The New York Times, which I recently disdained on this site for its health coverage, published an article on November 19 about Ozempic, an excerpt of which follows:

Ozempic users…aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack…the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”

I would suggest to that Redditor that Wegovy revived his taste buds. Nitpicky?

I had been under the impression that drugs like Ozempic, aka GLP-1 agonists, block ghrelin, the hunger hormone, but I was wrong. Instead, they emulate a hormone called GLP-1, which stimulates the pancreas to release insulin and blocks the pancreas from releasing glycogen. Insulin reduces blood glucose levels and glycogen increases them, so GLP-1 agonists overall reduce blood sugar. They also slow digestion and increase the feeling of satiety.

It does not appear that AI was used to create these drugs, but they share with AI products the characteristic of their human creators not knowing how they actually work, and this aversion to ultraprocessed foods seems to be a surprise to their inventors. The NYT article is filled with quotes from patients who were delighted to realize what a strawberry, for example, really tastes like, versus the processed flavoring versions of strawberries they have had up to now. They uniformly seem pleased with the new things they were tasting and uninterested in returning to diets of Campbell Soup and Pepperidge Farms. One spontaneously volunteered, I eat a lot of kale.

That may be going too far.

Big Pharma hangs out with its friend Big Ag, and they agree that this is Not a Good Thing! Yes folks, I know this comes as a shock, but gigantic corporations really don’t want us to eat real food. So many Americans are taking these drugs that there has already been an impact on sales of ultraprocessed food, and the industry is fighting back hard. There are at least two prongs to the strategy: make new foods that taste good to people on GLP-1 agonists and make new foods that taste more like real foods.

As long as they *aren’t* real foods, that is. In order to generate extreme profits, they must be ultraprocessed foods. So how it that going?

The author tasted some of these new offerings and found them inferior to “ripe Rainier cherries” and other natural foods. He writes, The mild flavor profiles and engineered textures…were similar to existing packaged foods [sic], like Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson Grilled & Ready chicken strips.

In other words, ultraprocessed foods taste like ultraprocessed foods. Those of us trying to eat outside the industrial food system already know that not only are real foods tastier, they also slow digestion and increase satiety, and we don’t even have to give ourselves a shot every week. However, not everyone can do this on their own, so suddenly I find myself considering being in favor of a pharmaceutical. It’s not just about weight-loss; there are many chronic illness associated with eating ultraprocessed food.

Pharmaceuticals are synthetics engineered from nature for extremely high concentrations of the active substance, which allows them to have manageable dose sizes and to produce quick results, but also produces side effects. So do GLP-1 agonists have any severe side effects? Yes, though rarely: Pancreatitis, medullary thyroid cancer, acute kidney injury, and worsening diabetes-related retinopathy.

So if you can discipline yourself to eat outside the industrial food system for maybe 4-8 weeks, your body will likely make the adjustment on its own. I was astounded by how quickly I not only didn’t miss but also didn’t want all the things I stopped eating, and more important, loved my new food choices. If that’s not you though, maybe consider the drug.

The doctors will tell you you have to stay on it for your entire life. I wonder if someone came to love real food by using a GLP-1 agonist and then discontinued the drug while maintaining the healthy diet, would their new taste preferences persist?

Corporations will not be doing any research to answer that question for us.