Ozempic Didn't Cause the Problem My Book Talks About. It's Proof of It.
For decades, the message was: eat less, move more, and if you can't stick to it, that's a personal failing. Now, seemingly overnight, that message has been quietly replaced by a monthly injection. And the culture didn't just accept it — it embraced it, at a scale that's honestly hard to overstate. Some industry estimates put GLP-1 medication use at close to a quarter of U.S. households in 2026, with projections that it could reach roughly a third of households by the end of the decade. I'd treat that specific number as a directional estimate rather than gospel, but even a rough version of that trend is a seismic shift in how this country manages weight and metabolic health.
Here's what I keep coming back to: I'm not writing this to tell you GLP-1 drugs are good or bad. For plenty of people, especially those managing type 2 diabetes or serious obesity-related risk, they've been genuinely life-changing, and I'm not in a position — and wouldn't want to be — to talk anyone out of a treatment their doctor recommends.
What I am interested in is what the speed of this shift reveals. For forty years, the food and diet industry sold us low-fat everything, then portion control, then a dozen boutique diets, largely built on behavior change and willpower. Now that a drug exists that works by altering appetite at the hormonal level, the entire conversation has pivoted almost instantly — and a wave of "GLP-1-friendly" food products has shown up on shelves to meet it. Worth knowing: as of now, that labeling isn't regulated by any standard definition. It means whatever the company printing it wants it to mean.
That's the pattern We're Not Sick, We're Being Sold spends its pages on. Not "the industry is evil," but: whatever the dominant narrative is, an entire commercial ecosystem will assemble itself around it within months, whether or not the science has caught up. Low-fat had an aisle. Keto had an aisle. Now GLP-1 has an aisle. The nutrition advice underneath keeps changing. The pattern of monetizing whatever's trending doesn't.
If you're on a GLP-1 medication, or considering one, that's a conversation for you and your doctor — not for a blog post. But if you're noticing how fast an entire industry rebuilt itself around a single new drug class, and wondering what that says about how much of the last forty years of dietary advice was really "settled science" versus whatever was most profitable to sell you at the time — that's the exact question this book was written to help you ask.