With the advent of the New Year, everybody is desperately searching for a new person, with sudden stabs of self-improvement of the sort that are popular at this time of the year after overindulging ourselves during the festive season perhaps a stint in the cross-trainer which might help. The fact remains no one goes out to dinner for health, and restaurant reviews are not the place for fitness tips. 

Events leading to the creation of Ozempic and its revolutionary impact on public health. Pharmaceutical industry has long been seeking a cure for obesity even though one that seemed unattainable until recent breakthrough in type 2 diabetes research led to the development of Ozempic, a weight loss medication that activates a harmone in the stomach called GLP-1, making people feel fuller for longer. The treatment is so effective that it is already disrupting many industries – from healthcare to fast food to fashion- and it has quichly made it creator Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, the most valuable company in Europe. But the impact of GLP-1s goes far beyond billion-dollar profits, a true long-term cure for obesity could save 40 percent of American adults from dangerous, preventable illness. As more potential benefits emerge, one question looms in the minds of investors, healthcare workers, and politicians: Are these drugs too good to be true?

Reuters, Journalist Donnellan in Off Scales illuminates the history of a medical breakthrough in diabetes that is poised to change the world, while rising difficult social questions about inequality and morality. Through original reporting and rigorous research, she forecasts the future of GLP-1s and examines the story of Ozempic, from laboratory to mass phenomenon,  revealing the accompanying social tensions and the impact on the food and beauty industries and what their explosive popularity tells us about our deals of beauty and the lengths to which people will go to become thin. Donnellan profiles the scientist whose contributions to the discovery of GLP-1 were overlooked, documents her fight for recognition while her colleagues were thrust into the limelight, and offers new insight into the ways that the food and beauty industi3es made billions while provoking unhealthy and unrealistic body image standards and accelerating the obesity crisis. She also provides first-hand accounts of several Ozempic users and the transformative effect the drug has had on their weight loss journeys.

Off the Scales in an informative and entertaining study of the unexpected consequences of finally getting what we’ve wanted for so long.

Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity by Aimee Donnellan 4^thEstate/St Martin’s Press, £30, 320 pages.