This is a great read, and asks good questions. I hadn't found it already discussed. (Not that I'm good at that... she said to the moderators.) There was also a pro-vegan movie with the same name, which led to confusion. This one is about the GLP-1 drugs, and the author taking them. Published May 7, 2024.
The book is
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari, who has a background in science writing, and personal experience in overeating.
This makes him an excellent guide, always contrasting the promise of the drugs in the context of his lifelong struggle with food. His mother and grandmother were thrilled with American convenience food. That's what he grew up preferring, and eating, even though his father was a chef and was rather shouty about real food.
As he says, "We know better now." Yet, what to do with a Western world health crisis caused by Artificial Food? (My phrase.) Which is creating overwhelming numbers of people who can't stop eating this addictive substance. Like the friend he lost, too young, to the dangers of her weight problem.
Quote:
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Hannah’s death should have been a warning sign to me. As a child, I ate almost nothing but junk and processed food, but my weight only started to blow up in my late teens, when I began taking chemical antidepressants. Since then my weight had yo-yoed between being slightly underweight to quite seriously obese, with a waistline that ranged from thirty inches to forty inches.
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One poignant chapter was about the usual struggles with poor dieting advice. To me, this also highlighted how pernicious and unceasing is the action of this fake food when it comes to addicting people. With the drug, he found that the food doesn't taste as good. While his "rather tepid" enjoyment of real food, as his father wanted, did not change. Which makes for an interesting chapter in how his body treats the difference. At this point it sounds like Antabuse, and even if the food did not change, the nausea afterwards would influence a person.
He's great at explaining how this also creates increasing ripples of side effects. Also, what this tells us about addiction, and how it makes us feel and behave. As these receptors are all over the body. Seems like they work together.
We've also discovered artificial sweeteners signal a sweet taste that arrives without anything for the body to process. We know that can throw a body off their stride. And it seems, in many people, it does.
Quote:
But a decade ago, the journalist Joanna Blythman managed to get into several of the food factories that have cropped up across the Western world, in anonymous industrial parks on the edges of our cities, to see how what we eat is actually made. In her excellent book Swallow This, she describes what she found—and shows how wrong my assumption was. Once inside, she discovered that the places where our food is produced look nothing like a kitchen. They reminded her of a car plant, an oil refinery, or the missile-launching pad at the end of a James Bond film.
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Everything is stripped down to its component parts (or a replica of them), and then assembled into food. Almost nothing is what you expect it to be. If you watched the making of, say, a strawberry milkshake, you would expect at some point to see, somewhere, a strawberry, being pulped and processed. But in fact, in a typical strawberry-flavored milkshake, the flavoring alone is made up of fifty chemicals—none of which is a strawberry.
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I'm starting chapter eight, when he asks: What job was overeating doing for you? There's 14 chapters in all, so I'm about 50% done. He concludes with how Japan handled their overweight children, which he thinks shows a clear way forward.
He has an engaging style and is easy to read and understand, even the science parts. There's plenty of his own, and others', experiences with the drugs, and compare them to previous efforts.
Everyone talks about how it "turns off the food noise." The overactive appetite and the malnutrition alarms are probably combining for a truly horrible experience.
From what I've read so far, I think I was fortunate in the food timing. I ate in childhood with old school farm parents who believed "kids need good protein" and my mother tried to have meat and dairy in every meal. Unlike the author, I found something that worked, which led me to better maintenance, and an eventual goal weight that surprised me. (I think it was cotonpal who warned me that might happen
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I am sympathetic to the man's clear conveyance of his experience and why he decided to try it. He's younger, exposed to worse advice and food. While I wound up losing about 100 pounds, it took years to realize where my body wanted to be at, and how I should eat.
I've had a clue far longer. Also, I was fighting a foe that didn't have quite the expertise it has now. The deadly trifecta of meat in a bread wrapper, deep fried starch, and a sugary drink still rules too many lives.
All the more reason to take such a book seriously. It would be the one I'd give a friend if they were struggling with the same decision as the author.
He is taking the drug throughout what I've read of the book so far. There's notes and a reading list in the back.
Magic Pill: Extraordinary Benefits / Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs
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