Jessica Mathews and Alena Botros here, filling in for Allie.
Founders love to solve problems, and when you start looking into the big business of prescribing Ozempic, Wegovy, and other weight-loss drugs, you'll find a lot of things to fix. In the buzzy world of GLP-1s, as these weight-loss medications are known, there are steep price tags, frequent shortages, and soaring demand—a perfect storm for innovation, and chaos.
It’s no surprise, then, that dozens of startups—from Ro to Hims & Hers to Measured—have piled into this space and started prescribing Hollywood’s latest miracle drug. After all, Wall Street analysts are predicting as much as $100 billion in annual revenue to be made from anti-obesity medications in the next six years.
But some of these startups, it turns out, are making unproven claims in their efforts to reel in customers. As we write in a new feature for Fortune, Noom, Calibrate, and Embla tell customers they can stop taking GLP-1s and keep off the weight they’ve lost. Doctors and drug manufacturers, however, told us otherwise.
From our story:
Seven doctors who spoke with Fortune say the preponderance of medical trials so far show that generally, people who stop taking the drugs regain most of the weight they’ve lost within about a year. Fortune also spoke with five people who had stopped taking GLP-1 medications—all of whom said they started regaining the weight they had lost when they stopped taking the medications and their food cravings returned.
“There is no such thing as a ‘metabolic reset,’” says Dr. Angela Fitch, chief medical officer of Knownwell, a primary care and obesity medicine provider, and past president of the Obesity Medicine Association. Dr. Caroline Apovian, the co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, agrees: “The studies show over and over and over again,” Apovian says, that if you stop taking the medications, “you will regain the weight back.”
Research on GLP-1s is still in its early stages, whether it be what happens when you’re on the drugs, or off them. The science is far from settled—though that hasn’t stopped some companies from reassuring customers that they can take, and stop, the drugs at will.
Some of these companies have framed the issue as partly one of customer demand. When asked about the company’s marketing of Ozempic as a drug to take for a limited time, Noom emphasized that most patients don’t want to stay on the medications forever, noting research showing that “68% of people stop taking the GLP-1 by month 12 suggests a reticence to a forever medication by many. It would be difficult to stress this point enough.”
Even so, the role of startups in the proliferation of new medications—and all the potential ramifications—have not gone unnoticed. “That culture of ‘move fast and break things’—when applied to people, and people become the ‘thing’—is really dangerous,” says Ragen Chastain, a researcher, board-certified patient advocate, and author of a newsletter that explores weight science. “There is a lot of potential for harm to be done here when startup culture meets health care.”
You can read the full story here.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews and Alena Botros
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