Bodies by Prescription

GLP-1s and similar peptide-based medications are not simply highly effective biomedical interventions that reduce chronic disease risk. Their weight loss effects change how we feel about ourselves, how others react, and reshaping global regimes of stigma. 

Early research, synthesizing data from eight very different countries on five continents, shows how such medications generate powerful feelings of “normality,” intensify demand driven by widespread weight anxieties, and reshape the experience of eating. The team is also investigating shifting clinical relationships, the influence of social media and informal knowledge networks, and the ways these drugs intersect with gender norms, disordered eating, and global regimes of stigma. 

Across sites, the collaboration takes a comparative, mixed-methods approach—combining ethnography, interviews, and digital research—to map how pharmaceutical innovation is unevenly accessed, interpreted, and used, and how it may ultimately reproduce or transform existing social hierarchies. In doing so, the project foregrounds the need for social science to anticipate the broader implications of rapidly expanding metabolic and weight-related therapeutics in a changing global landscape.