Relying on weight loss drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro to tackle rising obesity rates would be a “societal failure”, England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty has said.
Speaking at the Medical Journalists’ Association (MJA) annual lecture last week, he acknowledged that the drugs are “transformational” for people that need them but stressed that this should only be a “very small minority”, the BBC reported.
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“Does anyone believe that the correct answer is to allow obesity to rise because of marketing — pretty aggressive marketing – of obesogenic foods to children and then stick them on GLP-1s at the age of 18,” he asked.
“If you do believe that, I would like you to explain that position, because I think it is shocking if that’s where we end up,” he added.
Whitty argued that it would be a “societal failure” if a “high proportion of the population, particularly in areas of deprivation rather than areas of affluence” relied on weight loss drugs.
“Just relying on the drugs seems to me the wrong answer,” he stressed.
Not medically acceptable
According to the BBC, he also questioned if “our answer [is] to say, ‘give up on public health’ and then just rely on drugs to get us out of a hole”.
He urged, however, that this is not a “socially acceptable” or “medically acceptable” answer because “these drugs are not benign”.
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It comes after Whitty said at the NHS Confed Expo last June that GLP-1s are “not a get out of jail free card”.
And at the same conference NHS England (NHSE) national medical director Sir Stephen Powis said that “we are at the very early stages of learning how to use these drugs” and “there is more to learn”.
Addressing obesity is “not just about the drugs, it’s around giving advice on nutrition...[and] sustaining weight loss”, among other things, he said.
And he stressed that “we certainly shouldn’t be starry eyed about them...they’re not a silver bullet”, adding that “we need to learn more about these drugs” as “we will see more problems coming through”.
