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One woman is illustrated with two realities. On the right, the woman is against a dark blue backdrop, looking down, with a plate that is empty aside from a medical device. On the left, the same woman is in a bright gold scene filled with various foods, including ice cream with sprinkles, pie, turkey, noodles and a burger.

Robert Neubecker

Branneisha Cooper has lost 55 pounds and counting since she went on Mounjaro, a diabetes drug that causes dramatic weight loss, in November. Her inflammation is down, as are her blood pressure and cholesterol levels. She says she’s super grateful for this new class of weight loss/diabetes drugs.

“I thought everyone woke up thinking about breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the past I tried everything to lose weight, but the food voice would always win,” she said.

Her food voice has gone very, very quiet. And as a career food writer and lifetime food fanatic, I find the silence ominous.

I know semaglutides, also called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, are shaping up to be the hottest Big Pharma gold rush in decades, and for good reason. In many cases they help people shed more than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/08/08/wegovy-drug-weight-loss-heart-attacks-stroke-reduced-risk/" target=_blank>20 percent</a> of their body weight. Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Saxenda, Trulicity, Mounjaro — nearly every pharmaceutical company has launched, or will launch, new products in this space.

Unlike previous weight loss drugs that often overpromised and frequently came with dangerous side effects, these meds work in part by quieting the “wanting” mind and dulling the pleasure centers. Patients may reduce calorie consumption by up to 30 percent, largely because food stops being so doggone important. They derive less pleasure from it. That will mean lots of weight loss. It will mean less diabetes and fatty liver disease, probably fewer strokes and a higher quality of life.

Will weight-loss drugs put diet charlatans out of business? I hope so.

Overeating and poor diet have been linked to cancers, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, respiratory diseases, arthritis, obesity and oral diseases.

Lifestyle-related diseases are linked to 7 in 10 American deaths each year, so the stakes are high and, for many, the trade-offs worth it. But I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around a higher quality of life that doesn’t have food and its many pleasures at the center of it all.

Think of all the holidays a disinterest in food would kill: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/11/09/thanksgiving-dinner-20-ingredients/" target="_blank">Thanksgiving</a>, dead. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/interactive/2022/cookie-recipes-holiday-baking/" target="_blank">Christmas</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/03/31/matzoh-fritters-recipe-passover-pizzarelle-con-miele/" target="_blank">Passover</a>, major body blow. And all those other universal things? Birth and death and love and sex? Food had a place in every one of them.

You say “I think I like you” or alternately “I’m sorry I did that” with a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/01/31/chocolates-valentines-day/" target=_blank>box of chocolates</a>. When someone dies? Bring their family a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/12/14/obituary-casseroles-funerals/" target=_blank>casserole</a> or gooey lasagna. Food is reward, solace, promise.

Cooking for someone is an act of love completely different from doing their laundry or driving them to the airport. It’s about giving pleasure, not doing a solid. Cooking someone a meal is a way of saying: I see you, I’m paying attention, I know what you like.

Cooper had to sit her grandparents down, urging them not to take offense at how little of their cooking she’s eating these days. She used to crave something sweet after every meal, used to hit up a happy hour or two with her girls, relishing the camaraderie along with the discounted appetizers and cocktails.

“Cooking has really become a challenge since I started. You just look at food and say, hmmm. I just don’t have a taste for it. I don’t have cravings or want to cook a particular thing,” said the 27-year-old, who is a buyer for Target in the Dallas area. Happy hours are different. Grocery shopping, too. Food has become fuel, not pleasure.

I fear that widespread adoption of this class of drugs could make the sensualist, the lotus eater, an endangered species, or at least an object of derision.

These are the people who seek the odd, sandy flesh of ripe figs or the silken slither of pan-seared foie gras. These are eaters who wax rhapsodic when reminiscing about the unctuous pleasure and salty pop of caviar washed down by an icy, astringent vodka.

Their tastes aren’t always highbrow. A platter of sticky <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/cherry-bourbon-glazed-ribs/" target=_blank>baby back ribs</a> gnawed with abandon at a splintery picnic table in the sun works nicely as well. Satiation is but a small part of the driving force behind this consumption.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock seemed bummed to measure his life with mundane coffee spoons, but that’s because he needed to get all the forks, balled-up napkins and deep pasta bowls in there, too.

I cherish the tiny white elvers — eels like vermicelli with faces — served to me in a delicate herbed broth by Daniel Boulud at Le Cirque when I was in my 20s. Or tucking into late-night platters of Peking duck at Tommy Toy’s in San Francisco in the late 1980s, their shatteringly crisp skin and pillowy buns a magic trick I’m stumped by to this day. Or even a ham and butter baguette, eaten under an umbrella in a steamy Parisian summer deluge.

The ancient Roman vomitorium has been debunked (they probably didn’t, in fact, use feathers as regurgitation aids so they could go back for seconds at the feast), but the human gusto for deliciousness, irrespective of caloric or nutritional density, is age-old.

If this class of drugs rewires our brains and guts to think of food as just sustenance, the world will be so sad. I am particularly suspicious of the primacy of virtues such as temperance and abstemiousness. That’s probably because I am a marshmallow girl.

