Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy • Hacker News Board

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#291

Post by garbawarb » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #191

heraldgeezer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans (and increasingly us Europeans) are pigs. The society is built to sit in a chair 8h, get in your car and drive 1h home and sit in a chair. Then repeat. Also "eating 3 meals a day" I eat 3 full meals, I blow up like a balloon. I don't get it. It's like they have to constantly eat. When I was a teen or in my 20s yes. Now in my 30s its game over. It is also the way society, public transport, cities are designe…

>> I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA? I had a business trip to Germany (from the US) and found it enlightening. We all went out to eat after work one night and a couple of the local Germans had to walk 20 minutes from the restaurant to the train station to go home and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a big deal to walk, but you'd never do that here in the US - or at…

That's not uncommon in New York either.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#292

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

jasongill wrote: post #155

tzs wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works out to something like $30-100 a month for most households. A bit disappointing for those hoping the savings on food would pay for the drug at the current drug prices.

The cash-payer (no insurance) price of GLP-1's has fallen by about 70% since I started on them 18 months ago, from around $1100/mo to $350/mo, for brand-name non-compounded (Ozempic, Zepbound, etc). Many people also stretch that 1 month supply to last longer, as well (eg "click counting"). Not to say that it's cheap, but they are no longer the high-priced drugs only for the glitterati that you may be thinking.

n=1, I pay $300/month for 2.5mg of Zepbound (tirzepatide) for cash pay direct via http://lilly.com/, shipped to my door.

(no affiliation, I just like the drug)

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#293

Post by rjdj377dhabsn » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

wtcactus wrote: post #218

rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?

I experienced the same, and no it isn’t. In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly. You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA. Seriously, for someone from Europe, some…

All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.

Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#294

Post by stewarts » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #265

Aurornis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication. GLP-1 drugs are popular in Germany, too. Not quite to the level of some other countries but a quick search shows about 1 in 12 individuals in Germany. Note that the US number quoted above was for households not individuals, so the numbers of households in Germany with at…

>I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. I had the same question and did some back of the envelope math. The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop…

I'm not sure how this math checks out.

1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Given 500 calories a day of excess, that would lead to 1lb of fat gain per week. 52 pound average gain per year?

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#295

Post by jjtheblunt » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #6

>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024. I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them…

I'm in the US and have a large friend circle across multiple states (from having moved for work over the years) and also do not know one single person using them. However my friends tend to be quite active.

The Added Sugars (that's how they are listed on labels in the US) are _insanely_ and insidiously pervasive in US food. it's truly nefarious.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#296

Post by foobarian » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

cookiengineer wrote: post #230

notdang wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... Here are some first steps: Earlier this year, Conagra started labeling some of its Healthy Choice frozen meals with high protein and fiber as "GLP-1 friendly." A spokesperson said those meals are selling faster than rival products making similar claims on their packaging. The company plans to introduce new Healthy Choice recipes with the same labeling in…

How do citizens of the US tolerate this? I'm baffled how messed up the food industry in the US has gotten over the last decades. When I was in the US I remember ordering pancakes in the morning. Those pancakes for like 10 bucks lasted for the whole week because I couldn't stuff so much in my stomach. I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil. Good luck trying to get an actual healt…

That's funny, I feel I had the opposite experience going into EU. Maybe it's regional? Anyway we were eating out a bunch around Slovenia and menus had a lot of "mixed meat" "fried cheese" type foods and servers would look at you funny if you wanted just vegetables. I got the vibe that they felt like they were letting you down if they didn't offer you their best meat so maybe it's a cultural leftover from hungrier times

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#297

Post by observationist » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

How does this pass as science?

There's no economic correction. They're making causal claims without identifying mechanisms. Self selection bias, self reporting, the people being polled are the type of people who answer polls. Massive conflicts of interest with one of the authors benefiting from the company collecting the data. They don't collect causal medical information, and cannot justify any of the causality claims they're asserting, with virtually none of the confounders able to be corrected for from the data that was collected, nor able to be trusted or validated, based on how the data was collected.

Oh, Journal of Marketing Research. The paper is the marketing, got it.

This Numerator guy on the paper is an enshittification leech doing his best to profit off of the casual corruption of science. Stuff like this should be ridiculed and torched wherever it surfaces.

All the legitimate universities and publication platforms should try having actual standards and nuke these types of submissions from orbit, but instead I'm sure they're happy to get their little chunk of clickbait revenue.

This is legitimately nuts. We can choose not to let this be how people become wealthy and degrade everything they touch.

edit: Go down the rabbit hole and look how these people grift. Companies like this are exactly and precisely why we can't have nice things.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#298

Post by paul7986 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #6

>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024. I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US. In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff. It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them…

We all drive to where we’re going we do not walk or bike daily like most Europeans do. When in Europe for my ten day trips I always come back five to ten pounds lighter.

Myself I count calories (1500 to 1800 a day for middle aged dude) and lol drive to do my daily five mile walks on a rail trail.

Foods here if ur lazy and just buy whatever indeed are lasted with preservatives but you can put some effort into ur health to maintain a European look :)

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#299

Post by tom_ » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #63

blitzar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friend circle in Germany probably doesn't have many members who were a proud big boned 5"7' 300lbs (~140kg).

For good reason. That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany. 1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078951/

The US population (~350m) is about 4 times that of Germany (~85m)...

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#300

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

aucisson_masque wrote: post #128

> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period. When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels – and their grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before they started That’s very interesting and it confirms what i thought about this drug. It’s a life long commitment. As soon as you stop, you end up becoming your old self whereas you don’t lose a…

This is more like someone who is bipolar who is functional when on meds, and goes back to being bipolar when they go off their meds. A nutrition expert cannot fix your brain chemistry, and will power is an illusion. A long term fix is needed for the GLP-1 pathway to properly regulate to the target metabolic profile. Fractyl Health is working on this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348199