Check It Out: Do you miss Super Bowl ads selling beer and trucks?
By Joan Janzen
Someone posted this after the Super Bowl: “I miss the days when the Super Bowl sold beer and trucks. Pushing big pharma weight-loss injections while impressionable children watch feels wrong.” Many sports enthusiasts agreed, including Dr. Suneel Dhand.
He expressed his thoughts online regarding the tennis star who promoted weight-loss injections. “Her success was built on discipline and relentless personal effort, qualities that are becoming increasingly unfashionable in modern culture,” he noted. “We are watching icons of earned excellence being used to sell the idea that the hard parts of health can be bypassed.” He also mentioned it may be linked to the tennis pro’s husband, who is a major investor in GLP-1.
Advertisements of this nature aren’t new. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, iconic stars like Clark Gable, Lucille Ball, and Bob Hope endorsed various brands of cigarettes.
However, this commercial didn’t make Sports Net’s top five ratings. Instead, they selected commercials that were funny and entertaining, which is what fans seem to prefer. But Dr. Dhand believes the issue runs much deeper than one advertisement or one athlete. He sees it as a cultural decline, sending a message that strength can be replaced with suppression.
These drugs were originally designed specifically for people with advanced diabetes. Sadly, the doctor sees the drugs being not only normalized but glamorized as a lifestyle solution for teens and young adults.
A comment posted in response to Dr. Dhand read, “I work in the OR. Not only are many of the patients on these medications, but half the staff are as well, most because they were five to ten kilos overweight.”
The doctor’s newsletter reported, “When I ask patients, ‘What are you doing for weight loss?’ … more often than not the response now is, ‘I’m thinking about Ozempic.’” He said not only has the answer become common, but at the same time there is no mention of changing habits. “The conversation skips straight past effort and lands squarely on medication,” he wrote.
The side effects are becoming more well known: muscle is lost, bones weaken, organs such as the pancreas and thyroid have problems, metabolism slows down, and dependency on the medication grows.
And what happens when the drugs are stopped? Weight loss returns, and over time, muscle mass, strength, and bone mass diminish.
He concluded his evaluation by saying, “We are medicating a problem created by a declining culture, unnatural environment, and a mental and spiritual health crisis, and then congratulating ourselves for the solution. We are quietly teaching young people that effort is optional, that discomfort is abnormal, and our bodies cannot be trusted without chemical assistance.”
The cultural shift has become apparent. Responsibility and blame are directed outward, and blame replaces responsibility and effort. “Shortcuts don’t build resilience; they erode it. This is not just an individual issue; it’s a cultural and spiritual issue,” he surmised.
There are also complications associated with these injections, and the UK’s centralized healthcare system makes it easy to keep track of the data. The number of gallbladder surgeries recorded by NHS England in 2024–2025 was at its highest peak in the past decade. Since the drugs were approved in the UK for weight loss, there has been a 13 percent increase in gallbladder operations, the highest number in the past decade.
The president of the Metabolic Specialist Society said he was doing more of these operations, with more and more people telling him they had taken weight-loss injections. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency updated its guidance on GLP-1 injections regarding the risk of acute pancreatitis, which is often linked to gallstones. Gallstones are hard deposits made of cholesterol and bile that form in the gallbladder.
Comments posted after the doctor’s observations were thought provoking. One read: “I work for general surgeons and surgical oncologists, and the increase in gallbladder surgery is alarming. Not all, but lots of clients affected are using GLP-1 meds. Coincidence?”
As a physician, Dr. Dhand continued to express his concerns. “A lot of people on this medication may not even be that overweight. A lot of people aren’t instituting lifestyle change and are losing muscle mass and are prone to bone issues,” he reported.
Nevertheless, the use of these injections is soaring and being dished out to millions of people. “This would have been unthinkable two or three decades ago,” he said, pointing out that the human mind always wants to take the path of least resistance. And yet your body can’t be tricked and eventually will fight back.
“Civilizations don’t decline because people suffer. They decline when people stop believing effort matters. This is going to backfire. I believe we are only at the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Dhand concluded.