I’m not talking about a jiggly midsection or my penchant for Jet-Puffed products. I mean this: In the early 1970s a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/10/13/the-marshmallow-test-revisited/" target=_blank>Stanford psychology professor named Walter Mischel</a> and his lab posited that a child’s ability to delay gratification would be predictive of future academic success, maybe even success in life. To prove this, they went to the university’s developmental psychology laboratory, Bing Nursery School.

That was my nursery school, and I was a subject in Mischel’s research. His experiment went thus: Offer a kid one marshmallow on the spot or two marshmallows if the child is willing to wait a bit while the researcher leaves the room and comes back.

About 30 percent of the subjects were able to wait a full 15 minutes to receive their treats. I was not in that 30 percent. I wanted my marshmallow pronto.

Mischel’s research took different directions since this early work, but he remained a zealot until his death in 2018, preaching that one’s ability to quiet the wanting mind is a central ingredient in the recipe for success. His researchers checked in periodically, sending my parents questionnaires, asking after my SAT scores (mine were respectable), body mass index (low) and marital status (still married to my high school sweetheart).

So I’m not buying it. Planning, procuring, cooking and — oh, yeah — eating food are among my chief joys. I went to culinary school in part because “what do we want for dinner tonight” is a full-contact sport in my family, and I wanted an edge. I’ve written about food for 32 years and I still find it enthralling. Every. Single. Day.

Then again, I know I’m not the target audience for these drugs. My metabolism is mercifully speedy, my relationship with food that of two old friends embracing each day anew.

I don’t want that to be laughable or unseemly. How do we think about the deep, visceral pleasure of cooking, eating and nurturing people by feeding them if we have in some way villainized eating for the absolute hedonistic joy of it?

Overweight people who use these drugs, who may have a more troubled relationship with food than I do, don’t share my worry.

For them, there is also pleasure in being able to sit through a meal without obsessing about what’s for dessert. There is pleasure in being thin enough that you can sit on the ground and enjoy a picnic with your family without needing someone to help you up. And there is great pleasure in being able to exercise for the first time — take long walks, go on a hike, even run a race — because you aren’t carrying all the extra pounds.

Art Smith, a James Beard winner, award-winning cookbook author and a restaurateur who was Oprah’s personal chef, has Type 2 diabetes and has battled weight all his life. He is taking Mounjaro and says after being on it for just one month he lost 10 pounds.

“I am a chef famous for fattening comfort food, but I continue to eat what I want. What I find it stops is the compulsive eating, plus I am happier with smaller amounts,” he said by email from a food-centric European vacation (he sent plate pics).

Virginia Willis is another James Beard-winning author and famous Southern chef. She lost 65 pounds “the old-fashioned way, less in and more out,” she said. It took her two years, and she has kept it off for three.

“There’s no joy in food for people when food is the enemy, when food and the resulting weight is a deep pain and cause of shame and sorrow,” she said, adding that food is “an ineffective drug they are using to try to fill whatever hole they are trying to fill.”

Would she take one of these drugs, if she had it to do all over again, or to keep weight off? Not a chance. “I think so often that the attitude this develops is, ‘I’m on this pill and that will take care of it,’ not ‘I will change my behavior,’” she said. “My health journey ... opened my world and helped me mind, body and spirit. I am not too sure a pill could do that.”

There is still no consensus on exactly how these drugs work. What experts do know, said Joan Ifland, a researcher and author who studies food addiction, is that they cripple the dopamine pathway in the brain, classically associated with the ability to experience pleasure.

Some scientific research suggests these medications may blunt our pursuit of many other things beyond overeating, including gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, porn addiction and compulsive shopping. But research also shows that even in a brain scan, people who are obese have different reactions to images of food than people who are of normal weight. The obese body is different from a “normal”-weight body in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.

Still, Ifland says we are tinkering dangerously with a basic driver of human behavior and motivation. “These drugs are trying to tamp down the dopamine pathway with an artificial sledgehammer," she said. “You can’t put a shadow over someone’s life, which is what crippling the dopamine pathway is.”

Branneisha Cooper describes her old self as an emotional eater and says the medicine has “freed up time because I’m not thinking about food.” She no longer has food as a “security blanket — now I have to deal with the problems.”

That seems healthy. But if food is a blanket, it’s one that swaddles cultures, families and relationships, and I worry about its unraveling.

Pulitzer finalist, criticism, 2017

James Beard finalist, 2017, 2019 and 2023

Paul Hansell Award for Distinguished Achievement in Florida Journalism, 2017

James Batten Award for Public Service finalist, 2017

Association of Food Journalists awards, 2013, 2014, 2017

National Headliner, 2014, 2015 

Florida Society of News Editors, 2013, 2015, 2017

Les Dames D'Escoffier, second prize, 2017

Society for Features Journalism, second prize features series or project, 2017

Moon Tampa & St. Petersburg (Moon Handbooks)

Moon Florida Gulf Coast (Moon Handbooks)

Moon Walt Disney World and Orlando: Including Daytona Beach and The Space Coast (Moon Handbooks)

Moon Spotlight Sarasota, Naples & the Paradise Coast

University of Virginia, bachelor's of English

California Culinary Academy, associate's degree

Laura Reiley is the business of food reporter. She was previously a food critic at the Tampa Bay Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun. She has authored four books, has cooked professionally and is a graduate of the California Culinary Academy. She is a three-time James Beard finalist and in 2017 was a Pulitzer finalist.

Laura Reiley

Weight-loss drugs could spell the end of food as pleasure

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