Oprah Winfrey busies herself shilling for weight loss drugs these days, as if she hasn’t accumulated enough attention for herself over her career.
At the same time that she’s lauding weight loss drugs, she’s coincidentally also pushing the narrative that “obesity is a disease” and, therefore, by logical extension, incurable without the benefit of expensive, lifelong pharmaceutical interventions.
(And if the proprietors of said interventions see fit to kick back a little bit of that windfall profit to her, why not? She earned it duping her credulous followers into open their hearts and wallets to the benevolent pharma gods.)
Via The Washington Post (emphasis added):
Winfrey, 69, said that after knee surgery in 2021, she “worked so damn hard” to control her weight with exercise and counting points on WeightWatchers. Winfrey has a stake in the wellness company, known as WW, and also is a board member.
She added a weight-loss medication to her holistic health and fitness regimen after a panel discussion with health-care experts in July, she told People.
Winfrey said she realized then that “she has a predisposition” to putting on weight “that no amount of willpower is going to control.”
“Obesity is a disease,” she said. “It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”
“It’s not about willpower” — a hell of a license granted to the obese to shirk all personal responsibility, no?
Let’s be clear: this “obesity is a disease” thing was not Oprah’s original epiphany. She is merely repeating industry talking points, underpinned by shady academic theorizing, to move product.
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Instead, “obesity is a disease” is an intentionally crafted narrative designed to instill simultaneously the idea that managing weight naturally through lifestyle changes alone is not feasible and, therefore, that the only solution to the problem is medical intervention.
Via CBS News (emphasis added):
Almost half of American adults have obesity, a condition that was a fraction of that just 40 years ago and scientists don't agree on what's caused the dramatic increase. What everyone does agree on is that it's a major health crisis, because obesity can cause type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke and more than a dozen cancers.
Now there's a medication that leads to dramatic weight loss. But it's wildly expensive. Hollywood celebrities take it to flatten their tummies, but few can afford the thousands of dollars it costs a year.
And very few insurance companies will cover it, even though in 2013 the American Medical Association, some would say, finally recognized obesity as a disease.
Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford: It's a brain disease.
Lesley Stahl: It is?
Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford: It's a brain disease. And the brain tells us how much to eat and how much to store.
The “obesity is a disease” theory is a biproduct of the same paradigm by which vitamin D, optimal diet, exercise, meditation, and any other number of mostly free or affordable and highly accessible lifestyle practices are dismissed by the Public Health™ professionals as insufficient prophylactic means to cope with COVID-19, who instead offer only mRNA injections and Remdesivir — which, by serendipity, perhaps, also serve to generate massive profit for the pharmaceutical companies that bankroll the FDA, CDC, NIH, et al.
