on a zenpic and people talked about it in a
Speaker 1: very similar way. Front page of Time magazine was the
Speaker 1: new miracle weight loss drug, right, very similar. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety five, there were eighteen million Fenfen prescriptions in this country.
Speaker 1: It was huge. It was discovered a small group of
Speaker 1: doctors in a practice in Fargo in North Dakota noticed, huh,
Speaker 1: a lot of people using this drug in our practice
Speaker 1: seemed to be having trouble breathing. Wow, And so they
Speaker 1: raised what's called a safety signal. It was then investigated.
Speaker 1: It turned out these drugs caused in a lot of
Speaker 1: people something called primary pulmonary hypertension, a horrific condition where
Speaker 1: the blood vessels and your lungs contracted and you can't breathe.
Speaker 1: It it kills you. It can kill you. If not,
Speaker 1: you're an oxygen the rest of your life. It's horrendous.
Speaker 1: So it obviously got withdrawn from the market, led to
Speaker 1: the biggest pay out in the history of the pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: industry twelve be and it does actually emerge the drug
Speaker 1: companies had known about this risk all along. You look
Speaker 1: at the stuff the drug companies, you know. One of
Speaker 1: the one of the documents that was presented at the
Speaker 1: civil case was just someone saying one of the people
Speaker 1: at the drug company saying, oh am, I going to
Speaker 1: have to spend my retirement writing check compensation checks for silly,
Speaker 1: fat women with lung brew can't breathe. I mean horrendous.
Speaker 1: Right now, I want to stress Eli Lilly and Novo Nordous.
Speaker 1: I'm very happy to criticize drug companies. I do it
Speaker 1: a lot. But they are not shysters like those people were.
Speaker 1: They are reputable drug companies. There's no reason to believe
Speaker 1: that they're like that. But I'm conscious that small things
Speaker 1: could lead to the whole thing unraveling. We need to
Speaker 1: be vigilant. I'm alert to that. It's why if you
Speaker 1: have thyroid cancer in your family, I mean, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say I recommend it. Don't really matter why I recommend.
Speaker 1: The FDA recommends don't take the drugs. It's not a
Speaker 1: good idea.
Speaker 2: Are there any others in that line, any oh?
Speaker 1: Loads? I mean yeah, I mean I would there's all
Speaker 1: sorts of things, all sorts of categories of people. I
Speaker 1: would say, shouldn't take it. If your BMI is lower
Speaker 1: than twenty seven, don't take it. You're incurring all the
Speaker 1: risks for none of the benefits. If you have thyroid
Speaker 1: cancer in your family, if you're a history of eating disorders.
Speaker 1: There's a whole array of people who should not be
Speaker 1: taking it, who currently are take it. Another big one,
Speaker 1: which obviously doesn't apply to me, is if you think
Speaker 1: you might get pregnant. So one of the things that
Speaker 1: really worries me is we have really no data on
Speaker 1: what it does to people are pregnant. Obviously you're told
Speaker 1: to not take it if you think you might get pregnant,
Speaker 1: but people get pregnant and all sorts of ways that
Speaker 1: you don't expect. So we know rats when they're given
Speaker 1: some agualatide the active component. I'm much more like to
Speaker 1: have children with birth deformities fetuses with birth deformities. Dr Stamward,
Speaker 1: who I mentioned before a Florida State said to me
Speaker 1: again stressed he's broadly confident, but has to alert people
Speaker 1: to potential concerns because he's a very responsible scientist. He said,
Speaker 1: to think about this, you might want to look at
Speaker 1: the long term research on mothers who are exposed to
Speaker 1: contaminants when they're pregnant. So think about, for example, mothers
Speaker 1: who are exposed to lead. This happens scandalously frequently in
Speaker 1: this country because a lot of poor people still live
Speaker 1: in housing that still has a lending it and still
Speaker 1: get water from We know about Flint, Michigan, but actually
Speaker 1: lots of places get water from pipes that are made
Speaker 1: of lead. It's insane that in the richest country in
Speaker 1: the world we allow that the poisoning of children. But anyway,
Speaker 1: if you look at the if you look at mothers
Speaker 1: who are pregnant and get exposed to lead during pregnancy,
Speaker 1: actually their babies look like all the other babies. There's
Speaker 1: no it seems like there's no difference. But when those
Speaker 1: kids get to be twelve thirteen, we know that they
Speaker 1: have less impulse control, they're more likely to have attention problems.
Speaker 1: So it seems to have affected their developmental trajectory, even
Speaker 1: though that wasn't immediately obvious at first. Could that happen
Speaker 1: with these drugs, Yes, I mean it might not in
Speaker 1: might effect their trajectory in a positive way. We don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'd be less likely to become obesie kind of
Speaker 1: a protective effect on that. But it's just disturbing when
Speaker 1: you when you look it's a really weird feeling to
Speaker 1: go all around the world into feel these leading experts,
Speaker 1: sit with them and to realize, oh, this is an
Speaker 1: experiment on millions of people, and I'm one of the
Speaker 1: guinea pigs. Shit right, it's a weird feeling, right, and
Speaker 1: it makes me angry that we've been put in the
Speaker 1: position where we have to make these choices. Like I say,
Speaker 1: there are countries that don't have to make these choices
Speaker 1: because they didn't allow their population to be put up
Speaker 1: with process and ultra process food in the first place.
Speaker 1: And that pissed me off.
Speaker 2: What has been the most horrific a Zempi stories so far?
Speaker 1: It's terrific aszempic story by I interview people had gone
Speaker 1: through rough experiences. I want to stress this is very rare,
Speaker 1: but there's a condition called pancreatitis which is excruciatingly painful.
Speaker 1: It's basically where your pancreast doesn't work properly. Doctors compare
Speaker 1: the pain of pancreatitis to being stabbed, and it makes
Speaker 1: you nine times more likely to get pancreatitis these when
Speaker 1: you take these drugs. So paratise is very rare, but
Speaker 1: it's obviously a huge increase in this very rare thing.
