What’s not to like about a silver bullet? After the excesses of Christmas—and, for some, of a lifetime—who wouldn’t want absolution of all dietary sins, and in the blink of an eye?
No more New Year’s resolutions. No self-discipline required. You can now shed those pounds without giving up on your diet of sugary foods and snacks, all thanks to the ultimate silver bullet: the weight-loss phenomenon Wegovy.
Everyone’s clamoring for Wegovy, whether it’s from their doctor or a dubious website. It’s making its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, rich beyond the wildest dreams of Croesus. It’s already the fastest-growing company in the world, and it’s in the vanguard of a whole array of pharmaceutical silver bullets that are calculated to reach annual sales of $100 billion within five years.
These silver bullets can cure anything. Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, obesity—they can fix it all. And it’s all because we’ve finally stopped fixating on insulin and are recognizing the importance of its “fellow traveler” glucagon. Insulin reduces glucose, but glucagon controls levels, and both work hand in hand to process sugars we get from eating carbs.
When the two hormones get out of kilter, we develop type 2 diabetes and possibly a host of other chronic problems, too. Diabetes, for instance, is as much a problem of too much glucagon as of too little insulin, or of insulin that can no longer do its job when it’s overwhelmed by sugars from a diet of fast and processed food.
This wonder-drug family—semaglutide, liraglutide, exenatide, dulaglutide and more—are synthetic versions of GLP-1, a molecule that regulates glucagon. In humans, GLP-1 is one of dozens of hormones released by intestinal cells after we eat, and it tells the brain we’re full.
Wegovy was a happy accident. Novo Nordisk had developed another semaglutide drug, Ozempic, to help people with type 2 diabetes, and had noticed they were losing weight.
Super-boost the dosage, Ozempic transforms into Wegovy and, hey presto, the worldwide problem of obesity is solved. Buoyed by this insight, Novo Nordisk is pressing the US drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to make it available even to obese children as young as six.
Others are joining Novo Nordisk at the money-making feast. Lilly has produced its own GLP-1 drug, tirzepatide, which is marketed as Mounjaro or Zepbound, and more, many more, are in the wings.
And they work. One study of Wegovy discovered that people were losing an average of 11.8 percent of their body weight, which translates into an average weight loss of 27 lb and about 3.5 inches off their waists. Mounjaro is even more effective; in one study, participants lost an average of 45 lb and 5.5 inches off their waistline.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if it’s sponsored by Wegovy, as our Special Report
Beyond the Weight Loss Jab explains. Users report that their weight loss plateaus, and those who aren’t disheartened throw in the towel because the injectable drugs are just so expensive, costing up to $1,400 (£1,100) a month.
Those could be the lucky ones if the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) is anything to go by. Since 2019, the agency has received 37,694 adverse event reports about semaglutide alone, and of those, 16,622 were logged as “serious,” including 505 deaths.
So, no, there’s no silver bullet that doesn’t cause splinters, nor is there such a thing as a free lunch if it includes lots of sugar. But there is a solution if you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, and its tale has parallels to the story of semaglutide.
Just as Novo Nordisk set out to control type 2 diabetes, French dietician Michel Montignac attempted to do the same through diet, particularly via carbohydrate restriction. Like the drug company’s researchers, he noticed his participants were losing weight.
Montignac may not have known about glucagon, but he did realize that calorie-counting—still the standard way to lose weight—was simplistic, and the real issue was the type of carbohydrates we were eating.
At the heart of the Montignac Method—he never liked to call it a diet—is the realization that all carbohydrates aren’t equal. Some are loaded with sugar, and some less so, although even these can become sugar time bombs if they’re fried.
The glycemic index (GI) is a blueprint of what you can eat and what you should be avoiding if you want to shed the pounds. Low-GI foods include beans, leafy vegetables, lentils, whole grains, wild rice and dark chocolate, while the sugar-loaded include corn, potatoes (especially fried), refined flour, white bread and white rice.
You’re not denying yourself, nor are you starving, as his best-selling book title Eat Yourself Slim . . . and Stay Slim suggests. And because it’s a method, it also becomes a lifestyle of good eating habits.
Montignac wasn’t the first to finger “bad” carbs as the enemy. That honor goes to English undertaker William Banting, who became so obese that he couldn’t climb the stairs. His doctor advised him to abstain from sugary and starchy carbs, and so successful was the diet that he wrote the very first weight loss book, which was published in 1863.
The low-GI diet is as close to a free lunch as we can get, and there are no nasty adverse reactions, like death. A happy low-sugar New Year!
