Grant: CG: Moving Upstream- Struct. Det. of Health-Commercial Det. of Health Inequities

Medications known as Glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, like Ozempic or Wegovy, are used to treat type 2 diabetes and/or to help with weight loss. The companies that make these medications shape how society discusses and understands weight, hunger, eating, and weight stigma, or the negative attitudes held toward body weight. Drug marketing presents weight, eating, and hunger as forms of illness needing medication and argue portraying weight in terms of disease reduces stigma. Shaping social understandings of weight and eating in terms of necessarily needing drug treatment is referred to as pharmaceuticalization. Another form of pharmaceuticalization is broadening the criteria used to prescribe medications, so greater segments of the population purchase them. A focus on expanding pharmaceutical treatment can shift the focus from addressing societal inequities and social determinants of health. In this way, how pharmaceutical companies shape our understandings of weight, hunger, and the need for drugs represent an influential commercial determinant of health. In this study, we will examine how drug companies, and the organizations they sponsor, construct or describe weight, hunger, and stigma. We will do this by reviewing and analyzing the companies' online materials as well as the materials of the organizations they sponsor. Secondly, we will determine how many, and which, people in Canada are being targeted for use of these medications based on criteria developed by company-sponsored clinical practice guidelines. We will apply these criteria to a population-based survey already collected by Statistics Canada. Findings from this study will reveal how pharmaceutical companies inform societal understandings of health, worthiness, and how we nourish ourselves. We will share our findings with partners in the nutrition, eating disorder, mental health, and weight acceptance communities, with particular attention to potential inequitable impacts on equity-seeking groups.