Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy:
When Americans begin taking appetite-suppressing drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, the changes extend well beyond the bathroom scale. According to new research, the medications are associated with meaningful reductions in how much households spend on food, both at the grocery store and at restaurants.
The study, published Dec. 18 in the Journal of Marketing Research, links survey data on GLP-1 receptor agonist use – a class of drugs originally developed for diabetes and now widely prescribed for weight loss – with detailed transaction records from tens of thousands of U.S. households. The result is one of the most comprehensive looks yet at how GLP-1 adoption is associated with changes in everyday food purchasing in the real world.
The headline finding is striking: Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.
Among households who continue using the medication, lower food spending persists at least a year, though the magnitude of the reduction becomes smaller over time, say co-authors, assistant professor Sylvia Hristakeva and professor Jura Liaukonyte, both in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
"The data show clear changes in food spending following adoption," Hristakeva said. "After discontinuation, the effects become smaller and harder to distinguish from pre-adoption spending patterns."
[...] The reductions were not evenly distributed across the grocery store.
Ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods – the kinds most closely associated with cravings – saw the sharpest declines. Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies. Even staples like bread, meat and eggs declined.
Only a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.
"The main pattern is a reduction in overall food purchases. Only a small number of categories show increases, and those increases are modest relative to the overall decline," Hristakeva said.
The effects extended beyond the supermarket. Spending at limited-service restaurants such as fast-food chains and coffee shops fell sharply as well.
[...] Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period. When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels – and their grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before they started, driven in part by increased spending on categories such as candy and chocolate.
That movement underscores an important limitation, the authors caution. The study cannot fully separate the biological effects of the drugs from other lifestyle changes users may make at the same time. However, evidence from clinical trials, combined with the observed reversion in spending after discontinuation, suggests appetite suppression is likely a key mechanism behind the spending changes.
Journal Reference: Hristakeva, S., Liaukonytė, J., & Feler, L. (2025). EXPRESS: The No-Hunger Games: How GLP-1 Medication Adoption is Changing Consumer Food Demand. Journal of Marketing Research, 0(ja). https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437251412834
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @07:48AM (5 children)
The food industry has been spiking dopamine-addictivity as a business model for decades. The GLP-1 drugs somewhat suppress certain cravings. And the food industry's response? Scientifically engineer addictive foods that don't rely on the suppressed neurotransmitter pathways. New addiction unlocked!
You might ask yourself: why are we fucking ourselves over so hard and so willingly? What is this drive to self-fucking that we are so glommed onto as a society?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @12:35PM
"We" aren't "They" are
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday January 04, @02:31PM
Cool story, bro. Where's the evidence?
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Sunday January 04, @04:35PM
See who created the "food pyramid" and why they made their choices.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday January 04, @05:41PM
Because it's part of this complete breakfast [miamiherald.com]. I'd also speculate that it's also much more shelf-stable [ahajournals.org], and hence shareholder-value-stable.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 04, @08:06PM
>The food industry has been spiking dopamine-addictivity as a business model for decades.
Pretty much ever since the tobacco industry got slammed in the court of public opinion and public smoking bans started happening, guess where the money behind tobacco went? Processed foods.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Sunday January 04, @08:54AM (4 children)
Fox News: Ozempic is a conspiracy by big pharma to make us eat yoghurt and fruit, become vegan, and turn gay!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @09:49AM
https://www.webmd.com/obesity/mounjaro-ozempic-wegovy-zepbound-difference [webmd.com]
There's also Tirzepatide
Higher rate of side effects though:
https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/mounjaro-ozempic-compare-3571637/ [drugs.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Sunday January 04, @05:43PM (2 children)
Well yeah, the frogs were sad [dukeupress.edu] that nobody was kissing them.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Monday January 05, @04:16AM (1 child)
Nice find, all it's missing is a positionality statement. Where did you get this link from?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday January 05, @06:50AM
I really just Googled for "Alex Jones gay frogs", skimmed the content and entered it in. I'll have to read it in more detail now :0)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 04, @09:15AM (7 children)
also works in reverse: losing weight makes you eat less.