Speaker 1: I interviewed a woman called Michelle Sterziak, who lives in
Speaker 1: Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, which is a place I
Speaker 1: only thought existed in country songs until I interviewed her.
Speaker 1: And Michelle said to me, you know, she went for
Speaker 1: a zmpic for weight loss. The doctor said, oh, this
Speaker 1: is rare side effects, one of those pancreatitis. She said, no,
Speaker 1: my life, I'll probably get it. She started taking it,
Speaker 1: lost loads away. Six weeks later, she went to visit
Speaker 1: a daughter in Pittsburgh and she woke up, she said,
Speaker 1: in the most excruciating angony she'd ever been in. She
Speaker 1: felt like she like she was being stabbed all over
Speaker 1: her body, and she was rushed to hospital and they
Speaker 1: hadn't know if I pancreatics. In the first thing they
Speaker 1: said was are you an alcoholic? She said no. Then
Speaker 1: they said are you taking her zempic? She was like yes,
Speaker 1: So that was probably the person. Michelle said to me,
Speaker 1: you know I've had children. It was much worse than
Speaker 1: the pain of childbirth, right so, which thank god you
Speaker 1: and I will never have to go through. But unless
Speaker 1: you've got something you want to announce, Jay, But there's
Speaker 1: some real horror stories, and most people are not having
Speaker 1: these horror stories. Most people are having I want to
Speaker 1: be responsible. Most people's experience is more like Jeff Parker
Speaker 1: or Oprah than it is like you know, Michelle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's now twenty years from now, thirty years from now,
Speaker 1: forty years from now. We don't know what the picture
Speaker 1: will be, which which puts us in this difficult position.
Speaker 2: So we've got some questions from the team. Yeah tell
Speaker 2: me referred to team. This is the team. So what
Speaker 2: is your view on when a zempic should be used
Speaker 2: for kids? If at all?
Speaker 1: For me, the debate about a zempic for kids through
Speaker 1: open the whole thing for me because for so many reasons,
Speaker 1: Because it's when you look at kids that you realize
Speaker 1: how this is a crisis created by the fast feed industry, right,
Speaker 1: and by processed food industry, and by the fact that
Speaker 1: we as a society have allowed that industry to poison
Speaker 1: our kids. Right. Think about where we are in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: Try walking around Brooklyn with a kid and them not
Speaker 1: seeing ads the whole time saying you don't feel good, Hey,
Speaker 1: stuff your face with our shit. Right. The first thing
Speaker 1: I want to say is this is a crisis created
Speaker 1: by them, and we need to stop them doing that,
Speaker 1: and we can do that, and I went to places
Speaker 1: that have done it. But given that's where we are,
Speaker 1: I think people are in a really tough position because
Speaker 1: there's so I'm very sympathetic to both sides of that debate. So,
Speaker 1: for example, I interviewed a really lovely woman called Deborah
Speaker 1: Tyler who's a nurse in Connecticut. Her daughter was very
Speaker 1: severely obese from when she was very young, and she
Speaker 1: took a daughter to the doctor when I think she
Speaker 1: was eight, and the doctor said she had liver problems,
Speaker 1: and she's like, can you imagine when you've been told
Speaker 1: your child is of the problems at the age of eight,
Speaker 1: And she faced this agonizing decision about whether to put
Speaker 1: her daughter on ozm PIC And in the end she
Speaker 1: decided to do it, and her daughter's liver problems have
Speaker 1: gone away. So I have a lot and she's still
Speaker 1: very agonized about it. All the problems are accentuated when
Speaker 1: it comes to children. I mean, there are benefits. Dr
Speaker 1: Charles you, who's one of the leading experts at Cambridge
Speaker 1: University on obest, explain to me if you are obese
Speaker 1: when you're a child. It is very hard to become unobese.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're unusual, right, it happens. You'll proof of that.
Speaker 1: There are other people approve that. Most people don't. Right.
Speaker 1: It's really partly because as you become obese, all sorts
Speaker 1: of changes happen in your brain that make it very
Speaker 1: hard to go back that I go through in the book.
Speaker 1: So there's a case for dealing with it early. Right,
Speaker 1: And we know childhood obesity, I mean has really devastating
Speaker 1: impacts on your health throughout your life and radically shortens
Speaker 1: your life on average. There are other people who have
Speaker 1: a lot of sympathy for like Professor Dan Cooper who's
Speaker 1: at UC Irvine, who say, well, A and I can't
Speaker 1: believe anyone would disagree with this. We need to deal
Speaker 1: with the underlying causes, but the environmental factors. But be
Speaker 1: children are not miniature adults, right. This could affect children
Speaker 1: in different ways. For example, of one of the things
Speaker 1: children use calories for is bone mineralization, and if you
Speaker 1: don't have enough calories, maybe your bones don't form it properly.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'll become austereoporotic as they get older, So it's
Speaker 1: really complicated. Novo Nordisk is currently doing a trial on
Speaker 1: giving these drugs to chill as young as six years old.
Speaker 1: It turns my stomach. It's a sign of a six
Speaker 1: society that we've reached this point. We need to fix
Speaker 1: the society. But if you're trapped in the choice that
Speaker 1: Debra Tayler is trapped in, honestly, I think I would
Speaker 1: probably do what she's done and I would feel as
Speaker 1: anguished as she does about it.
Speaker 2: So this came up with what you're just mentioning now,
Speaker 2: like what is your view on Oprah's ZMPIG special and
Speaker 2: what would the benefits and some of the challenges that
Speaker 2: came from it on people's perspectives.
