It’s not just you; Celebrities have become strikingly thin over the last few years. Stars like Meghan Trainor and Kelly Clarkson have dropped a visible amount of weight in the past year or two. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, the stars of Wicked and Wicked: For Good, have even sparked health concerns as their weight loss has seemed almost too drastic.
While some do not claim to have any help other than diet and exercise, a number of these celebrities have been outspoken about their use of weight loss medications like Ozempic.
It is incredibly easy for us to judge these celebrities for their bodies (especially female stars) with the justification that they are normalizing being abnormally skinny, and by consequence promoting eating disorders for impressionable teen girls.
But are these celebrities really the sole culprit of our current culture that idealizes thin female bodies? The problem may actually lie within the proliferation of Ozempic and big pharma’s profit seeking objectives.
The explosive popularity of Ozempic and other similar weight loss medications is less a celebrity driven trend than the result of aggressive pharmaceutical advertising and a healthcare system that rewards profit over equitable access to medications for people who need them.
Medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and other GLP-1 treatments contain semaglutide, which is a drug that was originally created to treat Type 2 diabetes by regulating blood sugar and appetite. While semaglutide has shown to be immensely successful in its treatment of diabetes, it’s rebrand as a weight loss drug in medications like Wegovy has caused shortages, rising costs, and ethical concerns in its use.
GLP-1 medications typically cost anywhere from $900 to $1,400 per month, with insurance coverage being minimal. This naturally means that wealthier individuals are able to access these medications more easily than those who are lower income and do not have full coverage insurance.
Prescription use of semaglutide increased more than 400% between 2021 and 2023, with most users being privately insured. Patients who are publicly insured through programs like Medicare and Medicaid often have higher rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, but they are far less likely to actually receive these drugs, raising concerns that access to the semaglutide medication is being driven by profit only.
In 2023, Novo Nordisk (the Danish pharmaceutical company responsible for creating Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus) spent over $200 million on advertising for Ozempic alone. They also spend an additional $10 million dollars every year to lobby against laws that would require semaglutide medications to be covered by Medicaid.
While medications like Ozempic are effective because they treat the part of the brain that tells us we are hungry, these drugs do nothing to address the underlying socioeconomic factors at play.
Critics argue that while pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk are able to almost infinitely capitalize off of health issues Obesity and Type 2 diabetes, in reality they do little to address the social conditions like poverty, food access, and housing instability that have been proven to contribute to the rise of obesity in America.
“It’s sad. They’re taking advantage of people’s insecurities,” said Dr. Craig Story, professor of biology at Gordon College.
In a recent interview, Dr. Story explained that body weight is controlled in the part of our brains called the hypothalamus. It controls
both the feeling of hunger and each individual’s rate of metabolism.
This complex metabolic system has control over several hormones like leptin and GLP-1, which is the hormone that is mimicked by Ozempic in order for the drug to affect our sense of hunger.
Story also discussed his apprehensions toward the obvious cultural factors driving the demand for these kinds of weight loss drugs, arguing that the desire for extreme thinness — which we are seeing more of in popular culture and being told could be physically attainable with Ozempic — is not inherently medically healthy. “It’s promoting that stereotype of needing to be super skinny.”
Big pharma only rushed to create multiple forms of GLP-1 medications when it was discovered that it caused dramatic weight loss, not when it was proven to treat Type 2 diabetes.
In a capitalist system, beauty standards and human insecurities are the perfect state of affairs to increase profit through products and services that treat infamously fluctuating female beauty ideals.
This history of companies profiting off of beauty standards is not new.
When Gillette created the first razor marketed to women in 1910, there was previously no cultural standard for women to shave their body hair. Gillette simply saw that there was a gap in the market, so they created and promoted the idea that female body hair is unattractive and/or unhygienic.
These companies don’t just take advantage of these beauty standards, they often create them. If it has been proven already that there is incredible incentive to create products catering to these arbitrary conventions, why would they not?
For-profit pharmaceutical companies today take advantage of this profit loop hole with great success. Novo Nordisk’s market value is now greater than the entire GDP of Denmark where they are headquartered.
And while celebrities are often the first subject we think of when considering where current beauty standards stem from, it is beneficial to remember that there is arguably greater reason for big corporations to be behind these subjective feminine ideals.
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