It's almost like there's a relationship between calorie (energy) intake and excess energy storage. Who knew...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @09:40AM (6 children)
But somehow I rarely see studies where they measure the calories of the poop... 🤣
And also so many allegedly smart people keep presenting the math as: consumed calories - calories burned; but leave out the pooped out calories.
If anyone thinks there's no calories in poop, why do dung beetles collect poop...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Sunday January 04, @01:33PM (5 children)
Like many things, it gets complicated when you investigate.
Somewhere between 25% and 50% of human fæces is bacterial biomass. It's not just undigested food. In fact, if you count by number of cells, there are more (bacterial) cells living in your gut than make up your (human) body - you are, in a sense, a parasite on the bacteria that live in your gut. If they had a vote (one cell, one vote), you'd lose. Luckily the bacterial cells are smaller than the human ones.
This has a couple of consequences: measuring the remaining calories in fæces and subtracting that from the calories of your food intake does not tell you how many calories went into supporting your human body. The bacteria living in your gut use a non-trivial portion. This is also why the make-up of the population of the bacterial (and fungal) population living in your gut is important, and can affect your overall health. It turns out that you can transplant bacteria from a healthy person's gut into an unhealthy persons gut and successfully ameliorate certain medical conditions. It also means that taking antibiotics against a systemic infection also radically changes the population of bacteria in your gut: and not always in a good way. It can take years to recover a normal population.
It's even been shown that children born vaginally compared to children born by Cæsarian section have a different gut biome:
Int J Mol Sci. 2024 Jan 15;25(2):1055. doi: 10.3390/ijms25021055 -- The Impact of Cesarean Section Delivery on Intestinal Microbiota: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Perspectives—A Systematic Review [nih.gov]
You share your food with the bacteria living in your gut, and those bacteria affect your health, and also affect your weight. Lots of work has been done on this in mouse models e.g. biome transplant ameliorated weight gain after dieting in mice:
Nature, Scientific Reports: (Sci Rep 15, 15455 (2025). [nature.com]https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-99047-z) [doi.org] Fecal transplantation from humans with obesity to mice drives a selective microbial signature without impacting behavioral and metabolic health
You asked a really great and interesting question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @01:47PM (1 child)
> You share your food with the bacteria living in your gut,
As a wild ass guess, you also share the air you breathe with those bacteria. That should also be accounted for?
It's more obvious in plant metabolism, where a potted plant gains mass from the carbon in the CO2 in the air, the water you give it, while (I think) consuming only small amounts of the dirt they are potted in.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Sunday January 04, @01:59PM
As a WAG, it is correct in that some of the bacteria in your gut are not anaerobes, but 'the vast majority' are. So you share less oxygen than you might at first think.
Rosenberg, E. Diversity of bacteria within the human gut and its contribution to the functional unity of holobionts. npj Biofilms Microbiomes 10, 134 (2024). " rel="url2html-17884">https://doi.org/10.1038/s41522-024-00580-y [nature.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday January 04, @01:50PM (1 child)
Oops, cited wrong article there:
Try - BMC Microbiol. 2025 Mar 13;25(1):135. (doi: 10.1186/s12866-025-03853-4). Fecal microbiota transplantation mitigates postdieting weight regain in mice by modulating the gut-liver axis [nih.gov]
Of course, what works in mice doesn't necessarily work in humans, but they are a standard mammalian model used for research, and there is work going on on human FMT.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05, @05:46AM
Yeah, the other problem was it's harder to "standardize" poop for FDA approval. But I guess there's been progress since?
Tears ago there was "rePOOPulate"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2049-2618-1-3 [springer.com]
And frozen poop pills:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/11/355126926/frozen-poop-pills-fight-life-threatening-infections/ [npr.org]
And so: https://www.raps.org/News-and-Articles/News-Articles/2014/10/As-Frozen-Poop-Pills-Shown-to-be-Effective-in-Stud [raps.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Monday January 05, @07:24PM
You bring up some interesting points but going to the core of it I realistically assume that none of the bacteria, viruses, and phages in my body are gathering energy from any source other than the food I eat. If people are going to slavishly argue for Calories-In/Calories-Out, it's a blind spot.
