Dr. Susan Yanovski, a co-director of the office of obesity research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, warned that patients would have to be monitored for rare but serious side effects, especially as scientists still don’t know why the drugs work.
Also, why are executives deciding how our bodies work?
She faced resistance in part because some company executives were convinced that obesity resulted from a lack of willpower. One of the champions of investigating GLP-1 for weight loss, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, the current chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation and former chief scientific officer of the company, said in the video posted by the foundation that he “had to spend half a year convincing my C.E.O. that obesity is not just a lifestyle condition.”