alt Hacker NewsOzempic is changing the foods Americans buy
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Yet they seem to be spending more in restaurants:
> Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out.
> ..In casual dining establishments, they spend 25% more than non-GLP-1 households do, the market researcher says. Data firm Numerator shares similar findings, noting that while GLP-1 users report eating out less and cooking at home more, their spending says otherwise: “Verified purchase data reveals that their fast-food buy rate is up 2%.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-02/ozempic-g... (archive: https://archive.ph/V6Erv)
The best news was this:
> Ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods – the kinds most closely associated with cravings – saw the sharpest declines. Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies.
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period.
This isn't always the patient's choice—my insurance/PBM (CVS Caremark) dropped coverage for the GLP-1 that I was taking (Zepbound) and had several rounds of prior-authorization shenanigans over a few months before they approved the previous-generation GLP-1, Wegovy. Now I've had to start the ramp-up of a different medication again, which hurt and stalled progress. Evil.
> “The data show clear changes in food spending following adoption,” Hristakeva said. “After discontinuation, the effects become smaller and harder to distinguish from pre-adoption spending patterns.”
It's interesting that overall spending doesn't decrease that much in the end, although shifting from snacks to fruit is the kind of change health advocates have always wanted?
> a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.
Interesting. Wonder what it is about yogurt and ozempic users. Probiotics?
I'm confused by the language...
Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.
A household doesn't take Ozempic, a person does. Are they implying that if everybody in the household takes Ozempic, as a group they see a 5% reduction? Or, any one person in the household causes a 5% reduction for the group? The average household in the US is 2.5 people...
To clarify the headline, this is the effect for households that use a GLP-1, not the country overall.
> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.
>The share of U.S. households reporting at least one user rose from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024.
I was wondering how you could get such a high impact overall. But it seems one in 6 households are on GLP-1 drugs in the US.
In my friend circle in Germany I don't even know one single person on this stuff.
It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.
I do think this could only be temporary victory over the food industry by the pharmacology industry. It's only a matter of time until food additives or varieties are discovered that partially ameliorate the effects of ozempic.
The title snippet here is potentially misleading. From the paper:
> Households with at least one GLP-1 user reduce grocery spending by 5.3% within six months of adoption,
The reduction is only within those households using GLP-1 drugs, NOT across the US as a whole. Same for the other claims in the paper.
(That still suggests that these drugs are responsible for a 0.8% drop in total grocery spending in the US, which is remarkable.)
My initial question was whether this 5% was overall or just for households with someone using ozempic.
It looks like it’s just for users, not across the board.
For those that really need to lose weight I think these drugs are likely hugely beneficial. Obesity has so many downsides and is a huge net drain on healthcare systems.
In terms of long term effects the only medical study I saw that concerned me was done on rats and showed a decrease specifically in the muscles of the heart. This was taking into account general weight loss and appetite suppression (which might more generally affect muscle mass). Not hugely concerning for the obese that might see massive benefits but for those who are already a healthy weight and taking it to get 6 pack abs it might be something to consider.
In other news, water is wet. More at 11.
Is anyone surprised that hunger-affecting drugs used on a large scale are causing changes in consumer habits?
One might want to consider inflation in the balance...
It's not just GLP-1 type drugs.
My grocery spending has fallen significantly since I started ADHD medication. Both lisdexamfetamine and methylphenidate absolutely zeroed my appetite. When I walk around a grocery store I'm no longer tempted by anything I didn't actively go in to buy. This is a huge shift from my pre-medication days.
How does this pass as science?
There's no economic correction. They're making causal claims without identifying mechanisms. Self selection bias, self reporting, the people being polled are the type of people who answer polls. Massive conflicts of interest with one of the authors benefiting from the company collecting the data. They don't collect causal medical information, and cannot justify any of the causality claims they're asserting, with virtually none of the confounders able to be corrected for from the data that was collected, nor able to be trusted or validated, based on how the data was collected.
Oh, Journal of Marketing Research. The paper is the marketing, got it.
This Numerator guy on the paper is an enshittification leech doing his best to profit off of the casual corruption of science. Stuff like this should be ridiculed and torched wherever it surfaces.
All the legitimate universities and publication platforms should try having actual standards and nuke these types of submissions from orbit, but instead I'm sure they're happy to get their little chunk of clickbait revenue.
This is legitimately nuts. We can choose not to let this be how people become wealthy and degrade everything they touch.
edit: Go down the rabbit hole and look how these people grift. Companies like this are exactly and precisely why we can't have nice things.
I wonder how much the 2026 SNAP food stamp item rule changes will move this needle further, with several states using new federal waivers to restrict "junk food" items like soda, candy, energy drinks, or prepared desserts?
I thought it was interesting to see this around late 2023. Walmart had said the noticed a reduction in cart spend by those filling GLP1 prescriptions at their pharmacy.
