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Last summer I decided that I didn’t want to buy a new and larger post-partum wardrobe, and so tried to lose some weight. It was utterly ghastly. I suffered from overwhelming brain fog, deafening “food noise”, and mind-numbing tedium as I weighed out all my meals. So forgive me if I sound a little jealous as I engage in one more measurement exercise: where are we exactly in the weight-loss drug revolution?
For a start, it would help to know how many people are actually taking these GLP-1 drugs. According to the pollster Gallup, over the second and third quarters of 2025, roughly one in eight Americans were active users. In other countries where wallets — and waistlines — aren’t quite as thick, that share is lower. According to the market research company Kantar, earlier last year the share of British adults using the drugs was only 4 per cent.
There’s no question that GLP-1 drugs can help you shed weight while you’re on them. And since Americans both started off as heaviest, and adopted them earliest, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that as of December 2024, they were among the biggest losers, according to figures shared with me by Leigh O’Donnell of Kantar.
Those weight losses are among users. But are they big enough to make a dent in national obesity statistics? In England the answer is no, at least up to 2024. In the US, it’s “maybe”, depending on the source, and when exactly you reckon the revolution arrived. According to Gallup, obesity has fallen markedly since 2022; the health research company Epic Research finds that it has essentially plateaued since 2020; and according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey it may have peaked in the late 2010s.
If the results aren’t more obvious, it could be because usage simply wasn’t high enough up to the point at which we have decent data. That’s probably what’s going on in England, thanks partly to its relatively restrictive drugs regime. More generally, many people don’t stick with the drugs once they start. According to one study, only around 65 per cent of Americans prescribed GLP-1 drugs between 2016 and 2023 stuck with the treatment for at least three months.
As we get more data, and as treatments become better and cheaper, I suspect that the effects of these drugs will show up in the aggregate statistics more clearly. Until then, economists have been busy studying two more areas where the GLP-1 revolution is showing up: healthcare costs, and food spending.
The first was motivated by the hope that weight-loss drugs could pay for themselves. Obesity is expensive, as it raises the risk of heart attacks and other ailments. If GLP-1 drugs cut the risk of those catastrophic events enough, then those in charge of healthcare budgets should be investing big, not balking at the high cost.
But a study of GLP-1 users between 2016 and 2023 failed to find evidence of these cost savings. If anything, healthcare spending rose, as patients had to be monitored and the drugs’ side effects managed. Admittedly, they only had five years of data, and two for the newest generation of semaglutide drugs. Still, they were sadly sceptical that the results would change dramatically, pointing out GLP-1 drug users in the wild tend to be healthier than clinical trial participants, reducing the scope for big savings.
Other studies find that GLP-1 users buy less food overall, particularly the ultra-processed sort. In Britain, it’s worth putting the magnitudes in perspective. A survey by Kantar suggested that Brits on the drugs spend roughly 2 per cent less on groceries than non-users. So if 4 per cent of adults are spending 2 per cent less, that’s a 0.08 per cent aggregate change, easily swamped by other shifts.
For individual companies, this might not be particularly soothing, particularly as GLP-1 prices plunge, new formulations reduce the side effects, and usage rises. How much they should worry depends on the effects of the drugs on taste for their products (crisp makers should face a crunch) and how diversified they are (alcohol sellers should feel anxious).
The better news for retailers is that GLP-1 users might be willing to pay more for their grub. One study found higher willingness to pay per pound of protein, to the tune of between 10 and 40 per cent, comparing users with otherwise similar non-users. And once people stop taking the drugs, their old desires return. One seems to come back stronger: former GLP-1 users see their demand for chocolate and candy 7 per cent higher than it was before the drug-taking. Perhaps, having slimmed down a bit, life tastes sweeter.
soumaya.keynes@ft.com, @SoumayaKeynes
The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes is a podcast from the FT bringing listeners a deeper understanding of the most complex global economic issues in easy-to-digest weekly episodes. Listen to new episodes every Friday on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts