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Johann Hari

Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs Hardcover – May 7 2024

by Johann Hari (Author)

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The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society’s dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies.

In January 2023, Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, one of the new drugs that produces significant weight loss. He wasn’t alone—some predictions suggest that in a few years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking these drugs. While around 80 percent of diets fail, someone taking one of the new drugs will lose up to a quarter of their body weight in six months. To the drugs’ defenders, here is a moment of liberation from a condition that massively increases your chances of diabetes, cancer, and an early death.��

Still, Hari was wildly conflicted. Can these drugs really be as good as they sound? Are they a magic solution—or a magic trick? Finding the answer to this high-stakes question led him on a journey from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo, and to interview the leading experts in the world on these questions. He found that along with the drug’s massive benefits come twelve significant potential risks.��

He also found that these drugs radically challenge what we think we know about shame, willpower, and healing. What do they reveal about the nature of obesity itself? What psychological issues begin to emerge when our eating patterns are suddenly disrupted? Are the drugs a liberation or a further symptom of our deeply dysfunctional relationship with food?��

These drugs are about to change our world, for better and for worse. Everybody needs to understand how they work—scientifically, emotionally, and culturally. Magic Pill is an essential guide to the revolution that has already begun, and which one leading expert argues will be as transformative as the invention of the smartphone.

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Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

May 7 2024
Dimensions

14.58 x 2.77 x 21.64 cm
ISBN-10

0593728637
ISBN-13

978-0593728635

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Popular Highlights in this book

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The first way that ultra-processed food undermines our satiety is strangely simple. You chew it less.
Highlighted by 459 Kindle readers
The second way our satiety is being undermined is that these manufactured foods often contain that uniquely powerful combination of sugar, fat, and carbs—and this seems to activate something primal in us.
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Big Agriculture does to animals precisely what the processed food industry is doing to us and our children every day.
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From the Publisher

Arthur C Brooks says Entertaining and highly-readable

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Review

“Compelling, thoughtful and fascinating, a revealing and inspiring meditation on weight loss, addiction, and the new drugs that may change the way we think about and treat obesity.”—Maia Szalavitz, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

“Magic Pill may be the most revolutionary, honest and important book you read about weight loss, the body and food. As is always the case with a Johann Hari book, what appears to be a story about the drug,��Ozempic turns out to be a��portal into the deepest investigation and revelation on how to live a healthy life.”—V (Formerly Eve Ensler), The Vagina Monologues, Reckoning

“A deep-dive into Ozempic��couldn’t be more timely—and necessary—to get the full scope of how and why everyone is suddenly skinny!”—Andy Cohen

“Hari is��excellent��on the booming ultra-processed food industry and the science of addiction that drives it. . . . Magic Pill is��a wonderfully accessible exploration of one of the most complex problems of our age. Hari highlights the risks of the new drugs, but also their benefits.”—The Telegraph (UK)

“A fast paced and��fascinating��dive into an extremely sensitive topic, written by��a charismatic and compulsively readable author.”—Dan Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 10% Happier

“Magic Pill is��a fascinating exploration��of weight-loss pharmaceuticals that will redefine our approach to obesity. From his own journey with Ozempic, to a global investigation spanning Iceland to Tokyo, Hari delves into the transformative potential—and concerns—surrounding these drugs.”—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators

“With the intense interest in the new miracle weight-loss drugs, we need a balanced look at their promise and peril.��Entertaining and highly-readable, Johann Hari’s Magic Pill delivers the information people need to help make a medical decision that might change their future.”—Arthur C. Brooks, Professor, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Entertaining without trivializing��and��deeply informative without being prescriptive, this book��leaves us with much to ponder, both on the individual and social levels.”—Gabor Maté, MD, bestselling author of The Myth of Normal

�� Magic Pill, Johann Hari gives us a crash course on the new weight-loss drugs that will soon be transforming bodies, minds, and societies on a massive scale. Magic Pill will help you think more clearly about eating, dieting, health, and mental health, even if you never touch Ozempic.”—Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

��formative, lively . . . A terrific read��for anyone curious about or considering using these remarkable medications.”—Booklist (starred review)

“[A] levelheaded analysis. . . . One of the first books about the Ozempic age, this��sets a high bar for those to follow.”—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers. His TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to Joe Rogan. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, and Stolen Focus.

