Published February 23, 2025
Ozempic has hit a strange cultural nerve. At the 2023 Academy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel joked that “everybody looks so great. When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder, ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’” The audience laughed nervously. As with liposuction or Botox or anything that suggests a lack of unmediated beauty, Hollywood is skittish about admitting its affinity for the diabetes-turned-weight-loss drug.
Ozempic, one of a few brand-name variations of a class of medications known as GLP-1 agonists, has become a shorthand term for them all; I’ll be using it in that vein here. Few newly trim—or even shockingly thin—stars have admitted to taking Ozempic; comedian and actress Amy Schumer recently slammed her fellow celebrities for denying it. In a curious example of “authenticity culture” devouring itself, Schumer saw fit to demand that a group of professional pretenders confess to slimming down via artificial means. The subterfuge can go only so far; new Ozempic-related cosmetic procedures have become commonplace among California’s plastic surgeons; apparently swift weight loss comes with its own aesthetic problems.
The Trump White House is also at odds. Elon Musk celebrated the “miracle drug” on Christmas Day, dubbing himself “Ozempic Santa” in an X post showcasing his weight loss. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to run Medicare and Medicaid, has long been sponsored by drugmaker Novo Nordisk to promote Ozempic on his talk show. The newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., meanwhile, has repeatedly slammed Novo Nordisk. He recently claimed that the company is “counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we are so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” noting that Novo Nordisk does not market the medicine in its home country of Denmark.
Kennedy’s opposition to Ozempic is of a piece with his general views on pharma: he insists that drug companies conspire with the government to undermine American health with the aim of selling fraudulent “fixes.” In an October post on X, he accused the Food and Drug Administration of waging a “war on public health” that “includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” Ozempic, with its side effects of nausea and gastrointestinal distress, is a poor substitute for healthy habits, so this thinking goes.
This divide in the Trump administration is reflected by Americans more broadly. A recent AP-NORC poll showed that 61 percent believe it is a “very or somewhat” bad thing for adults to take GLP-1 agonists to lose weight, at least if they are not obese or suffering from a weight-related health condition. Only 54 percent believe it is a “very or somewhat good” idea for those with obesity or weight-related health problems to take the drug for weight loss.
This raises an obvious question: Why? Why wouldn’t virtually all Americans—over 42 percent of whom qualify as obese—welcome a drug that has been shown to help people lose up to 20 percent of their body weight? And why should celebrities be ashamed to admit that they have taken this highly popular medication?
The actress Mindy Kaling, for example, appears to have lost significant weight in recent years—but she studiously avoids addressing claims that she has taken Ozempic, emphasizing instead her strict workout schedule. Physical discipline is to be admired; pharmaceutical weight loss might be seen as an admission of failure or weakness. Hollywood might be shy about its drug-induced weight loss because it suggests an easy way out.
The idea of losing weight with Ozempic might also cut against a sense that beauty ought to be natural, the result of good genes or good living, rather than acquired through extraordinary technology or artifice. There seems to be a growing suspicion of modern cosmetics and cosmetic treatments that are too transformative; Kylie Jenner famously confessed to getting lip injections after lying about it for years. Or perhaps it’s a class issue; Ozempic is expensive and not covered by many insurance policies, at least when used for weight loss rather than diabetes.
The introduction of GLP-1 agonists for weight loss also coincided with a distinct shift in American attitudes around “diet culture.” With the rise of “fat activism,” admitting a desire to lose weight became somewhat socially awkward. A 2023 YouGov poll found that 55 percent of US. adults believe it is possible for someone to be very overweight and still be healthy; a decade earlier, in 2012, only 23 percent of U.S. adults believed that to be true, according to an AP-NORC poll. Most Americans today believe that obese people face discrimination in the job market, health care, and many other settings. And a majority attribute obesity to factors like the food industry, the environment, and genetics, in addition to personal lifestyle choices.
One prominent activist against “weight-based discrimination and anti-fat bias,” Virgie Tovar, titled an April 2024 entry in her Substack newsletter “The Ozempocalypse.” Tovar, who was recently featured in a Hulu documentary on Ozempic, is a consultant for the San Francisco Department of Public Health as well as the author of the 2018 book You Have the Right to Remain Fat. Describing the “culture-wide party being thrown for GLP-1s,” Tovar writes, “It’s alarming. It’s terrifying. It’s eugenics.” She goes on: “a group of people with power have decided that a certain quality possessed by a more marginalized group of people does not meet their standard and seek to erase that quality.”