Speaker 1: So I can't think just passionately about Oprah, right, Like
Speaker 1: I know everyone loves Oprah and a kind of oh
Speaker 1: we love Oprah. Oprah is what are the two or
Speaker 1: three humans alive for his most influenced be Like when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, do you remember this when your
Speaker 1: kids remember? It's so vividly the Oprah Show of you
Speaker 1: on at five pm on Channel four. Right, and no
Speaker 1: one in Britain when we were kids spoke like Oprah, Right,
Speaker 1: no one spoke about their no one spoke about their emotions,
Speaker 1: no one spoke about in this extraordinary and profound way
Speaker 1: that Oprah does. And I really think one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I get on well with Oprah, I think is
Speaker 1: because I've I've so entitalized her voice that I sort
Speaker 1: of I mean, clearly, as a British person, you can't
Speaker 1: talk like Oprah, but like, well, clearly no one can
Speaker 1: talk like Oprah, but you know what I mean. So
Speaker 1: I can't think dispassionately about it because I love her
Speaker 1: so much and I'm weirdly friends with her, which is
Speaker 1: like still to me the most surreal, whether she emails
Speaker 1: me or texts me. And my friend I was like,
Speaker 1: shut up, everyone Oprah needs us. But I thought her
Speaker 1: special was incredible and I cried a lot for the
Speaker 1: minute it started. I cried, and my friend said, thank
Speaker 1: God Oprah has not brought her show back, because if
Speaker 1: you had this emotional reaction every day, you've been a
Speaker 1: psychiatric hospital because of seeing op profront of an audience
Speaker 1: may be emotional, but I thought it was amazing, and
Speaker 1: I think part of it made me really sad, because
Speaker 1: you think about how much Oprah has given us, right,
Speaker 1: how much she's given to the culture, people forget, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean even just think about the incredible work she
Speaker 1: did on breaking the taboos around sexual abuse right where.
Speaker 1: What she's done is incredible. And I could list like
Speaker 1: fifteen things like that that Oprah has done transform the culture.
Speaker 1: And you think, all that time she was doing that
Speaker 1: and rising, she was being bullied in the most hateful ways.
Speaker 1: I really recommend people watch. And this is someone else
Speaker 1: who I admire and was a damaged person. So I
Speaker 1: don't want to say this in a spirit of judgment,
Speaker 1: but you can watch it on YouTube. There's an interview
Speaker 1: between Oprah and Joan Rivers from I think nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and I'll preface this by saying, a Joan Rivers was
Speaker 1: the funniest comedian I've ever seen, and be Joan Rivers
Speaker 1: was someone who hated her own body and was at
Speaker 1: war with her own body. So she's externalizing something that's
Speaker 1: an internal, horrifying battle. But it's viscerally shocking when you
Speaker 1: watch it now. She says to Oprah something like, I
Speaker 1: haven't watched it in a long time, so I'm going
Speaker 1: to be get the exact wording wrong. But she says
Speaker 1: something like, you can't be this fat, you need to
Speaker 1: lose weight. And it's not said as a joke. It's
Speaker 1: not framed as like I mean, it would be would
Speaker 1: be acceptable as a joke, but it's not even framed
Speaker 1: as a joke. And you can see just looks really
Speaker 1: thrown and make some joke about herself because what else
Speaker 1: could she do? But you think, God, that's the Tonight Shows.
Speaker 1: They're on the Tonight Show, right, that's because Joan was
Speaker 1: the guest host. How many people watch that? Twenty five
Speaker 1: million people? That's been brutally shamed in front of twenty
Speaker 1: five million people. You think Oprah's carrying that the whole
Speaker 1: time she's torturing herself. You know that famous the famous
Speaker 1: image of her with the you know, the thing that
Speaker 1: represents as much fat as she's lost. And you think, God,
Speaker 1: I feel so sad if you, even if your Oprah,
Speaker 1: you get tortured about it, right, you just realize. So
Speaker 1: to see her overcome that and see her looking so well,
Speaker 1: and to see her given a space beyond that stigma,
Speaker 1: I found incredibly moving. But that's tied up for me
Speaker 1: with so many other feelings about Oprah that I can't
Speaker 1: really you know.
Speaker 2: No for sure. And do you feel like some of
Speaker 2: that stigma's now going the other way too? Right? Oh,
Speaker 2: you lost weight because of a zambic so then that
Speaker 2: stigma creeping in, have you.
Speaker 1: I think what's happening is a complicated thing. Just like
Speaker 1: the drugs interrupt the way we eat and bring to
Speaker 1: the surface these emotional feelings we didn't know were there.
Speaker 1: I think culturally, as zen pick is leeching out some
Speaker 1: deep underlying ideas about obesity. So, for example, I'm a
Speaker 1: feeling experience in them to myself. When I was taking
Speaker 1: the drug, I kept thinking I'm cheating, I'm doing something wrong.
Speaker 1: I think that's really weird. One of my best friends
Speaker 1: to take statins right to lower's cholesterol. I've never once
Speaker 1: thought cheating to get lower cholesterol than me. You think
Speaker 1: I was crazy if I said that, Right, that's really
Speaker 1: weird what's going on here? And I think it lies
Speaker 1: with that. It looks a lot into the history of
Speaker 1: obesity and how we talk and think about it. So
Speaker 1: if you look back in the sixth century, the pope
Speaker 1: Pope Gregory the First was the first one to lay
Speaker 1: out the seven Deadly sins, and one of them is gluttony,
Speaker 1: and it's always depicted with like some hugely fat person
Speaker 1: picking out It's very deep in our kind of psychees
Speaker 1: to think of obesity as a sin, right, And one
Speaker 1: of the ways you know that is what are the
Speaker 1: forms of weight loss we had? There's basically only one form,
Speaker 1: and it follows the classic Catholic pattern of like the sinner,
Speaker 1: you're sinner. You've got to be tormented, you've got to
Speaker 1: go through hell and purgatory, and then we'll forgive you.
Speaker 1: So think about that game show the world. It's called
Speaker 1: the Biggest Loser, repulsive and wicked show in my view,
Speaker 1: but it's where people haven't seen it. People are very unwell,
Speaker 1: very seriously overweight, are humiliated, made to take part in
Speaker 1: very extreme and in fact dangerous forms of exercise and
Speaker 1: starve themselves, and whoever loses the most weight is the
Speaker 1: biggest loser and therefore wins. It's like, oh yeah, if
Speaker 1: you torture yourself and go through agony, then we'll forgive
Speaker 1: you for your sin. Then we'll go, well done, good job, Joe. Right.
