Seriously, Can Use of GLP-1s Lower Obesity Prevalence?

The headlines won’t stop. “Obesity rates are falling and it’s almost certainly because of Ozempic,” says the Futurism banner. Vox tells us “the Ozempic effect is finally showing up in obesity data.” So can it be true that use of GLP-1s is lowering obesity prevalence?

The short answer is no. Not now. Probably not ever. These nonsensical headlines are simply evidence of how flawed the prevailing mindset about obesity really is.

Losing weight does not cure obesity. It can simply bring it under control. It’s just like lowering a person’s blood pressure. It brings hypertension under control. But it doesn’t cure it. It’s the same thing with blood sugar and diabetes.

Obesity Is a Chronic Disease

This gets back to a fundamental fact of obesity that people struggle to wrap their heads around. It is a complex, chronic disease. Not a simple matter of gaining a little weight at Thanksgiving from eating too much turkey and stuffing.

When someone who has lived with obesity for their entire life goes on an extreme binge of diet and exercise to lose an extraordinary amount of weight, they are not “curing” obesity. They are simply mimicking the Biggest Loser. And from that misadventure we know one simple truth. The condition of obesity does not go away with extreme weight loss. The excess weight returns. It is a biological fact driven by the disrupted metabolic state of obesity.

Good News, But…

Without a doubt, a steady downward trend in self-reported BMI, as documented by Gallup, is good news. It’s also good news that GLP-1s do a fine job of improving metabolic health. But it does not mean that GLP-1s are solving our problem with an excess of obesity in the population. Our friend Lee Kaplan pointed this out in a recent comment here:

“It is great to see the drop in BMI based on self-reported heights and weights, but this is not the same as a decreased prevalence of the disease of obesity.”

This is just a reminder that most of the world simply doesn’t understand the true nature of obesity and its treatment.

For further perspective, click here and here.

Seriously? photograph © Obesity Action Coalition / OAC Image Gallery

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November 2, 2025