In a 2019 essay for the leftist magazine Ravishly, Tovar cited a document known as the “Fat Liberation Manifesto,” first published in 1973 by Judy Freespirit and Sara Fishman, members of a radical group known as the Fat Underground. It insists that the struggles faced by fat people are “allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, financial exploitation, imperialism and the like.” Freespirit and Fishman “repudiate the mystified ‘science’” claiming that fat people are unfit, and reject the “commercial and sexist interests . . . selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, . . . ridicule.” Most notably, their manifesto says this:
We single out as our special enemies the so-called “reducing” industries. These include diet clubs, reducing salons, fat farms, diet doctors, diet books, diet foods and food supplements, surgical procedures, appetite suppressants, drugs and gadgetry such as wraps and “reducing machines.”
We demand that they take responsibility for their false claims, acknowledge that their products are harmful to the public health, and publish long-term studies proving any statistical efficacy of their products. We make this demand knowing that over 99 percent of all weight loss programs, when evaluated over a five-year period, fail utterly, and also knowing the extreme proven harmfulness of frequent large changes in weight.
Weight-loss products are intrinsically harmful, this line of thinking goes. They yield nothing but disappointment and worsened well-being via yo-yo dieting. They benefit predatory profiteers at the expense of vulnerable people. Fat people are arbitrarily made to feel less worthy, then drawn into a lifetime of harmful physical and emotional regimens. For fat liberationists, appetite suppressants such as Ozempic are among their “special enemies.” “Fat people of the world, unite!” Freespirit and Fishman proclaim, “you have nothing to lose.”
These ideas gained traction in the decades since the manifesto’s publication; “fat activists” point to public figures like Oprah Winfrey, who has famously struggled with yo-yo dieting, to show that fad diets or even surgical weight-loss procedures don’t offer lasting solutions— and that weight virtually always creeps back. The harms of inevitable, significant weight gain, they insist, are intrinsic to products that promise significant weight loss. The ultimate beneficiaries of formulaic weight-loss systems are those running the weight-loss industry, not those they recruit for weight loss—often through abuse and shame.
Aubrey Gordon—author, self-described fat person, and co-host of the popular Maintenance Phase podcast, which seeks to break down the “wellness-industrial complex”—seems to concur. As she stated in in an October 2023 episode:
I just want people to understand the stakes of this as a fat person are, “I feel like I don’t belong in the world.” When people talk about how great it’s going to be when I’m not around, that’s not me being too sensitive, that’s not fat people taking it too hard, that’s you saying plainly, “Everything will be better when you’re gone.” And then, fat people like taking that message, that’s horrible.
Gordon and her co-host, Michael Hobbes, debunk diet after diet on the show, often lamenting the idea that obesity should be considered a special health category, much less a disease. Gordon rejects the idea that fatness somehow diminishes physical attractiveness: “Impossibly beautiful fat women like Lizzo, Aidy Bryant, Queen Latifah, and Beth Ditto [have] long since shown us the power of fat beauty.”
Activists like Tovar and Gordon believe not only that fat people constitute a marginalized group that is routinely mistreated and made to feel unwanted or worthless, but that drugs like Ozempic constitute a tool of eugenics—or as Tovar insists, genocide.
Today’s activists often take things farther than the “Fat Liberation Manifesto” authors, who did not claim “fatness” as intrinsic to their identity or personhood in the way Tovar or Gordon do. The latter present fatness as an immutable characteristic, one that is being targeted for elimination through a program of eugenics. This approach has yielded some tangible policy results; in 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed a bill into law making it illegal to discriminate based on height or weight.
Gordon also points out that drugs like Ozempic seem to work only up to a point; once a certain percentage of body weight is lost, the appetite-suppressant effects taper off. They are therefore unlikely to make very obese people particularly thin. She argues that, despite this limitation, the perception that her obesity is her fault will only grow with the popularity of these drugs.
This type of fat activism appears to be in a moment of cultural decline. But it is interesting to observe the ways in which it overlaps with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s program of getting Americans more in touch with the natural rhythms of their bodies, and of rejecting establishment or Big Pharma approaches to managing health. The overlapping sensibilities between Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement and fat liberation also reflect a culture of suspicion toward health authorities—from Big Pharma to former chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become something of a lightning rod in debates about public health.
It’s unclear so far what, if any, decisive or long-term impact Ozempic might have on American health. But the contours of the debate are revealing.
Devorah Goldman is a fellow in EPPC’s Program in Bioethics and American Democracy. Her work focuses primarily on medical policy, culture, and public bioethics.
