Reflection

During COVID, while a lot of people working from home were gaining weight, I adopted a couple of simple rules. One was my “one plate per meal rule”—no seconds and, usually, no dessert. The other was walking 10,000 steps a day. Neither was particularly complicated, but both changed my behavior in ways that have lasted.

The behavior modification continues with my walking and small plates.  More than a year ago, I stopped ordering my usual Jack Daniel’s or other bourbon drinks with dinner, substituting a single beer or no alcohol at all. Carol and I also became tired of ordering two restaurant meals, taking home far too much food, and eventually throwing most of it away. So, we changed how we order. Today, we might split a meal and add a salad, or order two or three appetizers instead. We have virtually ended wasted food and, incidentally, reduced what it costs us to dine out.

Neither of us takes a GLP-1. We made these changes for practical reasons. This story is not about us, but our experience may offer a small preview of something much larger.

What happens when tens of millions more people gain greater control over their appetites?

Constraint Versus Desire

Most diets depend upon constraint.

“I’d like another piece, but I shouldn’t have it.”

GLP-1 drugs introduce something potentially different. Many users describe a reduction in “food noise.” Instead of continually exercising willpower against the desire for another helping, they may simply not want it as much. A 2026 survey of adults using injectable semaglutide for weight management found substantial reductions in reported food-noise scores after treatment, although the researchers emphasized that prospective research is still needed. (INFORM survey, 2026.)

“I’d like another piece, but I shouldn’t,” becomes “I don’t particularly want another piece.”

That is a profound distinction, and its implications extend well beyond the bathroom scale. Imagine tens of millions of Americans eventually using increasingly effective, less expensive, and easier-to-take GLP-1 medications. They eat less. Portions get smaller. They snack less often. Some may drink less alcohol. Grocery baskets change, restaurant orders change, and household spending patterns begin to change with them.

But the money not spent on a second entrée, dessert, or cocktail does not vanish. Neither does the human capacity for desire. Once new eating habits become normal rather than something requiring constant discipline, people have both money and attention available for other things.

Reduced desire for one thing may create room for desiring something else. The important economic question may not be what disappears, but what replaces it.

GLP-1 then becomes an economic story rather than simply a pharmaceutical or healthcare story.

We Don’t Stop Wanting Things

Human desire is not, in my experience, fixed. Quite the opposite. As our needs are satisfied, we often develop new desires, and businesses are extraordinarily effective at helping us discover them.

Consider the proliferation of BOGO promotions—buy one, get one free. Retailers are not simply lowering the price of groceries. They are encouraging us to take home more. Consumers often buy something they would not otherwise have bought because the second one is “free.” By the next visit, the product is likely not BOGO anymore. But many consumers try it, some like it, and new purchasing habits are born. Once the habit is established, the next purchase may occur at the regular price.

BOGO is a small example of something businesses do remarkably well. Restaurants encourage an appetizer or dessert. For years, McDonald’s employees famously asked, “Want fries with that?” Retailers suggest another item at checkout. Hotels offer another night or an upgraded room. Streaming services encourage another subscription. Businesses continually give customers one more opportunity to add something to the order.

For decades, businesses and technology have steadily reduced the friction between wanting something and buying it. Credit cards removed the need for cash. Amazon removed the trip to the store. Smartphones put the store in our pockets. Algorithms learned what might tempt us next.

AI will take that process further. Now introduce something else into the equation: pharmacology that gives millions more consumers greater control over one of our most fundamental appetites. The result, I suspect, will not be a consumer economy in permanent retreat.

It will be a consumer economy that changes direction.

Follow the Spending

I do not view GLP-1s as a bearish economic story. Some businesses will undoubtedly face challenges as consumer behavior changes. Others will find new opportunities. Restaurants built around enormous portions may have to adjust. Snack-food manufacturers may sell fewer calories. Alcohol consumption could decline. Grocery baskets will change. Businesses that have prospered by encouraging consumers to eat or drink a little more will have to figure out what their customers now value.

But businesses adapt, and consumers do too. Restaurants can offer smaller portions and better food. Food companies can reformulate products. Consumers who spend less on calories may spend more on higher-quality food. Someone who loses fifty pounds needs new clothes. Someone who feels better may travel more, play golf again, join a gym, or spend money on experiences that previously seemed difficult or unappealing.

This is why focusing exclusively on industries threatened by GLP-1 adoption misses half the story. Every dollar not spent on excess food remains available to be saved, invested, or spent somewhere else. The more interesting question is not which companies lose when consumers eat less, but which businesses benefit when consumers make different choices.

That question becomes even more interesting when considering GLP-1s alongside AI. GLP-1s may alter some forms of human desire and behavior at precisely the same time AI gives businesses unprecedented ability to identify changing preferences and to develop, price, and market products around them. There will be rough edges—quite a few—but consumers and businesses have an impressive history of adaptation.

The Second Derivative

The first-order effect of GLP-1s is obvious: people lose weight and, in many cases, become healthier. The second-order effects are more interesting. People behave differently because they eat differently. They make different decisions because they feel differently. Businesses respond to those decisions, capital follows the businesses, new products emerge, and old business models adjust or disappear.

For most of modern economic history, businesses could treat human appetite, for food, for example, as something relatively constant, at least in the short run. They competed aggressively to capture bigger shares of it and became remarkably good at stimulating it. GLP-1s challenge that assumption in a way that diets, exercise programs, and public-health campaigns generally have not.

Appetite itself may now be becoming a variable.

We do not yet know how large that variable will become, how many behaviors it will affect, or where the dollars released by those changes will ultimately go. But with many more millions of people potentially gaining a degree of control over appetite that previously required considerable discipline, the effects are unlikely to stop at the dinner table.

GLP-1s won’t just change waistlines.  They’ll change markets.

Until next time, be well, and age gratefully.

Chris

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Sources:

INFORM Survey, “Retrospective Assessment of Food Noise Changes After Initiation of Injectable Semaglutide for Weight Management in the USA,” 2026. PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42217114/