Long before Kim Kardashian got people whispering about Ozempic at the 2022 Met Gala, STAT’s pharma and health reporters were tracking the rise of diabetes drugs that had a side effect of weight loss. We knew these so-called GLP-1 drugs were poised to become behemoths, altering societal views of illness and health as profoundly as Prozac did in the 1980s.
That’s why we began “The Obesity Revolution,” a multiplatform series that reveals how a new generation of weight loss drugs is transforming patients’ lives — and also dividing experts, warping the health care system, and spurring the biggest business battle in years. Many outlets have treated the new drugs as a wellness fad or profit play. STAT has reported more comprehensively than any other newsroom on these drugs’ wide-ranging implications. We used multiple mediums and tools to explore this revolution, including documentary video, database building, regular discussions on STAT’s “Readout Loud” podcast and outside media programs, live events featuring patient stories and expert debates, TikTok, and other social media — as well as sensitive, visually consistent art direction that avoided any mockery or visual cliches like scales or tape measures.
One of our driving themes was to hold pharma companies to account for aggressive attempts to shape attitudes toward obesity and their anti-obesity products. We probed a gigantic dataset — 13 million files, too big for Excel — and found that Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, spent $11 million on meals and travel for thousands of doctors in 2022. (This story ran five months before a similar Reuters article.)
We were the first to report data on the huge amounts the new drugs are costing insurers and how they’re pressuring patients and doctors to forgo prescriptions.
We spoke to more than two dozen researchers and reviewed 60 scientific studies, some not yet published, to report a delightful article and embedded video on the science of craving. This package explained that GLP-1 drugs act on the brain as well as the gut, and presented the first reporting on preclinical research using the drugs to treat opioid addiction.
To bring us to the heart of the matter, we spent weeks with a 9-year-old girl who epitomizes the difficulties of the obesity crisis. We showed that society is at risk of trying to medicate its way out of a multifaceted epidemic.
The series, which began with a definitive introduction to the GLP-1 drugs, included more than 20 other entries, such as a unique tracker of nearly 100 obesity drugs in development; a mini-documentary video about the quixotic and sometimes dark history of the body mass index; and the story of Svetlana Mojsov, a chemist who was excluded from recognition for her GLP-1 discoveries while her male colleagues received major awards. She later won her first major prize.
The concluding article in the series leaped ahead to the next stage of the obesity revolution, reporting exclusive details on how pharma plans to try to eliminate obesity altogether.
