Ozempic might be all the rage among people who want to lose weight, but wellness influencers and MAHA acolytes are raging against the antidiabetic medication. Derek investigates recent statements by RFK Jr and Calley Means and holds up their claims to the data we can all see online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition of obesity that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. | |
| Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. | |
| This is a drug that has made Novo Nordis the biggest company in Europe. | |
| It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. | |
| It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. | |
| This is always the thing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nearly everything he said right there is either false or needs further explanation. | |
| Is Novo Nordisk the largest or biggest company in Europe? | |
| By market cap, it currently is as of December 2024. | |
| But in terms of revenue, it makes roughly a tenth of what Volkswagen and Shell make per year. | |
| Total Energies is another company that makes about seven times as much revenue as Novo Nordisk. | |
| Now, how about his claim that 74% of Americans are obese and That's also false. | |
| That number pertains to the number of Americans who are overweight, which is a different category. | |
| It's also a category measured purely in America by Body Mass Index or BMI, which has major problems because it's a population-level health tool that's being applied to individual bodies, and it doesn't take into account things like muscle mass. | |
| Finally, with regards to the Danish government not recommending Ozempek, that's because the government is forcing people to look for cheaper alternative medications instead of Ozempek. | |
| reimbursement for the drug is limited to patients who cannot be treated with more affordable options. | |
| And part of that reason is also due to the supply shortage due to off-label use because it is an anti-diabetic medication. | |
| What Kennedy also doesn't go into there is the fact that Denmark's tax-funded public health care model lets the citizens have primary care, hospital care, home care, and mental health care services predominantly free due through taxation, | |
| and the entire system is organized into three administrative and the entire system is organized into three administrative levels unlike America's patchwork of confusing bureaucratic systems which have four distinct categories and vary state by state due to different legislation. | |
| Okay. | |
| Unfortunately for us, Kennedy and the other Maha accolades around him are very good at cherry-picking data and taking certain figures out of context and just steamrolling through a number of them, especially in examples like this where he's speaking in front of Congress and not really explaining the details of these very important situations when you're comparing international healthcare systems. | |
| I'm Derek Barris and this is a Conspirituality bonus episode, Why Big Wellness Hates Ozempek. | |
| As we're going to hear during this episode, some wellness influencers, especially those who are related to the Maha movement, really don't like this class of drugs that actually help people lose weight. | |
| And my feeling is they all seem to have a vested interest in weight loss supplements and programs and protocols. | |
| Plus, since they predominantly are right-leaning, they have a bootstraps mentality to weight and health overall, which doesn't really represent the reality of biology, but that's not that big of a deal to them. | |
| So I'm going to look at what one of them particularly is saying about Ozempic and just show how they create this cloud of misinformation around the drug in much the same way that Kennedy does in order to steamroll over other people. | |
| Let's dive in. | |
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