A Tale of Two Hackers: Junk Food and Ozempic

We’ve all heard about it by now — the miracle drug. Ozempic. Your buddy that could never seem to shed his gut? He’s down fifteen pounds and looking fantastic. For those of you who haven’t heard, or perhaps those of you living too salubriously to care, Ozempic is a drug to help type 2 diabetics manage their blood sugar levels. It also happens to generally reduce food cravings, diabetes or not. Naturally, it has caught on as a generic weight loss drug. As of the time of my writing this, there is massive demand for the drug and a worldwide shortage.  

To be frank, when I heard about this new miracle weight loss drug, my gut reaction was revulsion. My initial skepticism probably stemmed from my first exposure to Ozempic — like many, I encountered it by way of influencers hellbent on conforming to the next hot trend du jour in beauty. What can I say? It’s tough to be convinced of the merits of the newest miracle drug when it’s coming from lips with two syringes too many of filler. 

Eating healthfully and in moderation is a lifestyle, not something that can be “fixed” by a drug, I thought to myself. But I let those initial feelings pass. Let’s look at it a little more sympathetically: Ozempic can certainly benefit those where lifestyle changes are not an option and perhaps kickstart a healthy lifestyle for those where it is. If it is really the miracle drug it is touted to be, the future will be one with significantly less heart disease. Ozempic is reducing obesity. PepsiCo and Mondelēz, on the other hand, are promoting it. Why not instead direct our ire at the root of the obesity epidemic? Because, let’s be honest. Future generations will not look back kindly on the trash these companies try and pass off as food. Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, Cholesteros. History books will likely equate it all to marketing cigarettes to children. 

In fact, there are food scientists working full-time on making these so-called savory foods as addictive as humanly possible. It is therefore instructive to call them as they are: hackers. Specifically, they are able to operate like hackers in the nineties. Back then, there existed little in the way of defenses or safeguards or multi-billion dollar cybersecurity budgets. Indeed, the cybersecurity field as we know it was nearly twenty years away. The nineties Internet was the Wild West! And hackers easily capitalized on the lack of defenses. 

In the same vein, processed savory foods tap into our basest cravings. But unlike intrepid cypherpunks hacking the mainframe to uncover global conspiracies, these food scientists have a far less noble goal: hacking the malleable brains of children. Namely, converting them into type 2 diabetics before they reach thirty.  But when dealing with food hackers or computer hackers or any kind of hacker, it makes no difference; the first step in dealing with an attacker is identifying the vulnerability in the system. 

First, we can start with color. A great chef once told me, “You eat with your eyes first.” Unsurprisingly, chips and candies are lacquered with greens greener than a bird’s-eye view of the Amazon rainforest — and probably a light dose of carcinogens to produce such a vibrant hue. After enticing you to buy the food, you must, of course, enjoy it. Enter the bliss factor. Paleolithic humans developed a positive association with salt, sugar, and fat. The flavors signaled high-energy food in a time when food was scarce. Bliss-factor-optimized foods beguile the primitive mind: they transmit the same signals to our brain, yet rather than offering a nutritious and efficient meal, the body receives a high-calorie, non-nutritive jolt! (often prompting a profound nap, indicating that merely consuming this food is taxing).

The hacker, similarly, sniffs honest packets outbound to the server. He then replaces the genuine payload with a malicious one of his own design, manipulating the control flow of the server code. Cheetos, for example, take this a step further, being deliberately engineered to confuse the somatosensory system by quickly dissolving upon contact with saliva. The tongue then fails to perform its ancient task of gauging the incoming caloric load. Without this information, the brain will continue to secrete ghrelin and other hormones that stimulate appetite for longer than it otherwise would. Food scientists may euphemistically refer to this process as “vanishing caloric density.” And just as effortlessly as those calories vanish cholesterol materializes. Obviously, it encourages overeating and the virtuous cycle of spending.

If we are going to allow addictive junk food, best understood as malware for the digestive system, to line our grocery store shelves, then it makes perfect sense to have a drug that prevents cravings. Upon reflection, I realized I was being unfair to Ozempic.  I would even go as far to say that we shouldn’t stop at Ozempic. A step in the right direction, although it only controls appetite in general, and does not target problematic consumables, nor does it improve the flavor of healthy alternatives. 

Currently, lifestyle choices and discipline remain our best defenses against processed foods. My hope is that some ragtag biotech startup comes along and develops a next-generation Ozempic that acts as antivirus to food malware by patching the biological glitches that these savory food companies, these BMI maximizers, continue to assault without mitigation. Channeling an optimistic Ted Chiang, perhaps the drug could induce a gustatory agnosia when consuming junk food, neutralizing the evolutionary misfirings it exploits.

Food scientists — well, the ones working in the savory food industry — are hackers. In security parlance, we’d probably call them black hat hackers, or perhaps grey hat if we wanted to be charitable. Because, no, PepsiCo and other processed food peddlers aren’t just selling you food. That’s what the sweet elderly lady at your local farmers market does. They are exploit development shops operating at the scale of the NSO Group. And it’s time we beat them at their own game. Hopefully, Ozempic will pave the way for a new era of biological defenses.