It's what we've weighted for

Around the world, drugs that suppress appetite are all the rage for weightloss. We've taken to them faster than any diet. Could the war on fat finally be over?

- VIR SANGHVI

Have you been on a diet lately? Have you bought a diet book? Gone to see a "weightloss consultant"? Watched a diet video? Starved yourself for 18 hours because you are on an intermittent fasting diet? If you have, then enjoy it. Revel in the fasting. Make the most of the diet. Because, 10 years from now, when you tell your children that you used to diet or try and sweat off the kilos, they will look at you with wonder and astonishment.

Because dieting is nearly dead.

In the United States, the diet industry is crashing and burning. Diet books are selling in much lower numbers. Diet clinics are going bust. And gyms are becoming places you only go to if you are lonely and need to pick somebody up.

As you may have guessed, the assassin is the new generation of weightloss drugs. If you can make yourself thin without all the nonsense about food combining, carbsacrificing and intermittent fasting, why wouldn't you grab the opportunity?

The craze for weightloss drugs has gripped the country almost instantly. The best known of these drugs, Ozempic, (Semaglutide) only hit the US market in 2021. It is manufactured by a Danish company called Novo Nordisk, which sold $876 million worth of the drug in 2022. A year later sales had reached $4.5 billion. I don't have the figures for this year but some estimates say that they are around $8 billion.

These numbers are limited by Novo Nordisk's production constraints. Otherwise they would be even higher.