The article, co-authored with Maria Castellví Lloveras, a lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University, argues that the growing normalisation of GLP‑1 medications such as Ozempic reinforces dominant frameworks of rejection of excess weight. This conclusion is based on an analysis of user comments published in Spain’s mainstream digital press.
According to the authors, this generation of medications acting on the GLP‑1 hormone, such as Ozempic, has emerged not merely as a medical treatment, but as “moral technologies through which responsibility, effort and moral legitimacy are assessed and judged”. These conclusions are drawn from an analysis of 648 user comments published in nine articles in El Mundo, eight articles in El País and twelve articles in elDiario.es.
The communication experts have described the debate as “a shift between moral frameworks of individual responsibility and medicalised frameworks that view being overweight as a chronic condition requiring ongoing management”. Comments such as “fewer meals and more trainers” or “fewer pills and more treadmills”, according to the researchers, moralise weight loss. “These discourses associate excess weight with a lack of ethics,” they note.
Lara Martín Vicario argues that public discourse in Spain is structurally fatphobic: “GLP‑1 drugs reflect a desire for thinness that never truly disappeared, but with one condition: it must be a deserved thinness, achieved through effort and sacrifice,” she explains.
The analysis also highlights that pharmacological intervention is widely perceived as a form of “cheating”. Lara Martín Vicario expands on this stigma: “Even if you have lost weight and stopped being fat, it would still be considered wrong because you have not done it in the ‘right way’,” she adds.
According to the authors, the study shows that in public debate “there is no space for alternative discourses that advocate acceptance of excess weight”. “The absence of discourse around the acceptance of excess weight is striking and reduces the possibility of imagining a world in which this is not a problem that must be treated,” they argue.
Good and bad users
The analysis draws a clear distinction between so-called “good” and “bad” users. “Good users” are those who, due to their health condition, need Ozempic and are socially accepted “because of their efforts to lose weight”. As the researchers point out, “This reinforces the notion that being overweight is not a state that can simply be accepted, but one that must be changed at all costs.” This is what they define as the concept of the “good fat person”.
“Bad users”, by contrast, are those who seek a quick solution without any effort or sacrifice. “They make access more difficult for those who genuinely need it, as their use is purely aesthetic,” the authors state.
Another conclusion of the article is that the debate around GLP-1 medical treatment focuses on weight reduction rather than on the management of type 2 diabetes, the condition for which these drugs were originally developed.
Scepticism towards pharmaceutical companies
The academic article notes that users express rejection of the pharmaceutical industry, which they perceive as acting as a “loudspeaker” for its own economic interests. “Users do not criticise the marginalisation of fat bodies, but rather the manipulation of consumers by pharmaceutical companies,” the authors note. “At a broader social level, there is a general rejection of medication, which is seen as a trap for people who neither know how nor wish to take care of themselves,” explains Martín Vicario.
The communication experts highlight that the study’s findings “invite reflection on how new pharmacological treatments operate not only within the biomedical field, but also within the cultural and moral systems that shape their public reception”. In the case of GLP-1 drugs, they conclude that social discourse continues to revolve around “weight reduction as the primary goal and fails to incorporate perspectives that recognise body diversity, while also hindering alternative interventions that include body acceptance or the adoption of healthy lifestyles”.
