Did you take Ozempic?” entertainer Barbra Streisand asked actor Melissa McCarthy, on an Instagram post, now deleted, revealing two things about the world we live in (besides her boomer self still figuring out the tiresome everyone-sees-everything nature of social media). Her comment, in late April, revealed that a) irrespective of body-positive movements “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” as model Kate Moss said once, and that b) Ozempic, a drug used to treat diabetes for 18 years, is now being prescribed for weight loss. Several celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk, have spoken about taking meds to lose weight (not just Ozempic).
It is in this context, and in a world that’s getting fatter — 1 billion people lived with obesity in 2022 as per a Lancet study — that Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, has been researched and written. Writer-journalist Johann Hari has this way of bringing out a book on an idea whose time has arrived. But it’s not just his timing that’s right — share prices of companies developing drugs to curb obesity are rising — it’s also his style of looking at both the big and the little picture. “This is a mass experiment, carried out on millions of people, and I am one of the guinea pigs,” he says on page 20.
