A researcher who was involved in developing Ozempic has suggested that some people who have the weight loss injection find the resulting loss of interest in food makes life “boring”.
Professor Jens Juul Holst has found that people who use the weight loss jab for more than a year no longer get any pleasure from the foods they eat.
Despite winning the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2021 for his work developing treatments based on the GLP-1 hormone, Professor Juul Holst has now highlighted some negative effects of the drug and outlined why a lot of people stop taking it.
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He said: “What happens is that you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating, and so I think there’s a price to be paid when you do that.
“If you like food, then that pleasure is gone. The craving for food for some people is taken away when they take GLP-1 drugs.”
He added: “That may eventually be a problem, that once you’ve been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life.
“It’s just like every other drug, they don’t stay on it for many reasons. One of the reasons, as I said, is that once you have tried it and you realise you’ve lost interest in food, then that may be enough.”
He concluded: “We don’t know why people stop taking these drugs, but we know for a fact that they do stop. They do that all over the world.”
Previous research has discovered that nearly three-quarters of people who use GLP-1 drugs to treat Type 2 diabetes stop using them within two years.
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Prior studies have also found that most people tend to put back on two-thirds of weight they had previously lost when they stop taking Ozempic or Wegovy.
The FDA-approved jab whose active ingredient is semaglutide is used by the reality star Kim Kardashian and Twitter boss and investor Elon Musk.
According to the research, Ozempic is linked to lessening of addictions, such as smoking, nail biting, drinking and shopping.
