If you’ve been to the movie theatre lately, your ears drums might’ve been blown by the obnoxious Ozempic ad with poor sound editing. An upbeat tune plays while the camera introduces the unwilling audience to several people who joyfully “just asked.” The ad finishes off with a voiceover urging you to ask your doctor or visit their website to find out if Ozempic is right for you.
The commercial is eerily vague. What exactly are you selling? Most know Ozempic as the diabetes medication turned weight loss miracle drug. The ad allows us to fill in the blanks for ourselves.
Annoying pharmaceutical commercials are hardly a new phenomenon. The Ozempic ad sets the stage for an even larger issue of pharmaceuticalization, the obesity epidemic and its moral implications.
Pharmaceuticalization refers to the process by which health conditions are increasingly managed through pharmaceutical drugs, often driven by the pharmaceutical industry’s interest. This trend significantly affects how we perceive and address health issues, including obesity.
While there is no doubt that excessive weight can be linked to health issues, it has been consistently proven that the body mass index (BMI), the medical criteria for obesity as a disease or as a medical descriptor, is hogwash. It does little to determine the health of an individual, and it is particularly miserable at determining health factors for women and people of colour, according to Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. It can often do more harm than good, allowing those with an average BMI to assume they are in good health and for doctors to discriminate against the health of those in the “overweight” or “obese” categories. Additionally, it shifts focus onto the individual rather than the broader and more complicated structural issues, which are the root problem. “Obesity” was first used solely as a negative descriptor for fat people long before the medical community adopted it. The medical adoption of the word dates back to the 17th century, which coincides with modern medicalization, i.e., the umbrella in which pharmaceuticalization lives, wherein parts of everyday life became medical concerns. The “obesity epidemic” that we keep hearing about wasn’t popularized until the 1990s. The popularization coincides with the skyrocketing increase in the prescription drug market and deregulation in 1995. Now that we’ve set the stage let’s get into dieting pharmaceuticals.
Diet pills were introduced as early as the 1940s, according to a medically reviewed publication by Everyday Health. They were marketed to women and were incredibly dangerous and, at
times, fatal. More options came in the 90s and the 2000s, but they were also extremely dangerous and linked to issues such as heart valve defects, strokes and cancer – they were all recalled. A weight loss drug called fenfluramine, often taken with dexfenfluramine, increased in use by 80 times between 1992 and 1996.
We’re painting a picture of the impact of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization, which are not inherently good or bad. However, when combined with the powerful pharmaceutical industry and a consumerist society, a pattern emerges where consumer demand for drugs is exploited by the industry to market and sell their products, regardless of their safety. But there’s one more piece to the puzzle: What makes consumers care? I think it’s the moral implications. Some have declared the obesity epidemic a moral panic. The term “moral panic” describes a situation where public fears and state interventions exceed the actual threat. Obese individuals are represented as “folk devils,” violating societal standards with their failures. This moral framing creates a sense of urgency and guilt, driving consumers to seek pharmaceutical solutions to fix their perceived moral shortcomings. Ironically, the moral phenomenon pads the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, as seen with diet pills and now Ozempic.
Ozempic treats obesity by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 — this hormone signals to our brain that we feel full and slows the rate at which our stomachs are emptied, effectively limiting appetite. Appetite suppression is the most significant contributor to weight loss.
Ozempic, initially approved by the FDA to treat diabetes in 2017, was later approved to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, it has been all over the media and has become a part of pop culture, with celebrities such as Elon Musk indicating that they use medication with the same active ingredient. At the cost of $900 to $1,300 a month per user, you could call it a luxury drug. Ozempic earned its manufacturing company Novo Nordisk nearly $14 billion in 2023.
Ozempic’s popularity shows how the pharmaceutical industry capitalizes on moral panics surrounding health, obesity and societal beauty standards.
The cycle of medicalization frames conditions like obesity as individual failures to be fixed by drugs, reinforcing harmful body image narratives and ignoring systemic health issues.
As drugs like Ozempic rise, we must critically evaluate the broader implications of relying on pharmaceutical solutions to address complex social and health problems.
While they may offer short-term solutions, they often overlook the long-term structural changes needed to improve public health. It’s time to challenge the narrative that thinness equals health and rethink how we approach weight, wellness and morality.
