Hot topic: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs – the gender divide

Many more women are taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs than men. 

That’s the fascinating take-out from a recent analysis of more than 100,000 people taking the drugs privately in the UK, by a think tank called The Health Foundation. 

It wasn’t just a small weighting: for every man taking drugs GLP-1s like Wegovy and Mounjaro privately in the UK, four women are doing so. 

Now we can all guess why this is the case. Society puts much more pressure on women to be slim than men.  

And men are perhaps more laissez faire about their health than women – needing a shove to go to the doctor, for instance. 

But what’s arguably more interesting than the cause of this disparity, is the effect. 

Because if GLP-1s really are transformative for health – cutting the chance not only of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but also other big killers such as cancer – then this transformative impact is going to benefit far more women than men. 

Or to put it another way, far fewer men than women. 

This matters because there is already what might be termed a “health gap” between men and women, in the richer world anyway, that results in men dying sooner than women. 

In the UK, life expectancy at birth is currently 83 for women but only 79 for men. 

There’s ongoing discussion about why this is the case. The difference has long been assumed to be biologically innate. But there is growing evidence that where men take good care of themselves, the life expectancy gap narrows considerably. So, behaviour is very important too. 

If this pattern of many more women than men using GLP-1s continued at scale over the long term, then the result could be to pull these life expectancy figures even further apart. 

In other words, weight loss drugs could result in women living even longer than they do now, while men get ‘left behind’. 

There’s another angle here – a commercial one.  

If so few men are taking these drugs compared to women, yet we know they are just as likely to be overweight or obese by middle age, then aren’t the makers of GLP-1s missing a trick?  

The Health Foundation’s report, which also found a class divide in GLP-1 usage, can be found here: https://www.health.org.uk/press-office/press-releases/new-data-reveal-inequalities-in-access-to-private-glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-as-demand-surges 

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