Nibbling Gnawed

In my prime, I approached all you can eat buffets the way Edmund Hillary approached Everest, and my plate was piled nearly as high as that mountain. I’d show up at a Sizzler during off-peak hours, when the real pros are loading their trays, and go to work creating an epic bloat. Age and the glucose monitor plugged into the back of my arm have stifled my devotion to devouring. While I’ve lost my appetite for the physical toll of over-eating, like a professional athlete who longs for one more season on the field, I still have the latent desire to overgorge. For millions of Americans, the actual desire to eat, specifically to eat junk food, has been nearly erased. The proliferation of GLP-1 drugs is making people feel fuller faster, and is seemingly driving away cravings for the products big food has spent decades training us to crave. Let’s take a stroll through the supermarket with a guy who used to suffer from a sugar addiction. “He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess HoHos, without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos. We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey’s Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lay’s — they all barely registered. Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor’s happy place: the produce section.” With seven million people already on these drugs (and one assumes they were among the heaviest consumers of the foods they now avoid), you can bet food companies are taking notice. And if Ozempic users I know are any indication, the alcohol industry should be worried, too. Tomas Weber in NYT Mag (Gift Article): Will Ozempic Crush the Junk-Food Business? “Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches.” (So what does that leave? Celery?)