Chapter 1

Finding the Treasure Chest

How the drugs work

I opened my eyes and immediately felt that something was off. Thwacking my alarm clock into silence, I lay there for five minutes, trying to figure out what it was. It was two days since I had started taking Ozempic. I felt mildly nauseous, but it was not severe—if it had happened on a normal day, it wouldn’t have stopped me from doing anything. So that wasn’t it. It took me a while to realize what it was. I always wake up ravenously hungry, but on that morning, I had no appetite at all. It was gone.

I got out of bed and, on autopilot, went through my normal morning routine. I left my flat and went to a local café run by a Brazilian woman named Tatiana, where my order is always the same: a large, toasted bread roll, filled with chicken and mayonnaise. As I sat there reading the newspapers, the food was placed in front of me, and I looked at it. I felt like I was looking at a block of wood. I took a bite. It tasted fine. Normal. I took three or four more bites, and I felt full. I left almost all of it on the plate. As I hurried out, Tatiana called after me, “Are you sick?”

I went to my office and wrote for three hours. Normally, by noon, I would have a snack, something small and sugary, and then at about 1 p.m. would go down the street to a local Turkish café for lunch. It got to 2 p.m. and I wasn’t hungry. Again, my sense of routine kicked in, and again, I went to the café and asked for my standard order, a large Mediterranean lamb with rice and bread. I managed to eat a third of it. It seemed to me for the first time to be incredibly salty, like I was drinking seawater.

I wrote some more, and at 7 p.m. I left my office to go and meet a friend in Camden Market, one of my favorite parts of London. We walked between the stalls, staring at food from every part of the world. Normally, I could stuff my face from three different stalls, but that night, I had no hunger. I couldn’t even manage a few mouthfuls. I went home, feeling exhausted, and went to sleep at the unprecedentedly early time of 9 p.m.

As that first week passed, it felt like the shutters had come down on my appetite, and now only tiny peeks of light could get through. I was about 80 percent less hungry than I normally am. The sense of mild nausea kept stirring and passing. When I got on the bus or in a car, I felt a kind of exaggerated travel sickness. Whenever I ate, I became full startlingly fast. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you have just eaten a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and then somebody popped up and offered you a whole new meal to get started on. Some people say Ozempic makes them find food disgusting. To me, it made food, beyond small quantities, feel unfeasible.

On the fifth night, a friend came by to watch a movie, and we flicked through Uber Eats. The app suggested all my usual haunts. I realized I couldn’t eat any of this food now. Instead, she got a kebab, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup. On the sixth day, I took my godsons out, and they wanted to go into McDonald’s. When they got Happy Meals and I got nothing at all, one of them said suspiciously: “Who are you and what have you done with Johann Hari?”

I wanted to understand what was happening to my body. I figured that the best people to educate me were the scientists who made the key discoveries that led to the development of Ozempic and the other new weight-loss drugs. So I began to track many of them down and interview them, along with many other key scientists working in the field. Almost all of them have received funding from the pharmaceutical companies that now profit from these drugs, and we should bear that in mind as we hear what they say.

They taught me that these extraordinary effects were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and my brain, and in yours. To understand what it is, I think it helps to understand how it was discovered.

* * *

One day in 1984, a lean twenty-eight-year-old Canadian research scientist walked into a lab in Massachusetts General Hospital and felt instinctively uneasy. Daniel Drucker had been assigned to work in one of the huge buildings there, and he expected to find a shiny state-of-the-art setup. Instead, it was shabby and run-down. As he sat at his bench, pigeons were constantly cooing from their nests in the roof above him, threatening to poop and contaminate any experiment he might carry out.

He knew he had only made it to this lab in the first place by a few thin twists of fate. His mother had been born in Poland and fled the Nazis without a moment to spare—the day after she got out of the ghetto, her mother and sister were shot dead. She survived by hiding in attics. Even after she made it to the safety of Canada and learned her relatives had been murdered, and she made it to the safety of Canada, she never stopped searching for them. She would ask her son: What if the witnesses who saw them being killed were wrong, and they’re still out there alive somewhere, looking for me?

