They are against drugs like Ozempic because they wrongly view fatness as an identity. But we should be wary of treating drugs as the only solution to obesity.
They are against drugs like Ozempic because they wrongly view fatness as an identity. But we should be wary of treating drugs as the only solution to obesity.
W eight-loss drugs might be revolutionizing how we treat obesity. But one group is standing athwart this potential progress, yelling, “No thanks!”: the overweight.
Not all overweight people think this way, to be sure. It’s a subset who have, in recognizably left-wing fashion, adopted adiposity as an oppressed identity. While their opposition has a weak core, there are other, more legitimate reasons to be skeptical of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy — reasons that are free of leftist adulteration. For one, there are healthier, safer, and more lasting ways to lose weight.
But first, some background: The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month on the curious phenomenon of “fat activists” opposed to the possibility of weight loss. “Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,” Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), told the Journal. “It’s created an even louder public narrative that you could just solve all your problems by taking this magical drug, and if you don’t take it, well then, you deserve what you get.”
The strange reaction of the fat activists to drugs such as Ozempic is surely novel to many. The existence of fat activists may itself be news to many others. National Review readers would have gotten a taste of it late last year, when the San Francisco Department of Public Health hired Virgie Tovar as a “consultant on weight stigma and public health.” Tovar, who has written a book called You Have the Right to Remain Fat, has for many years spearheaded a public effort for fat acceptance.
But Tovar was hardly a pioneer. NAAFA, Osborn’s organization, was founded in 1969, a heady time for left-wing activism. In 1973, members of a group called the “Fat Underground” released their “Fat Liberation Manifesto,” in which they cast their cause as “allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, financial exploitation, imperialism and the like.” As good leftists, the manifesto’s authors couldn’t help but to echo a more famous tract by concluding “FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.”
As with many bad ideas, this one moved from the activist fringe to academia, in the form of “fat studies,” a self-involved, far-left, identity-based discipline (though one hesitates to use the word here) that has many counterparts throughout the ivory tower. The fat studiers had their first conference at Smith College in 2006 and now have their own publication: Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. (Sample paper: “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A study of pedagogical approaches aimed at challenging obesity discourse in post-secondary education.”)
Even as higher education faces serious pushback against leftist rot, this particular cause has proven difficult to eradicate. At Cornell University, student fees funded a group dedicated to promoting pole dancing for plus-sized dancers, among other groups. The University of Alabama’s Department of Health Promotion and Wellness encourages its staff to avoid “diet talk” around students. And a recent survey of medical schools by Speech First found that 30 percent of the institutions it investigated mandate “commitments to weight inclusivity” — that is, they downplay “weight loss as a health goal,” replace terms such as “obesity” with innocuous phrases such as “people with larger size,” and present “weight concerns as tools of oppression rather than health indicators.”
These ideas, unfortunately, do not stay on campus. Rather, they are transmitted back out into the wider world. This is how magazines such as Cosmopolitan run articles in favor of “radical fat acceptance,” and why there is such a thing as “Fatties for Palestine.” Once an identity group gains purchase on the left, the logic of intersectionality does the rest. And once an idea gains prominence on the left, the left’s power atop our culture’s commanding heights — still real, if fraying — ensures a trickle-down effect. So even if more mainstream campaigns for fat acceptance are shorn of the academic language of fat studies, they would not have existed without them.
But the essential claims of fat activists are dubious at best. BMI may be a flawed measurement, one that would classify as dangerously obese such prime physical specimens as NFL players. But dismissing that and other metrics harmfully downplays the very real problems associated with being overweight. As the Journal notes, “obesity is associated with approximately $385 billion in health spending in 2024” and “employees with obesity have seven times the medical claims costs and 11 times the indemnity claims costs of those with a healthy weight.” Associated maladies “include osteoarthritis, hyperlipidemia, . . . incontinence, asthma, psoriasis, reflux and kidney disease.” Roughly 8 percent of all medical expenditures in the U.S. are associated with treating obesity.
The very enshrinement of fatness as an identity is flawed. Yes, there are genetic and other factors that can complicate the achievement of a healthy weight. And there is a strong case — perhaps the strongest made by Make America Healthy Again types — that our government and public health establishment have transmitted dangerously wrong views on nutrition that have contributed to the obesity epidemic. To get a sense of how bad things are: It was big news at the end of last year when it was announced that the percentage of obese adults went from 46 percent in 2022 to 45.6 in 2023 — a rounding error.
It is decidedly old-fashioned to say so now — but diet and exercise can play a role in addressing this crisis. In fact, they must.
Can Ozempic and other drugs? Probably. Such medicines already got some credit for the obesity decline announced late last year. They have worked wonders for many people. But like any medicine, they have side effects. Some may yet be undiscovered.
That’s not the only reason, though, for at least some skepticism of these drugs. It would be truly unfortunate if we adopted pharmaceuticals as a wholesale solution to a problem that we ourselves have caused. Again, some people may need drugs like Ozempic. For others, however, a more enduring fix can come from within.