Central to the human experience is choice. We make choices, and we seek to maximize our choices. Prison punishes people by restricting their choices. Wealth is desired because it increases our choices. Health, great physical beauty, and a good reputation are also prized because of the choices they offer. Our choices define us.
However, with the power that comes from making choices comes the risk of making bad choices. Bad choices typically result in bad outcomes. These bad outcomes could be fatal, but most are merely disappointing, and they have the redeeming ability to teach us critical life lessons. We learn through our bad choices.
Standing by are those that wish for us to believe that we can’t choose, and we can’t help ourselves. Bad outcomes, they claim, are not the result of our bad choices but are the result of forces beyond our control. They do this even when such conclusions are obviously not true.
Many people and whole institutions are guilty of this. Teachers and parents often refuse to allow kids to learn from their bad choices. Justifications are offered that isolate the kids from the consequences of even their nonlethal choices. Governments offer justifications to whole populations with problems in order to harvest votes. This game is as old as humanity.
None play this game to greater effect than the pharmaceutical industry that makes a living defining disorders for which only they have the cure. They define a disease, a condition said to be outside of our control, and then sell us their cure. They define the problems, and they define it in such a way that restricts choice. The best choice, they say, is their drug.
The latest incarnation of this game is perhaps the most audacious and nonsensical, and for the drug industry, perhaps the most profitable of all time; they are now seeking to define obesity as a disease that the individual can’t control through making better choices but can be ‘cured’ by taking their drug, semaglutide.
Observe this report that recently aired on the pinnacle of mainstream news shows, 60 Minutes.
The drug in question, semaglutide, mimics a hormone that both stimulates your body to make insulin, and it produces a feeling of being full in the brain. Like insulin, it can’t be taken as a pill; it must be injected because it would simply be digested by the stomach if it was swallowed.
So, it’s an injection that was approved for use by those who have already passed the benchmark for having type 2 diabetes, which means they are already running chronically high blood sugar through consuming too many carbohydrates and too much sugar. These people are typically also obese. It has been the opinion of the medical establishment that type 2 diabetes was a metabolic disorder that resulted from too many carbohydrates and too little exercise. Some may have a genetic predisposition to it, but the trigger was too much food and too little motion. Choices were made, and type 2 diabetes was the result.
Semaglutide helps because it stimulates more insulin production, which lowers the glucose levels of a type 2 diabetic, and they tend to lose weight because they eat less.
Wait a minute, they did what? Yes, the type 2 folks lose weight because it’s easier for them to eat less. They feel full. They don’t change their diet, and they don’t get more exercise, they just eat less, and that causes them to lose weight. If you eat less, typically far fewer carbohydrates, and less fat, you will lose weight. Your body will burn off the reserves for fuel.
And so now, the race is on to get semaglutide in the hands of everyone, overweight or not, a type 2 or not, and the best way to do that is to follow the well-worn path that the pharmaceutical industry has followed many times, which is to define a behavior as a disease and then offer the drug as the cure.
No one disputes that weight comes off because of eating less food, but what is now disputed is the individual’s ability to make choices. According to the new messaging, a ‘person with obesity,’ which is the new way of saying an ‘obese person,’ can’t choose, they have a disease, and only by taking the cure, made for profit by the very same people who are clearly pulling the levers of government and science to push their narrative, can the sick be well. They will take this cure for the rest of their lives since obesity will return if they stop.
How did we get here? Where are we going? These are critical questions to ask as the American public starts down this perilous road. So many aspects of American culture, science, medicine, governmental policy, and economics are at play, and this campaign to refine obesity will reveal them all.
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