The absurdity of our civilization’s extreme relationship with food hit me like a runaway snowboard the other night while watching the Ozempic Olympics in between commercials advertising pizza and french fries.
The relentless marketing, alternately promoting weight-loss support and foods that lean towards making us fat, isn’t aimed at the elite winter athletes strutting their stuff on the world stage in Italy. It’s a safe bet they didn’t achieve the peak of human fitness on a diet of pizza and french fries. It’s equally doubtful they require injections of the GLP-1 class of drugs to help manage their weight.
These athletes deserve our admiration and respect, but to be fair to the rest of us, most working stiffs don’t have the time, drive or resources to devote full-time to the pursuit of extreme fitness.
No, those commercials are aimed at the couch potatoes back home, subjecting us to both temptation and a shortcut to redemption as we bear witness to these feats of human endurance.
The effects of swinging between food-culture extremes, however, reverberate through the food chain right back to the farm. There’s a cost that merits consideration, as evidenced by the food business twisting itself into a pretzel trying to understand how these drugs affect consumer demand.
First, these products cause consumers to eat less, which has companies shifting their product lines to more nutrient-dense foods. It’s also now known one of the unintended consequences of rapid weight loss is a loss of muscle.
Lately, the focus has shifted to how to support consumers in their post-GLP-1 phase as users move away from the drugs due to cost, side-effects or other reasons. Recent studies are indicating the weight they lost bounces back four times faster than weight lost through traditional diet and exercise.
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