Obesity, or obesity, has tripled worldwide since 1975 and the World Health Organization estimates that 1 billion people will be affected by 2030.
– We have an epidemic of obesity that reaches every country in the world, says Francesco Branca, head of the department for nutrition and food safety at WHO, to the Foreign Office.
Anders Hansen, who is a senior physician in psychiatry, believes that obesity and overweight are largely due to genes that give people a strong desire for calories. Our biology and our brains are “rigged to put food in us”, which makes it extremely difficult to lose weight.
– Body weight is very genetically controlled. This means that some people from birth have genetics that mean they are extra good at defending themselves against starvation, and they easily put on the pounds in our world. So when we place the entire responsibility for weight loss on the individual, it is not only naive, it is also deeply unfair.
Anders Hansen predicts that two billion people will take diet pills within ten years.
– One billion due to obesity and the other half for purely cosmetic reasons. I think this could be a medical revolution, almost on par with antibiotics.
The criticism: The pharmaceutical companies must save us
Common to the attention-grabbing drugs, such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, is that they suppress hunger. But there is also criticism that medicine would be the solution to the obesity epidemic.
British The Times columnist Alice Thomson wrote one attention-grabbing chronicle about how “Fast food companies have made us fat for 50 years and now pharmaceutical companies are going to save us”. She wants to see more preventative measures, especially for children.
– How do you teach people to eat healthily and get access to better food and less processed food? I think we have to deal with it before we start medicating the whole country for obesity, she says in the Foreign Office.