Daniel trained to be a thyroid specialist, so he was surprised and disappointed when the lab’s head told him that the hospital didn’t have any thyroid work and he was assigned to a different project. Every human body is made up of cells, and in the 1970s, scientists had discovered new tools they could use to figure out for the first time what is going on inside them. They were working their way through many of the cells, and Daniel was allocated the inner workings of something named the glucagon gene, which is produced in the pancreas. Very little was known about its deeper structure. Go figure it out, he was told.

It didn’t particularly excite him, but it was work, so he got started. He found it tough. He told me that when it came to clinical medicine, “I was very capable, but when I got to the lab, I was completely incapable. I had never done [this kind of] research before. It was a struggle for me.” When he successfully carried out an experiment that teased apart the functioning of this particular cell, he was just relieved that “I actually managed to do something with these clumsy wooden hands,” and that the pigeons didn’t poop on the results.

As he investigated what was happening inside the glucagon gene, he started to look into a specific question. He knew the gene consisted of different constituent parts—it’s a long chain—and one of them, found at the end, was a snippet of the overall genetic code, labeled as GLP-1. Daniel and the other scientists in his team wanted to figure out if this part of the gene was just an inert or redundant bit of code that didn’t do anything on its own, or if it could be teased out and investigated as a thing in its own right. After a lot of experimenting, he discovered that, in fact, it could be broken off from the wider code.

Once he knew this could be done, he began to ask: What does GLP-1 actually do? He decided to start putting it into lab dishes, to see how it interacted with many different chemicals that are found in that part of the body.

It was on one of those afternoons that he tried something that, years later, he told me was his “aha moment”—one that was going to reshape his whole career, and the lives of millions of people, including my own.

When he mixed GLP-1 with some cells that produce insulin, he noticed something striking: the GLP-1 stimulated the creation of insulin. Something about this tiny gut hormone could spur the making of another hormone, one that is essential for your body to regulate your blood sugar levels and keep you alive.

His mind flickered immediately to diabetes, a medical condition where your body doesn’t produce enough insulin, leading to all sorts of disastrous health effects. He could see, in the Petri dish right in front of him, that GLP-1 “was making more insulin.” Could it be used to treat diabetics? Another scientist on the team named Svetlana Mojsov worked with a group to put GLP-1 into a rat’s pancreas. She found that there, too, it led to the creation of more insulin. This meant it didn’t just work in a dish in a lab—it worked in a living creature. Around the same time, a team in Copenhagen put GLP-1 into a pig’s pancreas. They found the same effect.

But finding a way to apply this to human diabetics was going to be a long road—and some surreal turns had to take place first.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 7 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593728637
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593728635
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 363 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.58 x 2.77 x 21.64 cm
�鶹�� Rank: #38,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Weight Maintenance Diets (Books)
- #23 in Weight Loss Diets
- #76 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
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810 ratings

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Johann Hari

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Johann Hari is the New York Times best-selling author of 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs', and one of the top-rated TED talkers of all time.

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TJHGREER
Interesting read
Reviewed in Canada on February 27, 2025
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Well written and researched with pages of links at the back to continue investigation.

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Sophia C. G
Bon livre
Reviewed in Canada on December 24, 2024
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C’est plutôt comme un blog ou une auto biographie. Interressant dans les propos

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Jennifer
Balanced opinion
Reviewed in Canada on December 13, 2024
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I like that both sides of the debate are explored

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Joanne G.
very informative
Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2024
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Sadly I am a sucker for any new magic pill that hits the market. This book talks about the different diet drugs that have come on the market, most particularly Ozempic. After using the drug himself, the author offers his research. There is no data for long term use, but that will come. It was refreshing to read something from someone who is not marketing a product, but has used it.

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Kindle Customer
Excellent Book
Reviewed in Canada on July 28, 2024
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I loves this book. It was well written and super informative. If you or someone you know is considering Ozempic read this.

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Daniel Robert Menzies
One of my favorite authors does it again
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2025
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Hari strikes a difficult balance of pros and cons in debating one of the most controversial issues of our day. His easily understood prose is so digestible I was able to finish the book in under a day. Magic Pill is a journalistic classic. I eagerly await his next tome.