Speaker 1: But I think one of the things that's weird with
Speaker 1: those sen because it's so easy, right. So it's like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people look at it and go, well,
Speaker 1: you haven't paid for your sin, right, you haven't suffered.
Speaker 1: If you suffer, we might forgive you suffer with bariatric surgery.
Speaker 1: I also think it underlies can you think about right
Speaker 1: in this culture which makes it so easy to be
Speaker 1: to over eat and be obese, and so hard to
Speaker 1: be healthy, lots of people are making daily sacrifices to
Speaker 1: not gain weight, particularly women. They're starving themselves, they're denying themselves,
Speaker 1: they're going hungry, they're doing extreme forms of exercise, and
Speaker 1: I think to them, people like me must look a
Speaker 1: bit like Lance Armstrong looks to a cyclist. It's what you, you, bastard.
Speaker 1: I work so hard for this and you just inject
Speaker 1: yourself once in the leg a week and you get
Speaker 1: the same benefit as me. Screw you. I can see
Speaker 1: where that impulse comes from, and I think we have
Speaker 1: to re I think we have to acknowledge those feelings
Speaker 1: are there. They were there in me, they're in everyone.
Speaker 1: I think it's you can't live in this culture and
Speaker 1: not absorb those ideas at some level. But then we
Speaker 1: have to say, okay, well, A, I don't think of
Speaker 1: these people are sinners. I think we're typical products of
Speaker 1: this environment, and i'd hope we can move beyond the
Speaker 1: ideas of with sixth century pope. But also in terms
Speaker 1: of being in a race and competing against each other, well,
Speaker 1: we are competing, but it's not me against you. It's
Speaker 1: all of us against the forces driving up obesity, which
Speaker 1: are the processed food industry. If we reframe it that way,
Speaker 1: we can get out. Look, we live in, as you
Speaker 1: know very well, a toxic age where you know, every
Speaker 1: conversation turns toxic very quickly, partly because of social media
Speaker 1: algorithms which prioritize negativity, all sorts of factors that are
Speaker 1: going on. If we want to have a non toxic
Speaker 1: conversation about obesity and about a zenpic, I think we've
Speaker 1: got to acknowledge those ideas about sin and cheating are there,
Speaker 1: and then we've got a move beyond them.
Speaker 2: Well said, Well said, yeah, I wonder whether you saw
Speaker 2: did you do it into any research on investors in
Speaker 2: fast foods and weight loss drugs, did you find any patterns?
Speaker 1: I didn't, but I'd be surprised if and there was
Speaker 1: some reporting in the Washington Post, which I only read briefly,
Speaker 1: so I don't want to get it wrong. But if
Speaker 1: I remember rightly, I suspect I don't know this, but
Speaker 1: I suspect the fast food industry will soon be funding
Speaker 1: antio zen pic propaganda, just like the tobacco industry used
Speaker 1: to fund, you know, claims that smoking isn't bad for
Speaker 1: you for yearsnars, or like the oil industry still funds
Speaker 1: claims that global warming isn't happening or is actually a
Speaker 1: good thing, or you know, over amazed if that isn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're going to lose a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and they are some of the most profitable companies in
Speaker 1: the whole world, so i'd be I suspect they're already
Speaker 1: doing it.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, yeah, No. It's an interesting to
Speaker 2: think about because I feel like part of our part
Speaker 2: of the environment we all live in, is somewhat of
Speaker 2: an illusion and ignorance of not understanding who's behind the
Speaker 2: narrative storytelling. You know, when fast food first came around,
Speaker 2: how did everyone not go, wait a minute, this is
Speaker 2: going to ruin the world, Like, how did we not
Speaker 2: do that? Or when, as you said, we're trying to
Speaker 2: find artificial solutions to artificial problems, and now that we're
Speaker 2: living in an artificial world, it's like, well, where did
Speaker 2: we allow that to happen? And I want to talk
Speaker 2: about Japan in that vein, because that was a place
Speaker 2: where you found that at least tried to deal with
Speaker 2: this in a much healthier, smarter way.
Speaker 1: This completely blew up. Have you been to Japan?
Speaker 2: So that's number one on my list right now.
Speaker 1: Okay, if there's one thing you take away from this
Speaker 1: conversation going to Japan, go to Japan. It I expected
Speaker 1: it to be great, and it massively exceeded by expectations.
Speaker 1: But it's completely amazing. I give your list of things
Speaker 1: to do. But the so Japan is really important because
Speaker 1: some people say about these drugs. Look, if the country
Speaker 1: gets to be rich, people are going to have more
Speaker 1: food than they can eat. Obesity is just inevitable, right,
Speaker 1: and therefore these drugs become inevitable. But actually, Japan is
Speaker 1: the third richest country in the world in the history
Speaker 1: of the world, and now is the third rich country
Speaker 1: in the world, and they have almost no obesity at all.
Speaker 1: Forty two point five percent of Americans are obese. It
Speaker 1: is four percent of people in Japan. Right, there's almost
Speaker 1: no childhood obesity in Japan. I went to a school
Speaker 1: in Tokyo, typical middle class school. When several schools, it's
Speaker 1: the weirdest thing walking around a school with a thousand
Speaker 1: children and they're being not one overweight child anywhere. It's
Speaker 1: as weird if you're used to going to British and
Speaker 1: American schools. So I wanted to understand how did Japan
Speaker 1: do it because I remember at first I read about
Speaker 1: you know, a zepic has been approved in Japan and
Speaker 1: are in any sales because there's no one to take it, right,
Speaker 1: almost nobody. It's a tiny, tiny market for it. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of weird that we expect Japanese people to
Speaker 1: look like sumo wrestlers. It would be like expecting an
Speaker 1: American to look like a bald eagle. And at first
Speaker 1: I thought it must just be that Japanese people won
Speaker 1: the genetic lottery, right, But that's not true. We know
Speaker 1: that because in the late nineteenth century lots of Japanese
Speaker 1: people moved to Hawaii. I was just there and they've
Speaker 1: been there ever since, and Japanese Hawaiians are almost as
Speaker 1: overweight as other Hawaiians. So and it's not that their
Speaker 1: genes suddenly mutated in one hundred and twenty years since.
