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Hi, my name's Thomas Weber, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepp Bound.
They're some of the brand names for weight loss drugs called GLP1 agonists.
In a nutshell, GLP1s reduce people's appetites.
We know they mimic the hormone that signals fullness to the brain.
But a couple of scientists I spoke to speculated that GLP1 drugs may also regulate the amount of dopamine that the brain releases.
And so when it does that, the drugs make foods that have been engineered to trigger the dopamine hit less appealing.
But researchers have also discovered something interesting about GLP1s.
They change the kinds of foods that people are interested in eating.
So instead of packaged, processed foods, many users tend to gravitate towards fresh fruits and vegetables.
So for this week's Sunday read, which you'll hear in a moment, I wrote about how drugs like Ozempic have the potential to disrupt, even upend the packaged food industry.
Early one morning last August, my reporting brought me to a glassy airy office building in the Bay Area, to the headquarters of a company called Mattson.
Matteson basically invents packaged foods and pitches them to the biggest food and drink companies in the world.
I passed display cases of prototypes from years past.