Concerns remain over successful ‘cure’ for obesity

Two months after Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk launched Wegovy — its blockbuster weight-loss drug — in Europe, demand has exploded.

Overweight Germans are desperate to get a hold of the drug, hoping to lose weight. 48-year-old Philipp Lang from Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt in Germany is one of them.

Lang has a background in investment banking and IT. He runs a family business, acting as the managing director of an illumination company in Friedrichsdorf while running restaurants in Frankfurt on the side. Lang is a busy man.

From his car, he tells EUobserver about his weight journey. Like many, Lang gained weight during the Covid pandemic, until he reached 120kg. In August 2022, he was hospitalised for psoriasis spreading out as arthritis and went through cortisone treatment, a steroid hormone that relieves pain and inflammation.

He started taking Ozempic, a diabetes drug commonly used to obtain weight-loss, to prevent gaining weight from the cortisone. When Wegovy (which contains the same active ingredient, semaglutide, in a higher concentration) was made available in Germany, he immediately took it.

“It worked well,” Lang says. Without implementing lifestyle changes, he quickly shed weight and is now at 105kg.

Ozempic and Wegovy mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 which targets parts of the brain that regulate appetite. The hormone slows down the rate of ‘gastric emptying’, which means people feel fuller and have less desire to eat. It also encourages the body to break down fat.