Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

by Johann Hari

We built a food system that poisons us—and then, to keep us away from the avalanche of bad food, we decided to inject ourselves with a different potential poison, one that puts us off all food.

Joseph Stalin reputedly said that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is just a statistic. I guess I had known since I was a teenager that the major scientific bodies in the world warn that obesity kills large numbers of people every year—but in my twenties and thirties, it had seemed like an abstraction.