This is wild. 5.3% isn't a small amount, at least not for US consumers.
All economies have deep and sometimes non-obvious dependencies. I'm interested in what happens next.
Will food stores lay off workers? Will they change their mix of offerings? Where is the new equilibrium going to be?
As an example from the piece:
> Only a handful of categories showed increases. Yogurt rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks.
Will the unit prices of these products go up to compensate for the losses in savory snacks?
This is why if we can get them down to ~$50 I think they are clearly +ROI just on the individual level.
I snack, drink less, and feel like eating out significantly less. Or when I do those things, I eat the take-out meal over multiple-meals. 1-2 less takeaway meals and a svelter grocery bill due to the less booze or snacks probably is at least $50 if not more.
Happened as such on my home as well. And, although i wasn't expecting it, cut off lots of money on booze and beer.
Becoming addicted to food can seriously wreck your life. Nothing makes every aspect of your life harder than being fat. And it just sneaks up on people because no one talks about it, like alcohol, it’s just a thing people assume you will do.
When I’m hungry, I eat, and that’s it, I don’t think about food until hours later when I get hungry again. It blows my mind that there’s people that just never stop thinking about food, even shortly after they’ve eaten, even when they’ve had their fill. We don’t have to live this way. Try to think about food less, it starts in the mind.
Just a reminder there are no shortcuts; doing the work to actually heal yourself and fast, etc. will always beat this sort of thing in the long run.
That’s an astonishing number. Wouldn’t that be more than enough to cause a decrease in grocery prices?
We’re seeing similar in the UK, fast food restaurants are having to adapt and dieting companies have outright collapsed.
Sounds conspiratorial, but when you look at the revenue impact this is having, the deluge of baseless articles about it making your eyes fall out or “users who stop taking it gain the weight back” or whatever malady they can make a tenuous link to, it all make a lot more sense.
The biggest food companies do not want people to be thinner. They want people to buy their low-quality, high-margin products.
This isn't surprising to me. I'm on Topamax as an appetite suppressant & I notice a similar effect. A lot of the time a Soylent will do the trick, or a small snack that can't even be considered a meal.
I think it’s not ozempic, it’s people not able to afford as much as before
Strange to think that the whole obesity epidemic was essentially people buying 5% more calories than they should have.
> Notably, about one-third of users stopped taking the medication during the study period. When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels – and their grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before they started
That’s very interesting and it confirms what i thought about this drug. It’s a life long commitment. As soon as you stop, you end up becoming your old self whereas you don’t lose all the gains when you stop paying a nutrition expert.
Thank Christ. Grocery’s been a tip in the US for almost 20 years. Pendulum swinging back way overdue.
But why is a Danish product being accused of something that an American product also does
Anyone else notice the lack of crowds at their gym post new years?
Interesting to consider the effects of GLP-1 drugs on the environment then
The shopping app I have used in my area for the past 7 or 8 years shows the number of "deals" in each category. This week there are 36 deals in "Cookies, Snacks & Candy" (up from 20-25 from winters past) and 19 in "Frozen Food" which is also higher than years past.
The big processed food brands are clearly more aggressive in their discounts. Lower demand overall from GLP1s or common sense is part of it. But the other factor relates to the huge increases in prices starting during the pandemic.
I mean, 13 ounce bag of Doritos for $7.29? A box of freaking Cheerios for $5.99? Few people will touch that, so they're in a situation where they must discount heavily to move product. These particular products are on sale 2-3 weeks every month at $2.29 to $2.99 (see https://www.starmarket.com/weeklyad)
hopefully it's reducing the demands of snacks filled with artificial crap and shifting the trend to give manufacturers an incentive to focus on healthier alternatives
This matches with another study that found that Ozempic reduced people pooping by 4.2% on an average.
That is pretty astonishing given 10% of Americans use semaglutide / tirzepitide.
> Spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies. Even staples like bread, meat and eggs declined.
I can't read the paper (paywall), but that means something like the 10% of Americans who are on it must switch to purchasing almost no junk food.
There is lots of talk about food in these comments but the other part of the equation is exercise. You can eat as much as you want but then you have to burn those calories with exercise and most people don't.
People know in GLP-1 will tell me it “changed their metabolism”. Few fat people want to admit that they’re simply eating less, and if they ate less without drugs they’d also lose weight.
I worry that eventually fat people on GLP-1 will figure out a way to over eat, just as people with stomach reduction learned to sip calories all day long and get fat again…
This headline is a touch misleading as it gives the impression of being across all US households, the quote is:
>Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.
So, the body positivity campaign was a psyop.
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US
The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.
So far, what being on a GLP-1 gives me is a steady state that most people probably find quite unremarkable: I don't crave a snack, and I don't thirst for alcohol. Both of those desires have had real control over me for a very long time.