Since they hit the market, Ozempic and the other GLP-1 analog drugs have played up thinness as the solution to everything. What has emerged as a useful drug for people with type II diabetes and whose side effect is weight loss, through appetite modulation, has become the aspiration panacea for thinness. In a tremendously fatphobic society, who wouldn’t want to be thinner? Now it’s possible, all it takes is a few clicks.
The WHO has been talking about an obesity pandemic for years, but its definition is misleading: the WHO defines obesity as “an abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat that may be harmful to health” (WHO, 2023). And it uses BMI as a classification tool; That is, obesity is considered when the BMI is equal to or greater than 30 kg/m². In many documents, the WHO describes obesity as a risk factor for non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases or some types of cancer.
However, in other contexts, such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), it treats it as a chronic disease, with specific diagnostic codes. This ambiguity contributes to clinical and social confusion and reinforces the pathologizing view of the fat body.
What is certain is that it is not an infectious disease that spreads by contagion, and could therefore create a global pandemic. It is curious that, having had a real pandemic, Covid, five years ago, these linguistic licenses are allowed. Language is never innocent and they know that if they use terms that can scare the population, the effect is greater.
It is neither a pandemic, nor an epidemic, nor an infectious disease. None of this matters if the function is to scare the population. Another reason why unethical behavior in the fight against overweight and obesity is allowed is the great economic and commercial advantage it brings.
We must not ignore the campaign that the Novo Nordisk laboratory has carried out on television and on the tents of Spanish cities, with encouraging posters such as “obesity can kill”. And with an advertisement on television showing a fat girl, of whom we initially know nothing about her health, only that she weighs more than she “should” according to the famous BMI, and who in the end takes it for granted that she is sick, is obese, and finally “speaks without filters”.
What remains unfiltered is her fatphobia: just because she’s fat, she’s assumed to be sick. I wonder, even if they were, whether they were fat or sick with whatever, could they be forced to take drugs?
Would you see it with the same eyes if the commercial was dedicated, for example, to cancer patients? Would we see billboards with the slogan “cancer kills”? Would we stigmatize those who suffer from it? The answer is no. A lot of license is given with overweight and obesity, even though weight stigma has been proven to cause a lot of damage.
The unequal treatment of fat people causes them to stop attending doctor visits because if they have any ailment they will receive a dietary prescription. In this way he is denied the treatment that would be offered to a thin person. This, gentlemen, is medical negligence.
It does nothing, from the scientific journal The Lancethe also called for an approach away from stereotypes and weight stigma, together with medical societies and, again, with the money from the laboratory that supported the study. While recognizing that BMI was an obsolete parameter, they reclassified what was previously overweight – that is, that BMI between 25 and 29 – as clinical pre-obesity. To be more careful, they entered the word “obesity” five points earlier in the BMI.
It is striking how people insist on not abusing antibiotics to avoid resistant strains, while, on the other hand, more and more semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus) is prescribed to people without diabetes, simply because of their weight. This comes despite serious and emerging side effects already being documented, such as a rare form of blindness, known as nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION).
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded in June 2025 that there is a plausible association between the use of semaglutide and an increased risk of developing this rare form of blindness: around one in 10,000 people per year could be affected. Recent studies support this warning: for example, a large study in Denmark found that semaglutide can double the risk of NAION in patients with type 2 diabetes and even increase it up to 7 times in overweight or obese people.
Daniel Drucker, one of those responsible for the development of semaglutide – the active component of Ozempic and Wegovy – warned in an interview with this newspaper that it should not be used in people who are not overweight or obese, as its long-term effects on healthy subjects are not known. In literal terms: “If you are not overweight or obese, you absolutely should not be taking these drugs. You are taking all the risks and getting none of the benefits, that’s for sure.”
This reinforces what has been underlined by independent sources such as Verificat: neither Ozempic nor semaglutide have been evaluated as a slimming treatment in healthy people, and only the safety profiles, not the efficacy, have been studied in patients without metabolic pathology.
On the other hand, although semaglutide has a proven anorexigenic effect, this appetite suppression does not translate into learning healthy eating habits. If it is prescribed unaccompanied – without nutritional education or psychological support – it becomes a chronic treatment: the person loses weight while taking the drug, but when he stops taking it he regains the lost weight and has not acquired any sustainable routine. And the risks of muscle loss, slower metabolism, and the potential history of drug use without a clear diagnosis must be considered.
What kind of society have we built when we prefer to treat healthy people only to adapt them to an ideal of thinness, even at the cost of subjecting them to a long list of already documented side effects – nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of muscle mass, suicidal ideation, among others – typical of drugs like Ozempic? We are talking about drugs originally designed to treat type 2 diabetes, the use of which has now been extended to reach a body standard.
Transforming thinness into a medical objective, without an underlying pathology, means not only exposing healthy people to serious risks, but also transforming it into an economic privilege: only those who can afford such expensive treatments can access it.
This reinforces the idea that thinness equals status and perpetuates a body hierarchy in which fatter people are marginalized, not because of health, but because of class. Ultimately, being thin becomes a privilege that undermines bodily diversity and deepens social divisions.
FEEDING WITH SCIENCE It is a section on nutrition based on scientific evidence and knowledge verified by specialists. Eating is much more than a pleasure and a necessity: diet and eating habits are now the public health factor that can best help us prevent numerous diseases, from many types of cancer to diabetes. A team of dieticians-nutritionists will help us better understand the importance of food and dispel, thanks to science, the myths that lead us to eat badly.