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Ivan Lazarus
Great insight into the pros and cons of GLP-1 medicationx
Reviewed in Australia on February 11, 2025
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The author writes in an easy to read and digest manner thoroughly discussing the various pros and cons of taking the new GLP-1 medications. The writing appears unbiased, honest, and intelligent.

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Melanie Reichel
Really grest bbok
Reviewed in Germany on January 25, 2025
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Wonderfully written while as unbiased as possible providing facts and view points. Great all around with detours in directions I woulnd‘t have thought of in relation to GLP-1 medications before reading this.

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Olivier
Anecdotal oversimplified book about… well, Hari.
Reviewed in the Netherlands on August 31, 2024
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The book discusses mental health and the complexities surrounding it, arguing against the oversimplification of using medication as a catch-all solution. My criticism of the book are concerns about its reliance on anecdotal evidence, potential oversimplification of complex issues and controversial claims about the pharmaceutical industry and the nature of mental health disorders. I feel that it downplays the role of medical interventions in favor of lifestyle changes, which is not feasible for everyone - scientific studies point out that most obesity is maintained by inflammation; not lack of willpower, focus or diet.

It's important to engage with a variety of perspectives when considering the topics raised in the book, as mental health is a multifaceted issue that often requires individualized approaches.

Anecdotal Evidence:
Hari often uses personal stories and anecdotes to support his arguments. While these stories can be compelling, critics argue that they may not represent a broad population's experiences and can lead to oversimplification of complex mental health issues.

Reductionist View on Medication:
The book argues that reliance on pharmaceutical solutions can overshadow other important treatments, such as therapy, social support, or lifestyle changes. While there is merit in advocating for a holistic approach to treatment, some critiques suggest that Hari may downplay the effectiveness of medication for many individuals, especially in severe cases.

Lifestyle Factors:
Hari emphasizes the importance of lifestyle changes—such as diet, exercise, and social connectedness—in managing mental health. Although these factors are indeed significant, the critique lies in potentially presenting them as universally applicable solutions without acknowledging the diverse contexts and challenges that different individuals face.

Pharmaceutical Industry Critique:
Hari is vocal about his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry because of his own experiences, suggesting that it has a vested interest in promoting medications over other treatments. While it is essential to critically evaluate the role of pharmaceutical companies, some argue that his assertions may border on conspiratorial, lacking nuanced discussion around how medications have historically been beneficial for many people.

Scientific Basis:
Hari's claims lack robust scientific backing. Although he references studies and expert opinions, detractors argue that some interpretations could misrepresent data or lack consensus within the scientific community.

Potential Alarmism:
Some reviewers posit that Hari's writing could be interpreted as alarmist, instilling fear about the over-prescription of medications without sufficiently addressing scenarios where medication is essential for stability and recovery.

Missing Context on Mental Health:
The complex nature of mental health disorders - affected by genetic, environmental, and social factors - means that solutions are rarely one-size-fits-all. Critics assert that Hari’s focus on lifestyle changes might overlook the specific needs of those with chronic or severe mental health conditions.

While "Magic Pill" has sparked important conversations about the multifactorial nature of mental health and the need for a more holistic approach, engaging critically with its arguments is vital. It’s always beneficial to consider multiple perspectives when discussing such complex topics to arrive at a more balanced understanding.

As in all Hari’s books it’s mostly about him and his approach to the subject - which can be supplementary. If you delve deeper into his background, you’ll recognize his popular mannerisms are primarily for personal gain and exhibiting his views.

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Cabondo
Essential Reading – Eye-Opening, Compassionate, and Deeply Relevant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2025
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This book is essential reading for absolutely everyone—whether you’re struggling with your own weight, supporting someone who is, or simply trying to understand the bigger picture. Magic Pill offers a powerful, compassionate insight into what it truly means to live with obesity. It sheds light on the complex realities behind weight gain, the daily struggles so many face, and the evolving science around treatment—including GLP-1 medications.

As someone who has just started taking Wegovy, I found this book profoundly validating and informative. My osteopath recommended it, and I’m so glad he did. I was blown away by some of the discoveries—ideas I’d never heard before that instantly made sense. I kept quoting passages to my family and hope they’ll read it too. This isn’t just a book—it’s a perspective shift.

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