Speaker 1: So something else is going on, right, There's something in
Speaker 1: the environment that's that's driving up obesity in our societies
Speaker 1: and hasn't in Japan. And there's so many fascinating things
Speaker 1: about this. I went to. The most important to understand
Speaker 1: is Japan deliberately created an environment in which it is
Speaker 1: hard to get fat and hard to eat badly. If
Speaker 1: you go back to the nineteen twenties, Japanese people had
Speaker 1: one of the worst diets in the world. They only
Speaker 1: ate protein on average once a week. Right, they were
Speaker 1: quite unwell. They had poor life expectancy, and the Japanese
Speaker 1: government at the time deliberately transformed the society. Not for
Speaker 1: a good reason, it's because they were They wanted to
Speaker 1: have an army to go and invade the rest of Asia.
Speaker 1: So we all got our motives for weight loss. Not
Speaker 1: the best run, but you know whatever, it worked, right
Speaker 1: they and they deliberately created this new new diet in
Speaker 1: this new way being which is now continued in policy
Speaker 1: in Japan. So I went to school, like I say,
Speaker 1: in Tokyo to see how does it begin. There's lots
Speaker 1: of layers at which they do this. And I was
Speaker 1: greeted at the door by a woman called Harumi to
Speaker 1: t Bay who's the nutritionist at this school, Coenji School.
Speaker 1: Every school, by law in Japan has to employ a
Speaker 1: professional nutritionists. It's a difficult qualification to get. It's three years.
Speaker 1: On top of your teaching qualification. Your job is to
Speaker 1: design the food that the kids eat. By law, the
Speaker 1: kids can't bring back lunches. They have to eat what's
Speaker 1: prepared there, and they can only that food has to
Speaker 1: be fresh, prepared on the day and have no processed
Speaker 1: ingredients at all. And then they use this healthy food
Speaker 1: which has to contain all the food groups every day
Speaker 1: to educate the kids about how to make their bodies healthy.
Speaker 1: So still, you know, they're eating this food. And Japanese
Speaker 1: people love food. It's not a place people deny themselves food.
Speaker 1: They love it. Right, So with these group of kids,
Speaker 1: they're eating the school lunch, which literally is more like
Speaker 1: something from Nobu than like anything we ever ate at school, right,
Speaker 1: and they're eating it. And I say to these kids
Speaker 1: through my translator Chier, I said to these kids and
Speaker 1: never forget it the class I think of in particularly
Speaker 1: we're nine ten year olds. I said, what's your favorite food?
Speaker 1: The first kid said broccoli. I love broccoli. I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: little freak. So to the next kid, what's your favorite food?
Speaker 1: She said white fish. I said to the next kid,
Speaker 1: and she said, I boiled white rice. And I turned
Speaker 1: to cheer and I said, are these kids trolling me?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Their favorite foods are broccoli and a cheer Like all
Speaker 1: Japanese people could not understand why. I was puzzled and said, well,
Speaker 1: what do you mean. We teach our kids to eat
Speaker 1: healthy food? Don't you do that? And every food group
Speaker 1: they have they have a rope, a colored rope, so
Speaker 1: they like when they're eating the calcium shells up the
Speaker 1: white rope, she goes, this is calcium. What does it
Speaker 1: do when someone yells at It makes your bone strong?
Speaker 1: And she goes the red rope, this is carbs. What
Speaker 1: do they do give you energy? And she ties the
Speaker 1: ropes together in every lesson and that surrounded meal that
Speaker 1: you should have in every meal. Right, So they teach
Speaker 1: kids from a very young age how to nuture their bodies.
Speaker 1: And I was with these kids, and I couldn't help.
Speaker 1: I couldn't resist the temptation. I pulled up on my
Speaker 1: phone videos of British and American school meals, and these
Speaker 1: kids reacted like I had shown them an Isis beheading video.
Speaker 1: They like screamed, they were like what are They said
Speaker 1: to me, where are the vegetables? Said, there are no vegetables.
Speaker 1: Where's the salad? I said, there is no salad. They
Speaker 1: were just complete and it was very touching. My little
Speaker 1: girl put her hand on my shoulder and said, I'm
Speaker 1: worried about you. Well it like it was completely adorable. Right.
Speaker 1: It begins there and then all through the society. There
Speaker 1: are measures taken to make processed food. You can buy
Speaker 1: it if you want to, but it's very much a
Speaker 1: minority pursuit. It exists, but it's a tiny part of
Speaker 1: the Japanese diet, overwhelming the fish, fresh food, vegetables. Most
Speaker 1: people eat fresh food that's prepared on the day. And
Speaker 1: I think probably the most moving conversation I had for
Speaker 1: the whole book was in Okinawa, which is an archipelago
Speaker 1: of islands in the south of Japan, where I really
Speaker 1: saw what you win if you get this right. So
Speaker 1: Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Women
Speaker 1: live to be eighty eight. Men I think it's eighty two.
Speaker 1: But not just that. They have the healthiest lifespan in
Speaker 1: the world. So the average British person is in poor health.
Speaker 1: I think it's sixteen years before they die. In Japan,
Speaker 1: it's like a few years. So it's a very different relationship.
Speaker 1: And so I went to this place that sounds almost mythical.
Speaker 1: It's called Ogeemi. It's the oldest village in the whole world.
Speaker 1: It has two hundred and fifteen houses and one hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety two have someone older than the age older
Speaker 1: than the age of ninety living there. And I went
Speaker 1: there and I went to they' got this little community center.