Per https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.22965 [wiley.com] , poop has a slightly higher energy per gram content than sugar. Neat! Interestingly, they also measured the calories in Urine too.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Undefined on Sunday January 04, @01:56PM (8 children)
According to Google [google.com], non-high income US households spent about $1,080 percent per month on groceries (as of 2023, so this is a lowball number.) A 5.3% drop in spending works out to a positive household budget shift of about $57.
The direct cost of Wegovy per month is about $1,349.
The direct cost of Ozempic per month average out to about $425.
Other than that, they're the same drug, semaglutide.
So you certainly wouldn't want to make this decision solely on a budgetary basis. Health, sure, if the risks seem acceptable. Hopefully with the help of insurance and without an uptick in your insurance bills.
Although there's this (from uchealth.org [uchealth.org]):
...and...
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Sunday January 04, @01:57PM
arg... $1080 percent... sigh. Just $1080, thanks.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday January 04, @02:20PM (5 children)
So you save a few dollars (or whatever currency) on food but instead your medical bills or prescription drug bill go up by a significant amount. Is it subsidized by medicare if you are just "normal" fat? I assume you don't get it from them unless you are seriously, or morbidly, obese or you have diabetes-2. Add to it as soon as you stop taking the drug, you will regain all or most of the weight. Unless you sort of learned to eat better.
So considering the cost of the drug wouldn't it be better to just eat better food? I guess it doesn't have the same "magic pill effect". So better take medicine and eat crap food ...
Beyond the normal drawbacks, that more or less all medication have listen in their little pamphlet, there is a growing amount of reports that Ozempic (and the others) may be linked to various serious vision/eye problems and other issues. Also all the visual issues with Ozempic, yes you'll lose weight unless you are unlucky and is in that percentage of the population for which is does next to nothing. If you lose to much weight your skin and your entire body will start to look weird as it can't really keep up with the weight loss -- I guess that is what they call Ozempic-face where it looks like you just got rescued from some WWII deathcamp as your entire face just sinks in due to a lack of fat and muscles.
So unless I had Diabetes-2 or was morbidly obese I would stay away from it. I would rather be "normal" fat or, slightly, overweight then to take that "wonder drug".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @03:38PM
Of all of the monthly expenses, food cost is the easiest to cut.
And, if you haven't noticed, the cost of living has skyrocketed
no matter what Dear Leader's latest lie claims.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 04, @04:37PM (3 children)
Do they, though? The medical effects and costs of being fat are pretty extreme.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday January 04, @05:27PM
That was the question. If your food bill go down, but your medical bills go up. Then did you really gain much? Or are they similar or is one gain more, or less, then the other. If you don't get subsidized drugs then I'm just guessing here but I think your medical bills might go up more then you "saved" on the less food part.
Also it's not like most people that get Ozempic etc for their morbid obesity, and food bills. It seems to be more "normal" looking people that are taking them cause they believe that they are fat or that they should get even thinner and more "beautiful" or whatever it is that they are telling themselves. If they want to pay full price for it after the diabetics got their then fine. Their choice. But I doubt they'll really save much in their food bill compared to their new and never ending drug bill. Unless you want to buy off-brand Ozempic some Mexican drug cartel made in their bathtubs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday January 04, @07:58PM (1 child)
So the problem is that the medical costs of being fat are a spectrum, and it's very easy to take the benefits of overeating in the short-term (including the energy boost it can give you) thinking you can make it up later. And then you don't make it up later, because making it up later is hard.
Humans like the vast majority of animals are evolved to survive starvation. That's why we tend to get fat when we can.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05, @06:00AM
Only some humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate [wikipedia.org]
Denmark, Switzerland, France, Singapore and Japan don't have as high a percentage of obesity despite being "rich" countries.
I guess the Top 4 (Tonga etc) is genes plus cultural? https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35346493 [bbc.com]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday January 05, @07:42PM
Drug company profit is a massive part of the cost on these. Buying research grade peptides for e.g. Retatrutide would cost me under $200/month, even at the highest doses. (I'm currently spending around that for a much lower dose from a slightly-less sketchy local clinic.)