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Future Perfect

Ozempic is not just a weight-loss story anymore<br>The real promise of GLP-1 drugs goes far beyond weight loss.

by Bryan Walsh<br>Aug 15, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC<br>Share<br>Gift

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox, covering AI and other subjects for the Future Perfect section and audio/video, and writing the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.

Just last month, I marked my 25th year as a professional journalist, which I guess means my journalistic career is old enough to rent a car, no questions asked. Work in the news for that long, and you’ll occasionally find yourself surprised by things you published in the past. Like, I had all but forgotten that I had written this Time magazine cover story in 2008:

A couple things here. One, as the cover demonstrates, journalistic sensitivity was…less than ideal then, to say the least. And two, over a quarter-century occasionally covering obesity (both childhood and adult), that story only seemed to go in one direction: worse.

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It wasn’t for lack of trying. We put calorie counts on menus, taxed soda (well, in some places), built workplace wellness programs, and funded a small library of diet research. We deplored food deserts and promoted farmers’ markets. We told people — again and again — to eat less and move more. But the lines just kept going up.

Related<br>The one thing Ozempic still can’t fix

By the CDC’s measured survey, the share of US adults with obesity did not change meaningfully between 2013 and 2023. The age-adjusted obesity rate sat at 40.3 percent, while the age-adjusted severe obesity climbed from 7.7 percent to 9.7 percent over the same stretch.

While the question of weight in America is inextricably tied to body image and moralizing, those numbers had a deadly effect. One demographic model estimated that obesity was associated with roughly 18 percent of deaths among Black and white Americans ages 40 to 85 between 1986 and 2006. From diabetes to kidney failure, heart disease to sleep apnea, obesity is the delivery system for other diseases.

Related<br>The one, big unanswered question about Ozempic

Which is what makes a Gallup report published in July so surprising. In Gallup’s self-reported height-and-weight series, the US adult obesity rate fell to 36.4 percent, down from a peak of 39.9 percent in 2022. Over roughly the same period, the share of adults who said they were currently taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss rose from 3 percent in 2024 to 11 percent in 2026 — approximately 29 million people. While this only shows correlation, not causation, and Gallup’s self-reported measure should not be compared directly with the CDC’s measured rate, the timing is suggestive to say the least.

And the weight might be the least interesting thing about these drugs.

Semaglutide — the molecule sold as Ozempic and Wegovy — was first developed and approved as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, not obesity. It was only after earlier GLP-1 drugs and diabetes trials showed substantial effects on appetite and weight that researchers deliberately tested a higher dose for obesity, resulting in Wegovy in 2021.

But as it turns out, the list of things that have been noticed happening on the side with GLP-1s has gotten so long it’s begun to eclipse the main event. The coverage of GLP-1s has barely kept up with this news, because weight loss is what made these drugs famous and what we continually obsess over. But it turns out, weight loss may not be what they’re best at.

Side effects may include…

Let’s start with sleep apnea, which, untreated, drives up blood pressure, strains the heart, and raises the risk of stroke. These are people whose breathing stops dozens of times an hour, all night, every night. Two year-long trials put 469 of them on tirzepatide — the drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound — and cut those interruptions by more than half. Roughly half the group finished the year with no...