We are entering summer time, but before that, it is also “report time”, with many great publications making an update on what has happened since the start of the year. And today, I’d like to focus on GLP-1, which, alongside the broader topic of healthy ageing, is the hottest thing agitating the food industry.

1 – GLP-1 adoption is still rising fast in the US… and users remain under treatment

Gallup recently published a survey on the share of US adults currently taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss (excluding those using them for diabetes, which helps explain the slightly lower figure compared to other benchmarks). Adoption is still rising fast, with currently 11% of US adults under treatment, compared to 8% in 2025 and 3% in 2024.

To put that in context, this represents a massive rise from 7 to about 28M users in two years.

Beyond these impressive figures, the most striking point for me on this graph is not the rise of users, which is not so much a surprise. It is the absence of a widening gap between those currently using GLP-1 and those who have ever used it. It grew from 3 to 4% between 2024 and 2026. This means that for the past two years, a large majority of users have remained under treatment:

• This comes as a small surprise, as treatment adherence is often low and declining.
• It also begins to address users’ willingness to remain under treatment over the long term.

One hypothesis could be that, unlike other treatments, notably preventive ones, consumers here see immediate results when they start using GLP-1 drugs (and also when they stop).

2 – GLP-1 macro effects are visible with a 9% decrease in adult obesity in the US

The US obesity rate has dropped from 39.9% in 2022 to 36.4% in 2026, a full 3.5-point decline in four years, after decades of almost uninterrupted increase. That’s a 9% decline in adult obesity in just four years, which translates to about 9M people.

GLP-1 adoption, however, is not affecting diabetes prevalence, which continues to rise. There is probably a delayed effect here: weight can change very quickly, but its effects on overall health, and more specifically on diabetes, persist. We could, however, expect a decrease in diabetes in the next decade.

3 – GLP-1 beyond the US: a similar pattern

We’ve flagged this before, but it’s worth repeating: the UK, several EU countries, and a growing list of national health systems are moving toward reimbursement or subsidised access for GLP-1 drugs.

This will push penetration well beyond the “wealthy self-payer” segment that has driven adoption so far:

• Of the 2.4 million British GLP-1 users in 2024, only 220,000 were doing so through the National Health Service (NHS).
• France has become the first EU country to reimburse GLP-1 drugs this year. Also, 19 countries in Europe and Africa are using France’s price negotiations on medicines to determine their own reimbursement, which means many more users across these regions.
• India, with its specific patent laws, now has generic versions of Ozempic available at prices as low as 14$/month.

The bottom line is that Europe is following the US with a 3-year gap and that Asia, notably India, is at an inflexion point.

4 – What’s next?

Beyond GLP-1 adoption and its impact on the food industry (fewer snacks, more protein, more fibre, more than 90% of consumers looking for dedicated products), we can wonder what the long-term impacts are.

A new survey is quite telling of how the use of GLP-1 injectable drugs is changing consumer perception: 75% of current GLP-1 injection users say they are “very comfortable” giving themselves a regular injection for their health or appearance, versus just ~30% among the general population.

Once people cross the psychological barrier of self-injecting for health or appearance, they don’t seem to go back and are probably looking for more. That’s what we already pointed out in our insight on peptides (injectable proteins with unproven scientific effects on health, muscle gain, cognitive health, and appearance), which are becoming increasingly popular in the US.

GLP-1 has unleashed something much bigger than “just” a global weight-loss phenomenon. What it has really done is normalise self-injection as a routine health and appearance behaviour, not a medical exception. With 75% of users saying they have “no issue with needles,” the barrier that used to separate food, supplements, and pharma starts to dissolve. And that’s precisely the space peptides and other biologics are moving into, a space which will be very tough for the food industry to navigate. Food companies that keep watching GLP-1 as a simple “category disruption” problem may be missing the bigger picture: a slow loss of relevance in how people think about food and health.