Does Natural Ozempic Exist?
I receive a lot of emails from so-called “media insight” companies offering me use of a pre-written article if I include a link to the writer’s product website. I usually laugh at these emails before I hit “delete,” but a few weeks ago, I received one with the subject line, “I am an expert nutritionist, and these grocery items work like Ozempic.” I decided I needed to write about it.
What that email tapped into was a troubling trend of promoting certain foods and dietary supplements as being “natural Ozempic.” That’s hogwash. First, no food can act as a replacement for a pharmaceutical drug. Second, if a dietary supplement did have the same actions as a pharmaceutical drug, it would have to be regulated like one. And even though the dietary supplement industry doesn’t like it when I write this, “regulation” of supplements is akin to the Wild West. And the shady corner of the industry that peddles weight loss supplements is particularly lawless.
What bothers me most about headlines like the one above is not so much that they promote the tired old trope that certain foods have magic weight-loss-producing powers, it’s that Ozempic is a drug for managing type 2 diabetes. Yes, I know that “Ozempic” is incorrectly being used as a generic term for all GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs (much like people say “Xerox” when they mean “photocopy” or “Kleenex” when they mean “facial tissue”), but these drugs have very specific effects that Greek yogurt, avocados and sweet potatoes don’t have.
Excerpted from The Seattle Times
