Her food voice became very, very quiet.
And as a career food writer and lifelong foodie, I find the silence eerie.
I know that semaglutide, also known as a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, is becoming the hottest big pharma gold rush in decades, and for good reason. there is. Often they help you lose 20% or more of your body weight. Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Saxenda, Trulicity, Mounjaro — almost all pharmaceutical companies have launched or plan to launch new products in this space.
Unlike previous weight loss drugs, These drugs, which often overpromise and often come with dangerous side effects, work in part by quieting the “wanting” mind and dulling the pleasure centers. Patients may be able to reduce their calorie consumption by up to 30%. This is mainly because diet has become less important. They don’t get much pleasure from it. That means significant weight loss. That means less diabetes and fatty liver disease, possibly fewer strokes, and a better quality of life.
Overeating and eating poorly are linked to cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, respiratory disease, arthritis, obesity, and oral disease. Lifestyle diseases are associated with 7 out of 10 deaths in Americans each year, so the risks are high and for many, the trade-off is worth it. But I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around a better quality of life without food and a lot of fun at the center of it all.
Think of all the holidays that would be gone without Thanksgiving if you weren’t interested in food. Christmas and Passover, big body blows. So what are the other universals? Birth and death and love and sex? There was food in every room. Hold up a box of chocolates and say, “I think I like you,” or say, “I’m sorry.” What if someone dies? Ask your family to bring you a casserole or melted lasagna. Food is a reward, a comfort, a promise. Cooking for someone is a completely different act of love than doing their laundry or giving them a ride to the airport. It’s not about doing solid things, it’s about giving joy. Cooking someone a meal is a way of saying, “I see you, I’m paying attention, I know your preferences.”
Cooper sat his grandparents down and urged them not to get upset that he hasn’t been cooking much these days. She craved something sweet after every meal, and she spent an hour or two having fun with her daughters, enjoying the camaraderie along with discounted appetizers and cocktails.
“Once I started cooking, I started to really challenge myself. I just look at food and go, ‘Hmm.’ I just don’t know the taste. I don’t have any desire to build anything special,” said a 26-year-old Target buyer in the Dallas area. Happy hour is different. Also grocery shopping. Food has become fuel, not pleasure.
I fear that if this type of drug becomes widespread, sensualist lotus eaters will become an endangered species, or at least an object of ridicule.
They’re the ones who crave the strange, sandy pulp of a ripe fig or the silky slip of pan-seared foie gras. These are the eaters who go wild remembering the smooth pleasure and salty pop of caviar washed down with icy astringent vodka. Their tastes are not necessarily lofty. Or munch on a platter of sticky baby back ribs on a picnic table cracked in the sun. Feeling full is just one part of the driving force behind this consumption.
In a famous poem by TS Eliot, Mr. Prufrock seemed uncomfortable measuring his life with a coffee spoon, since he also had to put a fork, a rolled up napkin, and a deep pasta bowl all in there. I cherish the little white elvers (vermicelli-like eels with faces) that Daniel Boulud served me in a delicate herbal soup at Le Cirque when I was in my twenties. Or the late-night Peking duck platter at San Francisco’s Tommy Toys in the late 1980s, whose shatter-crisp skin and pillowy bun were magic tricks that still baffle me. Or even a ham and butter baguette eaten under an umbrella in the flood waters of a humid Parisian summer.
Ancient Roman vomit has been debunked (in fact, they may not have used feathers as a regurgitation aid so they could regrow for seconds at banquets), but calories A person’s appetite for deliciousness is determined by age, regardless of food or nutrient concentration. -old. The world would be very sad if this class of drugs rewired our brains and organs to think of food as just nutrients.
What I particularly suspect is that the primacy of virtues such as temperance and abstinence;That’s probably Because I’m a marshmallow girl.
I’m not talking about midsection jiggling or my preference for jet puff products. So in the early 1970s, a Stanford University psychology professor named Walter Mischel and his lab argued that a child’s ability to delay gratification could predict future academic success, and even success in life. . To prove this, they went to Bing Nursery School, the university’s developmental psychology laboratory.
