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“Everybody looks so great,” Jimmy Kimmel told the audience while hosting the Oscars earlier this month. “Once I go searching this room, I can’t help but wonder ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’”

Ozempic is in every single place; on the cover of magazines and splashed across Recent York’s subway, it’s the topic of countless memes and jokes, and, the stories are true, coursing through the veins of everyone in Hollywood and Manhattan who can get their hands on it. If weight reduction were a faith, Ozempic could be its god, the haunting ‘Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic’ heard in its TV ad – a sinister reimagining of Pilot’s 1974 anthem Magic – its hymn. Very similar to the diet-entrenched, skinny-obsessed culture we live in, talk of Ozempic is in every single place.

Ozempic is the branded name for semaglutide, which can also be sold under the labels of Wegovy and Mounjaro amongst others. A drug used to treat type 2 diabetes, it helps regulate blood sugar levels by mimicking the motion of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). It also greatly suppresses appetite and slows the speed at which the stomach empties, which has made it an extremely popular off-label medication for those wishing to shed some kilos.

Semaglutide has garnered lots of traction over a very short time frame, a lot in order that diabetics are actually struggling to get their hands on it because of consumer demand. Kim Kardashian – ever a barometer for Western beauty standards – is rumoured to have used Ozempic to suit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress on the Met Gala. While she denies the claims, she is undeniably thinner than recent years, and because the “BBL era” is said over, it’s clear that body ideals have swung back from ‘slim-thick’ and returned to simply slim.

But really, when has slim ever not been in? Weight loss program pills and weight reduction medication are nothing latest – they’ve been around for over a century because women have all the time been pressured to adapt to restrictive beauty ideals. Ozempic could also be being hailed a “silver-bullet” weight reduction miracle, but so was fen-phen within the 80s. Until it was found that the drug could cause untreatable and infrequently fatal heart conditions. To look back over the history of food plan pills and weight reduction drugs, is to grasp the deadly pressures to be thin which have long existed in our image-obsessed culture.

“The story of dinitrophenol goes back to World War I,” explains Dr Frank Greenway, chief medical officer and professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre. Considered one of the primary weight-loss drugs, dinitrophenol was first utilized in munitions factories as an explosive but after employees who got here into contact with it were seen to drop extra pounds, within the Thirties it was sold as “antiobesity therapy”. Not long after, nevertheless, dinitrophenol was shown to be incredibly unsafe at high doses, causing blindness and neuropathy; at very high doses, got here death. By 1938, the FDA stated that it was “extremely dangerous and never fit to be eaten” and it was faraway from the market. Its presence in food plan pills within the UK is currently illegal, and is to be reclassified in 2023 as poison, such is its high toxicity.

Within the Forties, the amphetamine Benzedrine became the food plan pill of alternative. Originally sold as a decongestant, Benzedrine salts were then discovered to be powerful stimulants and when World War II got here, the military within the US, Germany, UK and Japan placed large orders of the pills to maintain soldiers occurring the battlefield. Because the war got here to an end, pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline, and French shifted focus to a distinct demographic: housewives to whom they marketed amphetamines for weight reduction. This was only the start of an amphetamine-fuelled race to thinness.

Next, within the 50s got here human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) – a hormone produced within the placenta of pregnant women – after boys with pituitary tumours weren’t going through puberty. With the intention to stimulate the technique of occurring the golden elevator to adolescence, they got HCG, and were found to lose fat and gain muscle. After that got here a study from Dr Albert T. W. Simeons which found that, if combined with a strict, low-calorie food plan, people could lose 20lbs in six weeks. “But attributable to scepticism that the HCG was effective, there have been several clinical trials that compared a food plan with saline shots with a food plan with HCG shots,” Dr Greenway explains. “It showed that each groups lost 20lbs in six weeks, and that HCG was unnecessary.” The FDA now has as a part of the label for the HCG shots that it isn’t indicated or effective for treating obesity.

