You may have seen this week that Oprah was back on primetime television.
She hosted a special on Monday called “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.” Really, it was more of an infomercial for drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which millions of Americans are taking to lose weight.
Previously, I’ve gone into the various side-effects of these drugs. Ozempic, for example, can potentially cause thyroid tumors, cancer, and projectile vomiting. Maybe even more alarming is that we also don’t really understand how these drugs work. Ozempic essentially tricks the pancreas into releasing more insulin. In turn, Ozempic’s artificially created hormones, “appear to actually bind to receptors on neurons in several parts of the brain,” according to a biologists quoted last year by The Atlantic. What do these hormones do when they bind to receptors in the brain? Apparently, they reduce people’s urge not simply to eat, but also to shop, and to engage in a range of other compulsive behaviors. If that’s true, no scientist in the world has any idea why it’s happening, or what other modifications this drug might be making to the brain.
As if to prove that point, as recently as this month, the Atlantic published a follow-up piece entitled, “The Science Behind Ozempic Was Wrong.”
It all sounds very much like an elixir, a wonder-drug that can magically solve all of your problems. But if you’re the cynical type — or if you just paid any attention at all to big pharma over the past few years — you might have some questions. These are the questions that Oprah’s infomercial on Monday was intended to address. And to be fair, some of the side effects did come up; one woman in the special said that she had to stop taking one of these weight-loss drugs due to the nausea symptoms, for example.
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But by and large, this was a puff-piece that centered on a lie. It’s a lie that Oprah repeated several times, and that every television medical expert in this country repeats as well. It’s the claim that obesity is a “disease,” rather than a symptom of poor life choices. Watch:
Oprah uses this idea that obesity is a “disease” to justify “treating” it with drugs instead of diet and exercise. This is an idea that, if you listen to medical experts, is something you’re not supposed to question. As you just heard from that CBS doctor: “It’s a chronic disease! Go to the C.D.C. website! Everybody will tell you the same thing! It’s just like asthma or diabetes!” And then everyone nods around the desk.
Except, obesity is nothing like asthma or diabetes, actually. People with obesity can cure themselves. That’s true in literally every case of obesity. You can lock someone in a room and feed them 1,000 calories of fruit every day, and they will be cured with one-hundred percent certainty. All you have to do is eat a healthy diet, and you’re cured. You can’t say the same for everyone with asthma or diabetes (at least not Type 1 diabetes). And if obesity is a disease, you’d need to explain why almost nobody in the country had this “disease” in the 1930s. And why nobody in Ethiopia has it today.
There seems to be a very curious correlation here. The “disease” of obesity only takes hold in places where people eat a lot of food and don’t get a lot of exercise.
They say correlation isn’t causation, but I think in this case the causation is pretty clear. This is such an obvious, self-evident point that it made me wonder: When exactly did medical experts suddenly decide that obesity is a “disease,” and why did they do it? What definition were they using, exactly?
It turns out that the esteemed medical journal The Lancet has already answered this question. Back in 2013, the American Medical Association simply decided to arbitrarily classify obesity as a disease, even though they admitted that it didn’t meet the scientific definition of a disease.
As The Lancet notes:
A disease, by definition, needs to have characteristic symptoms and signs, and even though excess [body fat] is a characteristic sign, there are no symptoms that are unique to obesity. … The American Medical Association (AMA) applied a different approach to this conundrum in 2013. Instead of trying to determine whether obesity fits specific definitions of disease, the AMA used a utilitarian approach to determine whether the recognition of obesity as a disease would have a positive impact on the individual patient, the healthcare system, and the wider society.
In other words, they realized that obesity doesn’t meet the definition of a disease, because there are no unique symptoms that only obese people suffer from. But they just decided to call it a disease anyway, to raise awareness (otherwise known as, to sell more medications). That’s what one of the top medical journals in the world is admitting. And by the way, it wasn’t just the AMA that took this approach. The Lancet continues:
In the U.K., the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) recognised obesity as a disease in 2019. The main argument of RCP and those in favour of this recognition is that, unless obesity is defined as a disease, the funding for effective treatment options will be inadequate to stop its increasing prevalence and the health and socioeconomic costs associated with it.
This is almost too absurd to be real. But it is real. Leading medical associations all over the world decided to lie about obesity being a “disease,” and they admitted it out loud, and everyone just went along with it. We’re still seeing this today, of course, with nonsense like “Long COVID.” But with obesity, they just came out and told us they were lying. And no one saw a problem with it.
Take for example this remarkable clip from 2013, which is the year the AMA decided to just invent the idea that obesity is a disease. Watch as Charlie Rose asks the medical expert about this. You can tell Rose is a little confused as to why the AMA has suddenly made this decision out of nowhere. What “science” changed all of a sudden, Rose wanted to know, that explains why the AMA abruptly decided to label obesity as a disease?
Watch how the in-house medical expert responds:
It’s just one non-answer and non-sequitur after another. “It’s a disease because it hurts your body!” exclaims the T.V. doctor. But that’s not what a disease is. Shooting yourself in the foot would hurt your body, too. That doesn’t mean that shooting yourself in the foot is a disease.
Drowning yourself in the river will hurt your body. But when they pull your corpse out of the water they aren’t going to say, “Wow, it looks like he died from the drowning disease.” It doesn’t make sense. So when Charlie Rose puts some more mild pressure on this guy, he just says, well, the AMA overwhelmingly agrees with me. So shut up and accept the fact that obesity is a disease. Science commands it. You don’t get to ask questions.
It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The point is to medicalize the human condition and remove human agency by turning all vice into an illness. And in the process, big pharma makes a lot of money. It’s less clear why exactly anyone should take Oprah seriously concerning this topic. Back in December, Oprah disclosed that she has been taking a nonspecific weight-loss medication herself. More recently, just weeks before this primetime infomercial aired, Oprah stepped aside from her role on the board of Weight Watchers this month, claiming it could present a conflict of interest.
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In reality, the conflict is so obvious and so significant, that it completely undercuts the integrity of Oprah’s special, no matter what she does. Last year, Weight Watchers purchased a tele-health startup called Sequence that connects customers with doctors who are ready and willing to prescribe Ozempic. Weight Watchers realized that its model of preaching personal willpower and self-control was going out of style, so in a last-ditch effort to save the company, they started selling $99-a-month subscriptions to connect their customers with these weight-loss drugs. Oprah was on the board of Weight Watchers during that period.
Given that background, it’s hard to be impressed with the fact that Oprah left Weight Watchers’ board *right before* airing a special that stands to benefit both Weight Watchers and their new partners in big pharma. This would be a little like Hunter Biden suddenly leaving his extremely well-paying job on the board of a Ukrainian oil company, a few days before flying Joe Biden into Kiev on a private jet to fire the attorney general looking into the oil company. It doesn’t really look good, under any circumstances.
But the possibility that Oprah is a corrupt saleswoman isn’t really the story here. Everyone knew that already. The fact that virtually every medical expert in the country has been lying to you about obesity is the story. It’s not a disease. It’s not a chronic disorder that only some miracle drug can fix. That whole idea is a scam — one that the AMA deliberately started spreading more than a decade ago. And everything we’ve heard from the medical community since — including this transparent, cringeworthy Oprah infomercial this week — has been designed to perpetuate that scam. They want you to believe you don’t have any agency over your body or your life, so they can sell you a supply of drugs that cost $1,000 a month. Don’t fall for it.