Ozempic is not just a weight-loss story anymore

Just last month, I marked my 25th year as a professional journalist, which I guess means my journalistic career is old enough to rent a car, no questions asked.

Work in the news for that long, and you’ll occasionally find yourself surprised by things you published in the past.

Like, I had all but forgotten that I had written this Time magazine cover story in 2008 : A couple things here.

One, as the cover demonstrates, journalistic sensitivity was…less than ideal then, to say the least.

And two, over a quarter-century occasionally covering obesity (both childhood and adult), that story only seemed to go in one direction: worse.

It wasn’t for lack of trying.

We put calorie counts on menus, taxed soda (well, in some places ), built workplace wellness programs, and funded a small library of diet research.

We deplored food deserts and promoted farmers’ markets.

We told people — again and again — to eat less and move more.

But the lines just kept going up.

By the CDC’s measured survey, the share of US adults with obesity did not change meaningfully between 2013 and 2023.

The age-adjusted obesity rate sat at 40.3 percent, while the age-adjusted severe obesity climbed from 7.7 percent to 9.7 percent over the same stretch.

While the question of weight in America is inextricably tied to body image and moralizing, those numbers had a deadly effect.

One demographic model estimated that obesity was associated with roughly 18 percent of deaths among Black and white Americans ages 40 to 85 between 1986 and 2006.