Thomas Weber
Appearances
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Le Choy packaged Asian dinners, DiGiorno pizza, Hungryman's steakhouse meals, Marie Callender's frozen entrees. There were scientists in white coats all around, and one of the projects they were working on was finding products that Ozempic users would actually crave.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
There was a cube's high-protein brownie bite, a citrusy chicken strip that was similar in form to a mozzarella stick, and a taco with an endive leaf instead of a taco shell, which, I'll admit, was rather unsatisfying to me. Around 40% of Americans are obese, a huge market that might potentially be weaned off packaged food to some degree.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
And there's also a lot of research being done on these drugs as potential treatments for all sorts of diseases and conditions like stroke and heart disease, liver disease, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. The American packaged food industry, an over $1 trillion a year industry, is aware of the ramifications of this.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
And so what I really wanted to know is in this looming arms race between big pharma and big food, which one is going to prevail in conquering our appetites? So here's my article, read by Simon Vance. Our producer is Jack Desidoro, and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
But a couple of scientists I spoke to speculated that GLP-1 drugs may also regulate the amount of dopamine that the brain releases. And so, when it does that, the drugs make foods that have been engineered to trigger the dopamine hit less appealing. But researchers have also discovered something interesting about GLP-1s. They change the kinds of foods that people are interested in eating.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Hi, my name's Thomas Weber, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro, Zepbound. They're some of the brand names for weight loss drugs called GLP-1 agonists. In a nutshell, GLP-1s reduce people's appetites. We know they mimic the hormone that signals fullness to the brain.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
So instead of packaged, processed foods, many users tend to gravitate towards fresh fruits and vegetables. So for this week's Sunday Read, which you'll hear in a moment, I wrote about how drugs like Ozempic have the potential to disrupt, even upend, the packaged food industry.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Early one morning last August, my reporting brought me to a glassy, airy office building in the Bay Area, to the headquarters of a company called Mattson. Mattson basically invents packaged foods and pitches them to the biggest food and drink companies in the world. I passed display cases of prototypes from years past, deep-fried chocolate Twinkies,