That was my nursery school, and I was a subject in Walter Mischel’s research. His experiment was conducted as follows. Give the child a marshmallow right then and there if he is willing to give him one marshmallow, or if he is willing to wait a little while for the researcher to leave the room and come back, give him two marshmallows.
About 30 percent of the participants were able to wait 15 minutes to receive a treat. I wasn’t in that 30%. I wanted marshmallow pronto.
Since this early work, Michelle’s research has taken many different directions, but she remained an avid researcher until her death in 2018, believing that the ability to quell cravings is a central component of the secret to success. He was preaching. His researchers regularly checked in, sent questionnaires to my parents, and asked them about my SAT score (my score was respectable), BMI (low), and marital status (still with my high school sweetheart). I asked him if he was married.
That’s why I don’t buy it. Planning, sourcing, cooking, and oh yeah, eating food is one of my great joys. I went to culinary school partly because my family’s hobby was a full-contact sport of “What shall we have for dinner tonight?” and I wanted an edge. I’ve been writing about food for 32 years, and I’m still fascinated by it. every. single. Day.
Again, I know I’m not a candidate for these drugs. My metabolism is thankfully fast and my relationship with food is like two old friends that I embrace anew every day.
I don’t want it to be funny or ugly. If we somehow demonize eating for the sake of absolute hedonistic pleasure, we can also talk about the deep, visceral joy of cooking, eating, and feeding and nurturing people. What do you think?
Overweight people on these drugs may have more troubled relationships with food than I do, and don’t share my concerns.
For them, there’s also the joy of being able to finish a meal without having to worry about dessert. There is joy in being thin enough to sit on the ground and enjoy a picnic with your family without having to ask anyone to help you. And because you’re not carrying all that extra weight, there’s great joy when you’re able to exercise for the first time, whether it’s taking a long walk, going on a hike, or running a race.
Art Smith, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and restaurateur The former Oprah personal chef has type 2 diabetes and has struggled with his weight all his life. He has been taking Munjaro and says he has lost 10 pounds after taking it for just one month.
“I’m a chef known for my fattening comfort foods, but I continue to eat what I want. What I feel is that my compulsive eating has stopped, and I’m happier with less.” he said in an email from a food-focused trip to Europe (he sent me a photo of the plate).
Virginia Willis is also a Beard Award-winning author and a famous Southern chef. She says she lost 65 pounds “the old-fashioned way: intake less and output more.” It took her two years, but she stayed off it for three years.
“There is no joy in food for people when food is the enemy, when food and the resulting weight are a deep pain and a source of shame and sadness,” she said, adding that food is “the thing they seek to satisfy.” “Whatever hole they are trying to fill,” he added, “is an ineffective drug.” ”
If you had to do it all over again, or would you take any of these drugs to lose weight? Not a chance. “What I often find is that the attitude this creates is not ‘I’m going to change my behavior,’ but ‘I’m taking this medicine and I’ll be cured,'” she says. “My health journey…opened up my world and helped my mind, body, and spirit. I’m not so sure a pill can do that.”
There is still no consensus on exactly how these drugs work. What we do know, says researcher and author of the study, Joan Ifland. Food addiction paralyzes the dopamine pathways in the brain that are classically associated with the ability to experience pleasure.
Some scientific studies suggest that these drugs can dampen your pursuit of many other things besides overeating, such as gambling, alcohol, and tobacco. Porn addiction and compulsive shopping. But research also shows that obese people respond differently to images of food than normal-weight people, even in brain scans. We are only beginning to understand the ways in which obese bodies differ from bodies of “normal” weight.
Still, Ifland believes we are dangerously tinkering with the fundamental drivers of human behavior. motivation.
“These drugs are trying to ram the dopamine pathway with an artificial sledgehammer. They can’t cast a shadow over someone’s life; that’s what paralyzes the dopamine pathway,” she said.
Blaneisha Cooper says she used to be an emotional eater, and says that medication has “freed up my time and stopped thinking about food.” She no longer has “food as a security blanket. Now I have to deal with the problem.”
That seems healthy. But if food is a blanket, it’s a blanket of culture, family, and relationships that I fear will come undone.
