Name: Could weight loss jabs soon become pills? | The Global Story
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T17:03:01.000Z
Duration: 22 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

In the span of just a few short years, weight loss jabs like Wegovy and Mounjaro have become so prevalent in our culture, transforming the way we live, move and eat.

Adverbs of degree

Well, a lot of people have been wondering about my new fitness journey and what I've been doing and I've been really open about me being on GLP1s and I thought it was really important just to come out and say it.

Through the injection that everybody takes when you have a weight problem and you've tried everything and then somebody says, take this injection and you're going to be skinny.

From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C.

and today on our show, how weight loss drugs are changing our world.

Welcome to the global Story where each weekday we dive deep into one story that tells us where, where the world and America intersect.

And today I am joined by Giles Yeoh, who has a job title that I will allow him to explain himself.

I am a professor of molecular neuroendocrinology, which sounds very complex, no?

I study how the brain controls food intake and the genetics of body weight at the University of Cambridge.

These drugs have been around for a few years now and they're rather popular here in the United States.

I've seen some surveys that show about one in eight Americans are on a GLP1 and we want to understand in our episode today how these drugs have changed our world.

What do you see as the most fundamental way these drugs have changed our lives?

I think the most fundamental way these drugs have changed our lives is that for the first time we have broadly safe, we can discuss side effects in a second but broadly safe, broadly affordable to a large number of people with huge efficacy with regards to weight loss and type 2 diabetes.

I mean the weight loss we're looking now at, these drugs are anywhere between 15 and 25% depending on which flavor of drug we're talking about, which would have been mind boggling just six, seven years ago.

And actually this class of drugs, these sorts of called GLP1 drugs have actually been around for 20 years.

So for a while but if but for a large portion of their lifespan they have been once daily injections, the weight loss was in single digits.

And so you sort of saw step changes, right?

You go to the meetings, you know, you meet with the scientists, either that does that have done the basic research or work within the companies.

Now it goes from once daily to once weekly.

And so when it came out that there was a once weekly with this effect size, none of us were within the field were truly, I think, surprised.

We were not surprised by the effect of the weight loss.

We were surprised by the fact that the cultural uptake.

We go to the doctor, the doctor gives us drugs.

The vast majority of drugs, the only Advil, maybe.

But suddenly this was a drug that everybody knew.

And I think it was when I began to see TikTok videos.

And this must have been in 2020 height of COVID We were bored at home, swiping on our phone.

When I was looking, I said, oh, my God, this is a type 2 diabetes drug.

So why is there a hashtag, you know, that has to do with that?

So for me, when it actually occurred to me, this is odd, it was probably 2020 during that TikTok hashtag, follow my obsempic journey phase of it.

Well, I want to talk more about the impacts of these drugs, the ways in which they are changing our world.

But I think before we do that, Giles, it's worthwhile to.

To actually understand what these drugs are.

I mean, there's a range of them you've mentioned.

And before we talk about the cultural impact of them, can we talk about what they actually do?

If you are taking a GLP one, what will that do to your body?

And so GLP1 is actually the name of a natural hormone in our body that is produced from our gut, from our intestines.

So our intestines produce 20 different hormones, these gut hormones, two of which are relevant to our conversation today.

The first is GLP1 and the second is GYP GIP.

Now, these drugs are modified versions of one or both of these hormones.

These hormones are called incretin hormones.

They're called incretin hormones because what they do is they enhance insulin secretion when you eat food.

And so when you eat food and it passes through your gut, these hormones signal to the pancreas and enhance insulin secretion, helping you maintain blood glucose, which is why they were primarily originally used as a type 2 diabetes drug.

But most gut hormones, 18 of the 20 gut hormones, make you feel fuller, okay?

So as you eat and food goes through your gastrointestinal tract, these hormones are produced, which let your brain know how much you're eating, what you're eating, and

So GLP1 and GYP in its natural native form, that is their role.

Now, the magic power that comes that the drug companies have done to these drugs is to produce a version of these that stay in the drug in your blood for longer.

Because a natural version of these hormones that are produced from the gut only have a half life of two minutes because they're designed to be volatile, okay?

They're designed to reflect what you're currently eating.

And once that bolus of food has kind of passed through, is then designed to go back down again.

It's designed to kind of pulse your insulin and once it's taken up, the glucose to go away again.

But what these drug companies, all the drug companies, companies have done is sort of put molecular decorations on versions of these hormones.

And so what you do is when you take them, they stick around the blood for longer.

The half life of these drugs are a week to 10 days, which is why compared to two minutes.

And so they stick around for the blood for longer, which means that you're able to use them as a type 2 diabetes drugs, because for every given gram of food you eat, there's more insulin sourcing out your blood sugar.

And because they stick around the blood for longer, they go to the brain.

Your brain thinks you have eaten more food than you actually have.

I always hear people refer to this idea of silencing food noise.

One of the things that I realized the very first time I took a GLP one was that all these years I thought that thin people, those people were just had more willpower, they ate better foods, they were able to stick to it longer.

And then I realized the very first time I took the GLP one that, oh, they're not even thinking about it.

So, Giles, since these GLP1s have been introduced and really taken off in our culture, we have seen them radically reshape our world in so many ways.

And I want to talk through some of these ripple effects with you.

Perhaps we could begin with one of the most obvious effects and that is their impact on diet and weight loss culture.

How have you seen these drugs change the conversation as it relates to diet and weight loss culture?

So at the moment, the vast majority of these of these drugs are taken privately, which means that you got to be able to afford the drugs.

But diet culture tended always to be something that was discussed by the middle class people anyway.

In fact, Weight Watchers as a classic example.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Could weight loss jabs soon become pills? | The Global Story

sort

stick

diabetes

obesity