Speaker 1: And the first person I met, the first woman who
Speaker 1: walked through the door, was the one hundred and two
Speaker 1: year old woman called Matsufakucci, who walked there on her
Speaker 1: own from her home down the hill. And she said,
Speaker 1: I can't stay long because I'm looking after my son
Speaker 1: who fell off the roof fixing it the other day.
Speaker 1: I was like, Jesus, how old is your son? But okay,
Speaker 1: and we sat down and we talked and she talked
Speaker 1: about how much she loved life. It was volleyball season.
Speaker 1: She's been watching a great grandchildren play volleyball. I actually
Speaker 1: loved volleyball. You could see how much joy she took
Speaker 1: in life. Two into all these old women. And then
Speaker 1: someone put on some older Okinawan music and she put
Speaker 1: on a kimono and she started dancing. And so I
Speaker 1: start dancing with this one hundred and two year old woman,
Speaker 1: and I thought, wow, you were born before they started
Speaker 1: doing radio broadcasts in Japan. And here I am dancing
Speaker 1: with you and recording it on my iPhone. That's what
Speaker 1: you get if you solve obesity. You don't get destroyed.
Speaker 1: Clearly not everyone will live to one hundred and two,
Speaker 1: but you don't get your knees destroyed and your heart
Speaker 1: destroyed and your you know, you get to live, and
Speaker 1: you get more years of joy and more years of laughter,
Speaker 1: and more years of dancing. That's what we get if
Speaker 1: we solve this crisis, and it is within our grasp
Speaker 1: to solve it. These drugs are one tool. They are
Speaker 1: a difficult and controversial tool, and I'm not sure I've
Speaker 1: made the right decision to carry on taking them. It
Speaker 1: was the heart benefits. That did it for me. But
Speaker 1: we absolutely can deal with this wider crisis. They've done
Speaker 1: it in Japan. Think about smoking. Right, when we were kids,
Speaker 1: people smoked everywhere. People smoked on the subway, people smoked
Speaker 1: on the bus, people smoked on the plane. Doctors to
Speaker 1: smoke while they examined you. I remember it happening. There's
Speaker 1: a photo of me and my mother where she's breastfeeding
Speaker 1: me when I'm a baby, obviously smoking and resting the
Speaker 1: ashtray on my stomach. When I found this photo a
Speaker 1: few years ago, I thought she'd feel guilty. I showed
Speaker 1: it to She said, you were a difficult baby. I
Speaker 1: needed that cigarette. Right. If you think about how normal
Speaker 1: that was then. Right now, if you saw that, you'd
Speaker 1: call the police. Right, we've gone from you know, more
Speaker 1: than fifty percent of people with smokers when we were kids,
Speaker 1: it's now twelve percent. You very rarely see a young
Speaker 1: persons smoking cigarettes now, Ka, we've gotn issue with vaping.
Speaker 1: But you know that's an enormous transformation that's happened in
Speaker 1: our lifetimes through concerted action. Right, we can do the
Speaker 1: same with food. We can free future generations from this
Speaker 1: shitty choice. Japan showed me you can do it with joy. Right,
Speaker 1: Japanese people aren't sitting there being miserable. They love food.
Speaker 1: Their food is grabbed, never eaten, better than in the
Speaker 1: two and a half weeks I was in Japan. Right,
Speaker 1: literally never right. It's not about depriving yourself. It's about
Speaker 1: making better choices and empowering everyone to be in an
Speaker 1: environment where we can make better choices.
Speaker 2: Still have a stigma around body shape, size, weight and
Speaker 2: all of that as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of the complexities, so I don't
Speaker 1: want to shy away from it. These people are horrifically
Speaker 1: stigmatizing towards overweight people, and that informs some of their policies,
Speaker 1: which are just so strange to us that they sound
Speaker 1: like a kind of just bizarre parallel universe. Give an example,
Speaker 1: So in two thousand and eight, they had their obesity
Speaker 1: level went up by like zero point four percent, and
Speaker 1: they had a massive, like national freak out, and it
Speaker 1: was like this huge debate intopad. It was from like
Speaker 1: you know, I can't remember, it's literally for it saying
Speaker 1: like three percent to three point four percent or like
Speaker 1: saying that like we wouldn't even notice it in the
Speaker 1: US if that happened, right, And there's a huge debate,
Speaker 1: and they introduced something that I, frankly just when I
Speaker 1: read about it, thought this can't be true. It's so
Speaker 1: called the Matabo law. It's named after metabolic syndrome, which
Speaker 1: is a kind of combination of problems you can get
Speaker 1: when you're obese. This has very bad health effect. The
Speaker 1: introduced this rule. I actually kin'd even say it without
Speaker 1: like it decided insaid in Japan, every single employee once
Speaker 1: a year has to be weighed by their employer. If
Speaker 1: your weight has gone up, you have to, by law
Speaker 1: drop a plan with your employer to bring your weight down.
Speaker 1: And a company overall has to report its weight levels
Speaker 1: to the government, and if your overall workforce got fatter,
Speaker 1: you can be fined by the government. Right, So it's like,
Speaker 1: how can this work? So I went to this company
Speaker 1: that does it. I mean every company does it, but
Speaker 1: this is a company that agreed to show me, partly
Speaker 1: because they manufacture products to keep you healthy, so they
Speaker 1: can't want people to know about it, and they're super
Speaker 1: nice people, but it was freaky. So you arrive the
Speaker 1: first thing you see when you arrive at work is
Speaker 1: a face recognition thing. It says, hij you walked one
Speaker 1: three hundred steps yesterday whatever, because you have to wear
Speaker 1: a fitbit equivalent and a fitbit, and then it says
Speaker 1: you were number one hundred and twenty one in the company.
Speaker 1: By the way, Susie who said two deaths away from
Speaker 1: you hasn't weighed herself this week. Tell her to weigh herself.
Speaker 1: You're like, ohh And then so every you're encouraged. It's
Speaker 1: not required, but you're encouraged to take a photograph of
Speaker 1: every meal you take and post it so you can
Speaker 1: literally go, oh, I wonder what Bobby sits next to
Speaker 1: me eight yesterday and you can look at it all.
