Episode Details

Transcript:This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!

The Ob*sity* Action Coalition (OAC) claims to be a non-profit advocacy group for higher-weight people. The truth from my perspective is that they are anything but.

I wrote about the OAC in 2014 when their priority had been lobbying the AMA to declare that “ob*sity” is a disease. Today their priority is the “Treat and Reduce Ob*sity Act” the goal of which is to expand  Medicare coverage for weight loss interventions, including specifically expanding coverage for weight loss drugs.

These priorities make a lot more sense when you realize that the OAC is not an advocacy group for higher-weight people, but rather an organization that is predominantly funded by, and lobbies for the priorities of, the weight loss industry.

When I first wrote about the OAC the “Platinum” level of their Chairman’s Council (a distinction for those providing funding of $100,000 or more annually) included:

·         Allergan – Manufacturers of the lap band

·         American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric [weight loss] Surgery

·         Covidien – “committed to better patient outcomes through bariatric surgery“

·         Eisai – manufactures of the weight loss drug Belviq (now pulled from the market)

·         Vivus – manufacturers of the weight loss drug Qysmia

All of these organizations stood to profit from the AMA’s declaration of being higher-weight as a disease (and the lobbying was successful, not only did the AMA declare living in a larger body to be a disease, but they blatantly ignored the findings of their own Committee on Science and Public Health which had studied the matter for a year and recommended against it in order to do the weight loss industry’s bidding.)

Having simply existing in a larger body re-branded into a disease was a major step forward, but not the only step. The next big step for Big Pharma is insurance coverage for dangerous, expensive (and almost certain to fail) weight loss “treatments.”

And now the OACs “Platinum” level is down to one company – Novo Nordisk. A company that, having made a literal fortune price gouging on insulin, has promised their shareholders that their new weight loss drug, Wegovy, will make them billions. The rest of the sponsorship levels are still chock full of weight loss companies. They’ve also separated their Chairman’s Council from what they are calling “Corporate Partners”. Here Novo is again the top funder at “more than $500,000 annually” with Eli Lilly kicking in “more than $100,000” and the list goes on. I’ve included the lists below.

There is something else in common between the OAC of 2014 and today. At both times, they were involved in parallel campaigns that claimed to be about ending weight stigma, but were in fact about selling more weight loss interventions.

We’ve seen this before. It was a tactic used by Purdue Pharma and other pharma and medical device companies to sell opioids – they created non-profits like the American Pain Foundation that were billed as advocacy groups for pain patients (a legitimate group of patients who deserve advocacy and treatment,) but were, in fact, funded by and acting in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. The work of these n