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The rise of new weight-loss drugs could help reframe obesity as a societal failure driven by the food industry, rather than lack of personal willpower. That’s the message from two experts, who presented perspectives from an essay and poster at 33rd European Congress on Obesity (ECO) 2026.

“These medications could redirect blame for obesity from individual failings to the pervasive influence of commercial food systems, drawing parallels with historical public health successes against tobacco and alcohol,” Luc Hagenaars, PhD, Department of Public and Occupational Health, Amsterdam UMC in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Laura Schmidt, PhD, Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California San Francisco, wrote. “This reframing is crucial for addressing escalating obesity rates and associated chronic diseases.”

Framing obesity as a disease of individuals, as is the case now with current definitions of obesity, “comes with some unintended consequences,” Hagenaars told Medscape Medical News. “One is that it frames obesity as a medical condition that needs treatment, and that undermines public and political support for tackling the epidemic’s root cause — namely, the food environment, including financial incentives for an industry focused on maximizing sales of highly palatable, ultraprocessed foods (UPFs).”

Schmidt added, “The focus on individual responsibility has been a marketing strategy deployed by the food industry to take the focus off its own culpability in flooding our food environment with unhealthy, hyperpalatable food products. When 70% of what’s in your grocery store is UPF, what real choice do individuals have?”

GLP-1 ‘Shock’

What’s needed to help change perspectives and policy is what political scientists call “focusing events,” said Hagenaars. “These are drastic changes in the environment that change how society thinks about issues. And that then trickles down into how policymakers think about the issues and creates pressure to come up with solutions. That’s what might occur because of the GLP-1 shock.”

Ironically, he noted, “if the prevailing policy image in society is such that we condemn individuals for being big-bodied, and reinforce that idea by talking about individuals and their struggles with weight, that only strengthens the prevailing idea that it’s your own fault.”

When that happens, several harms may occur, according to Hagenaars and Schmidt. As outlined in their poster, these may include: The food industry responding by formulating food products so palatable they “break through the GLP-1 defense barrier”; commercial gains associated with GLP-1s attracting nonclinical market players (eg, Amazon direct-to-consumer channels, wellness influencers), reducing medical supervision and raising safety risks; commercial gains associated with GLP-1s triggering a revival of dangerous weight-loss products for those who cannot access GLP-1s; and governments using GLP-1s as an excuse to avoid structural food system reforms.

“The contrast with tobacco policy is instructive,” Hagenaars said. “If you Google tobacco, you don’t see an individual that has some health condition — you just see the product, and that’s whole policy focus. But if you Google obesity, you only see individuals who have a big body, and that makes people think about individuals, rather than focusing on the food industry.”

‘Cheap, Hyperpalatable Food Products’

On the other hand, the soaring popularity of GLP-1s could engender a scientific paradigm shift, aligning the understanding of obesity more closely with addiction models (eg, the depiction of UPFs as addictive, industrially engineered substances), according to Hagenaars and Schmidt. It could also lead to a decrease in consumer demand for UPFs, which is already happening. The food industry is responding by reformulating UPFs into smaller portion sizes, and supermarkets have begun to sell “GLP-1 friendly” foods in smaller packages, with protein and fiber additives.

“GLP-1s are a welcome medical innovation for treating the end-stage metabolic diseases produced by a UPF diet (diabetes, kidney disease, fatty liver, heart disease, and some cancers),” Schmidt said. But they don’t address a food environment “dominated by an industry whose primary goal is to remain profitable by saturation marketing of cheap, hyperpalatable food products that are harming population health.”

UPF regulations should include options such as “soda taxes, front-of-package warning labels on the most harmful UPFs, restrictions on child-targeted marketing, removing UPFs from school lunches, and removing the most harmful UPFs from workplace and federal food program procurement,” she said.

Furthermore, she added, “Health systems should take steps to ‘walk the talk’ by removing the unhealthiest UPFs from their food outlets.” The University of California San Francisco stopped selling sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in 2015, and evaluation studies showed that employees who were drinking a lot of SSBs reduced their consumption by large amounts, and experienced decreases in waist circumference and insulin resistance within 10 months. “Every health system should be looking at what foods it procures with an eye toward leading by example.”

Personal Behavior and Decisions ‘Still Matter’

Changing eating behavior has never simply been a matter of “trying harder,” said Robyn Pashby, PhD, research assistant professor of psychology at F. Edward Hebért School of Medicine at Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, Maryland, and member of the National Board of Directors at Obesity Action Coalition.

“All our behaviors are shaped by powerful neurobiological signals, reward pathways, and our environments,” she told Medscape Medical News. “The authors argue that GLP-1s could make the role of commercial food systems more visible and move public discourse away from individual blame. That is an important and potentially stigma-reducing reframing.”

That, she noted, “we need to be careful not to replace one overly simple story with another. ‘It’s all personal responsibility’ is wrong and harmful. But ‘it’s all the food industry’ is also incomplete.”

Obesity is shaped and influenced by myriad factors, including genetics, biology, stress, trauma, medications, sleep, social determinants of health, stigma, marketing, and culture, as well as individual behaviors, she said. “The existence of influence, however, does not mean the absence of choice. What it does mean is that the experience of ‘choice’ is not equal or the same for everyone.”

“People still make decisions and behavior still matters,” she continued. “The question is, ‘How do we help people have more agency in an environment that is actively working against them?’ The goal is not to dismiss the importance of personal decision-making. It is to understand the biological, environmental, and psychological forces influencing those decisions.”

Hagenaars, Schmidt, and Pashby reported having no relevant conflicts of interest.

Marilynn Larkin, MA, is an award-winning medical writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Medscape Medical News and its sister publication MDedge, The Lancet (where she was a contributing editor), and Reuters Health.