Speaker 1: It's just bizarre. And I was interviewing people there, so
Speaker 1: in to be the boss, who's this fifty eight year
Speaker 1: old man, I have to say, incredibly hot boss? And
Speaker 1: he was like talking about yeah, this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's great, it's really good for everyone. And I was
Speaker 1: interviewing the employees and they would go, yeah, this really
Speaker 1: helps me be healthy, and I would kind of go, right,
Speaker 1: So if you did this in the US or Britain,
Speaker 1: we would burn the office building down. And they genuinely
Speaker 1: didn't understand we're saying. They would kind of go, well,
Speaker 1: why they just it was. It really was a moment
Speaker 1: I thought I could profound cultural chasm, right, I thought,
Speaker 1: this is you're not like us.
Speaker 2: And we're not like and we can't Yeah. Yeah, just
Speaker 2: as they can't understand us, we can't understand that exactly.
Speaker 1: So there are lots of things about the Japanese model
Speaker 1: I definitely would not I mean, we couldn't integrate that
Speaker 1: even if we want to. But if we could, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to. So there's lots of things about the
Speaker 1: Japanese model we can't integrate, including just shame. Right, it's
Speaker 1: a very particularly to women who are overweight. It's really
Speaker 1: brutal the shaming there. So yeah, there's lots of things
Speaker 1: we wouldn't want to integrate, and lots of things we would.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's one thing that has stayed with me
Speaker 2: as we've been on this beautiful journey together. Today, I
Speaker 2: feel like we've you know, I've learned so much from you,
Speaker 2: or less much from the book. I really want people
Speaker 2: to read the book, to dive into it. We've kind
Speaker 2: of nicely kind of visited different chapters and different sections
Speaker 2: insides of the book. But there's one thing that stayed
Speaker 2: with me, and it's this idea of even after being
Speaker 2: on a zebig, if people are unable to change their
Speaker 2: eating habits even though they're satiated quicker, does that not
Speaker 2: necessarily double up on the health problems too?
Speaker 1: So inevitably changes you're eating patterns one key way you
Speaker 1: eat much less. Right, But an issue, and this was
Speaker 1: definitely true of me for the first six months, is
Speaker 1: to put it crudely, I was eating smaller.
Speaker 2: Portions of the same old I mean, yeah, yes, I was.
Speaker 1: Going to McDonald's been Instead of getting like a large
Speaker 1: big macmeal and nine nuggets, I was getting a hamburger. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's a move in the right direction, but still
Speaker 1: very imperfect. As Robert Kushner, one of the scientists who's
Speaker 1: involved in the studies about these drugs, explained to me, Look,
Speaker 1: there's an issue about nutrition just separate to wait. If
Speaker 1: you're eating food that doesn't give your body what it needs,
Speaker 1: even if you're not obese, that's still really bad for you. Right.
Speaker 1: So for me, it made me realize I had to
Speaker 1: do it. I'm super embarrassed to say it, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to
Speaker 1: do really basic things. I learned that partly because I
Speaker 1: realized I had to make that change. But you could
Speaker 1: I could have just carried on eating smaller portions. And frankly,
Speaker 1: I'm on the road at the moment, I am eating
Speaker 1: smaller portions of the same shit. This morning I had
Speaker 1: travelers travel is really tough, or even try living in
Speaker 1: Las Vegas, no idea, But you're worried about portion size
Speaker 1: in this country, generally you want to try Vegas. But yeah, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the issue A pointed to is real. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: still moving in a positive direction, but it can leave you, yeah,
Speaker 1: far from from the ideal position.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah, And it's been such a joy
Speaker 2: talking to you today, deeply insightful and appreciate the honesty
Speaker 2: of just what a challenging, nuanced, layered subject matter this is.
Speaker 2: And I feel your analysis, research and thought through it
Speaker 2: is actually so so so helpful in that if people
Speaker 2: are confused in their decision making for themselves their family,
Speaker 2: I think you've at least given them every angle possible
Speaker 2: to think about, which is I think sometimes what's missing, right,
Speaker 2: Sometimes we are just presented a binary angle, which is
Speaker 2: where we started and now we're ending today feeling like
Speaker 2: we can look at this from twelve different angles and
Speaker 2: twelve different points of view. We end every episode of
Speaker 2: On Purpose with a fast five or a final five.
Speaker 2: These have to be answered in one word to one
Speaker 2: sentence maximize.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is very hard for me, as you can
Speaker 1: tell you my brutal your final should someone to tell
Speaker 1: you your colleage should taze me? If I be on
Speaker 1: the sentence, you should why you are here exactly? The
Speaker 1: first question is what is the best health advice you've
Speaker 1: ever heard or received? It's what Lindy West said that
Speaker 1: I quoted before. You can't it's hard to treat well
Speaker 1: and object you hate. You've got to learn to love
Speaker 1: your body.
Speaker 2: That's great advice. I love that. One second question, what
Speaker 2: is the worst advice health advice you've ever heard or received?
Speaker 1: I went to an Austrian diet clinic in clarg and
Speaker 1: Fort where they made me eat nothing but tea for
Speaker 1: like days and days and days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not good advice, yeah, just tea. Exactly how did
Speaker 2: that end up? Tell us?
Speaker 1: I was surrounded by people I would go like, so
Speaker 1: there were people there who'd have been there for like
Speaker 1: three weeks, and they were on the tea diet, and
Speaker 1: I said, how do you feel? And they said terrible.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, you're gonna die. I felt like
Speaker 1: Jack Nicholson did what over the cookers there, flung out
Speaker 1: it's gonna buy a bratfirst? Not their own.
Speaker 2: Question Number three, what's something that surprised you about this
Speaker 2: journey that you went on with the magic pill?
Speaker 1: How hard it is, how complicated it's not. I'm not
Speaker 1: normally such an even handed person. It's really complicated, and
Speaker 1: that surprised you.