In 1960, Obetrol – a formulation of amphetamine mixed salts, including methamphetamine and dextroamphetamine – was approved by the FDA to treat obesity. Evidence that demonstrated the antagonistic uncomfortable side effects of amphetamines had been steadily accumulating because of the Benzedrine salts, and it didn’t take scientists long to determine meth was incredibly harmful. By 1965, the FDA banned the inhalers completely and limited amphetamines to prescription use only. But, having been approved as a weight-loss drug, vast quantities of amphetamines like Obetrol began to be distributed by food plan doctors. Civilian use went through the roof and by 1970, 5 per cent of Americans (or roughly 9.7 million) were using some sort of prescription amphetamine, the so-called “rainbow food plan pills”.

In addition to weight reduction, many individuals were using pills like Obetrol as recreational drugs. In 1963, Andy Warhol received a prescription for Obetrol and it became his drug of alternative (Warhol was on his method to the drug store to pick up his prescription Obetrol on the morning he was shot by Valeria Solanas). By now, widespread consumption helped to light up not only how truly addictive amphetamines were, but in addition their negative health effects, like psychosis, hallucinations and death. Not that it mattered. Profits were astronomical; one shelling out food plan doctor paid $71 for 100,000 amphetamine-containing tablets and sold them for $12,000. Although not banned by the FDA, Obetrol underwent reformulations, eventually rebranding and sold as Adderall, of which has never received FDA approval for weight reduction.

Then got here 1985: the 12 months when the National Institutes for Health declared obesity to be a chronic disease and, as such, required chronic treatment. It was also the 12 months that fen-phen got here onto the market. The latter (phentermine) and the previous (fenfluramine) were shown to assist people drop extra pounds – and lots of it. But, attributable to regulations, it wasn’t alleged to be used for longer than 12 weeks; the ladies who did, developed cases of heart valve abnormalities. As a consequence of the way in which by which serotonin was affecting the body, it was suspected that fenfluramine was responsible, and unsurprisingly, this led to it being taken off the market. In 1999, American Home Products (now Wyeth) agreed to pay as much as $3.75 billion to settle the various lawsuits the drug faced within the USA, in what was believed to be the most important legal settlement ever against a pharmaceutical company on the time. It’s estimated that Wyeth has since spent $10 billion in total damages.

1999 brought the following iteration of a weight-loss drug: orlistat, often sold under the brand Xenical. Though understood to be protected – and remains to be FDA-approved – Xenical inhibits the digestion of fat, resulting in 30 percent of the fat within the food plan passing out within the stool as oil. “People can develop anal leakage, pass oil once they think it’s air, and sometimes lose control of their bowels,” explains Dr Greenway. “This isn’t dangerous, but it may well be very socially embarrassing. While orlistat is approved for youngsters and adolescents, obese children are stigmatised, and in the event that they have faecal accidents, it just makes the stigmatisation worse and so it hasn’t been prescribed much.”

Within the 00s got here lorcaserin, which was marketed under the brand name Belviq. It was approved by the FDA in 2012, but inside a mere eight years, the FDA requested that its manufacturer voluntarily withdraw the drug from the US market because “a security clinical trial showed an increased occurrence of cancer”. And now we now have semaglutide, alongside a spread of weight reduction jabs available from the high street. 

The long-term effects of semaglutide are as yet unknown, particularly in relation to weight-loss purposes, although the history of weight-loss drugs counsels extreme caution. But its rapid rise in popularity says loads about where we as a culture are straight away in relation to attitudes around weight. Thin is purportedly “in again”, but given society’s rapid embrace of a size-zero aesthetic and our repeated willingness to try weight-loss drugs, did coveting thinness ever really go away? Despite the body positivity movement from the previous couple of years, there remains to be an extended method to go before we move past the fatphobia that’s so pervasive in our obesogenic lives. In Recent York Magazine’s cover story about Ozempic, Aubrey Gordon is quoted as saying that the hype across the drug boils all the way down to: “Can we finally be rid of fat people? Can we finally stop having fat people around so I don’t have to take a look at them anymore?”