New appetite-suppressing drugs are booming in the West while famine claims lives in Gaza. In both cases, food is a weapon – shaped by evolution and exploited by politics
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A friend of mine shared an anecdote about a mum of his daughter’s classmate. At the school gates, dressed in leggings and trainers, she had been telling a group of parents about how rigorous and demanding her fitness bootcamp had been: early morning runs, lifting heavy kettlebells, endless burpees.
Their new regime appeared to be working, and they had visibly lost body fat. However, the same lady later let slip to my friend that the fitness programme was a fabrication and her weight loss was due to a course of appetite-suppressing injections.
Use of new weight-loss medicines such as Wegovy and Mounjaro has grown exponentially in the last year. They have spread from treating chronic obesity to being a quick-fix solution for people like busy mums wanting to drop a few dress sizes. ‘Skinny jabs’ are a technical answer to a socio-cultural issue and, while they could be an appropriate intervention in some circumstances, they do not address the root cause of the problem.
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There are two distinct but related challenges: a crisis of obesity, but also far too much stigma associated with body image. The first issue is fuelled by the ready availability of enticing foods with unnatural flavour combinations. Sugars, fats and salts are mixed in new products with little nutritional benefit. Take salted caramel, a flavour that originated in 1980s France but is now a global phenomenon.
It tastes so moreish because it addictively combines sweet and savoury notes. Popular salted caramel products range from coffee to yoghurts, Ryvita and flapjacks. Part of the solution must be more regulation of junk food and better education on healthy eating. Second, a cultural shift is needed so that people aren’t driven to self-medicate to change their shape – or if they are using drugs to manage their weight, they can do so in a way that is safe and not met with prejudice.
Throughout most of the 300,000 years of human history, we have lived in environments where resource scarcity posed great risk to life. A big appetite is an evolutionary adaptation. We eat beyond our needs to store fat to serve periods of limited food availability. We have a particular craving for sweet treats because humans are wired to seek calorie- dense foods for survival.
In stark contrast to most of our history, resource abundance is now a greater risk than resource scarcity. Hunger driving overeating is a bigger public health issue than the absolute hunger of starvation. Too much food is leading to more premature deaths than famine. Diet injections suppress appetites to stave off the hunger pangs and control our minds to work against millennia of evolution and the adaptation to overeat to survive periods of food shortage.
UNICEF recently reported that, for the first time ever at a global scale, obesity now exceeds being underweight among school-age children and adolescents. Worldwide, 188 million kids are obese and at risk of life-threatening disease.
This has been a dramatic turnaround in the last quarter century. The percentage of underweight children aged 5–19 has declined from nearly 13 per cent in 2000 to 9.2 per cent today, while obesity rates have increased from three per cent to 9.4 per cent. Obesity now exceeds underweight everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Despite this broad trend, famine is still a killer. Food insecurity is a political rather than an absolute problem – there is more than enough agricultural output to meet human needs. Indeed, reducing wastage in food consumption would permit less intensive farming methods with a lighter environmental footprint. The political causes of famine are brought into stark relief by the recent news from a UN-backed body of famine in Gaza.
Israel has systematically obstructed food entering Gaza. People living in Gaza City are experiencing starvation, destitution and death despite thousands of tonnes of supplies waiting in trucks on the border. News images have shown infants with distended stomachs and protruding bones. This is an entirely man- made disaster, and famine has become part of Israel’s genocidal approach to prosecuting its war. In a world of over-abundance, it’s a war crime to deliberately starve people to death.
Rather than pressuring Israel to end the war and allow aid, other nations favour symbolic political interventions. Airdrops of food are Keir Starmer’s answer, but they are so limited in scale that they’ve been labelled a ‘grotesque distraction’ by a coalition of aid agencies.
One hundred and sixty flights a day would be needed to deliver just one meal to each of Gaza’s 2.1 million people. Last year, the RAF undertook a total of ten airdrops.
Drawing together the growth in weight-loss injections and famine in Gaza highlights the ways in which the politics of food remains deeply contentious in a world where everyone could have a healthy diet. Solving something as simple as ensuring people eat the right food requires radical global political action.