Speaker 2: You would be a lot more clear.
Speaker 1: I thought every other book I've ever written, I've come
Speaker 1: to a more firm conclusion at the end than this.
Speaker 1: You know, with this, it's sort of like you've really
Speaker 1: got to go down the list of the risk and
Speaker 1: benefits for yourself, and it will really help you to
Speaker 1: know all these risk and benefits. But I can't tell
Speaker 1: you at the end. And now, dear reader, do it
Speaker 1: or don't do it? Or do these things? You know,
Speaker 1: I'm completely failing at these one sentence.
Speaker 2: That's great, I'm asking you, yes, exactly, angry face when
Speaker 2: I go to squ is the Number four, if you
Speaker 2: had to ask people to reflect on three things while
Speaker 2: they're making their decision. There are many things in the
Speaker 2: book that they need to read and study, but three
Speaker 2: things while they're reading the book that you'd like them
Speaker 2: to reflect on as they're making their own decision. What
Speaker 2: would they be that are not related to be am
Speaker 2: I or or some of those more tactical elements and
Speaker 2: not attactical those tangible elements you shared with us earlier.
Speaker 1: Think about what your relationship with food was in your
Speaker 1: family when you were a child, because all sorts of
Speaker 1: issues around that will come to the surface in which
Speaker 1: we haven't touched on, but is really important. Number two
Speaker 1: is think about how important pleasure in food is for you,
Speaker 1: because a lot of people experience a huge reduction in it.
Speaker 1: Although I didn't, a lot of people do. Number three
Speaker 1: is these drugs might be significantly reducing addiction. This is
Speaker 1: hugely contested, but there are serious scientists who think they are,
Speaker 1: and that's the whole dimension when need to think about
Speaker 1: not just food addiction, but actually like cocaine addiction, ventimal
Speaker 1: addiction across the board. Those would I guess be the
Speaker 1: three things that we haven't covered that would be the
Speaker 1: things I mean, there's about one hundred things from book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, okay, great. Fifth and final question, if
Speaker 2: you could create one law that everyone in the world
Speaker 2: had to follow, what would it be?
Speaker 1: Oh, one law? Can I get rid of a law?
Speaker 2: Be the first person to do. I love it.
Speaker 1: The law I would get rid of would be the
Speaker 1: criminalization of addiction. You know a lot of addiction in
Speaker 1: my family. Punishing people we've got addiction problems makes the
Speaker 1: problem worse. Most of the money we spend on drug
Speaker 1: policy in this country is shaming, humiliating, and literally caging
Speaker 1: people with addiction problems. In Portugal, when they took all
Speaker 1: that money they spent on putting people in prison, shaming
Speaker 1: them and humiliating them, and spent it instead on like
Speaker 1: helping them, addiction massively fell. Deaths massively fell. We could
Speaker 1: do the same and we'd get the same results. So
Speaker 1: it would be I guess, take the current law on
Speaker 1: criminalizing addiction and drug use more generally and transfer all
Speaker 1: that money to helping people instead.
Speaker 2: Brilliant. You're the first person ever to get get rid.
Speaker 1: Of the law. Normally, so libertarian, but there I go.
Speaker 2: Every one. The book is called the Magic Bill, the
Speaker 2: extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs.
Speaker 2: Yohan Hari, thank you so much. Make sure you go
Speaker 2: and grab and order a copy right now. I really
Speaker 2: want this make this the book of your book clubs,
Speaker 2: the book that you're reading with your friends, your family.
Speaker 2: I think it will. As Johan said, there's so many
Speaker 2: parts of it that we didn't even get to cover.
Speaker 2: I hope you'll come back and we'll dissect it a
Speaker 2: second time. But I really believe that this book is
Speaker 2: so significantly important at this time, especially and especially for
Speaker 2: the younger generations to follow, so highly highly recommend Magic
Speaker 2: Pill that I really mean it.
Speaker 1: I feel quite emotional here you said that, thank youself.
Speaker 2: Really mean it. I think there's so many things, like
Speaker 2: you said, that we still haven't covered, and I hope
Speaker 2: you'll come back to do those anytime, because Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think this is it's it's the biggest thing right now,
Speaker 2: and especially with the way you've dived into it, when
Speaker 2: you're talking about just the amount of stigma there is
Speaker 2: from day one, and it seems to never go, like
Speaker 2: you said, even with Oprah, like whether you're here or
Speaker 2: you're here, it's like that experience of that stigma doesn't disappear.
Speaker 2: And so if you're living with that for your whole
Speaker 2: life and it was created by a system, that that
Speaker 2: needs to be addressed, and I think you're addressing it
Speaker 2: in a really deep and profound way. So thank you.
Speaker 1: I think I meant to say, my lovely publicist is
Speaker 1: in the corner, so sure taze me if I don't
Speaker 1: say this that anyone who wants to know anything more
Speaker 1: about the book can go to magic pillbook dot com
Speaker 1: than get the audiobook, which I read the e book
Speaker 1: physical book, And I think I'm meant to say you
Speaker 1: can get it from good bookshops or good bookshops, but
Speaker 1: you coul also get it from shilly book shops as well.
Speaker 1: Never understood that like a quality. So let's go order
Speaker 1: some KFC on.
Speaker 2: Weve got some for you and bring you hope buckets
Speaker 2: a k I hope that served you, you felt, I
Speaker 2: hope you felt You've got to share what you wanted
Speaker 2: to show. Thanks everyone, Thank you. If if you love
Speaker 2: this episode, you'll enjoy my conversation with Megan Trainer on
Speaker 2: breaking generational trauma and how to be confident from the
Speaker 2: inside out. My therapist told me stand in the mirror
Speaker 2: naked for five minutes. It was already tough for me
Speaker 2: to love my body, but after the C section scar
Speaker 2: with all the stretch marks. Now I'm looking at myself
Speaker 2: like I've been hacked. But day three, when I did it,
Speaker 2: I was like, you know what, her thighs are cute