published last week in the Journal of Marketing Research<\/a>, showed that US households cut grocery spending by an average of 5.3% within six months of starting a GLP-1 drug.<\/p>\nSome Americans\u2019 grocery bills are getting lighter \u2014 and drugs like Ozempic are a big reason why. _KUBE_ \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
Among higher-income households, the drop exceeded 8%.<\/p>\n
Spending fell outside the supermarket, too. <\/p>\n
Purchases at fast-food chains, coffee shops and other limited-service restaurants declined by about 8%, the researchers found.<\/p>\n
The paper linked survey data on GLP-1 use with detailed transaction records from tens of thousands of households, offering one of the clearest real-world looks yet at how the drugs reshape everyday food buying.<\/p>\n
Unlike earlier studies that relied on self-reported diets, the researchers analyzed actual purchases collected by Numerator, which tracks grocery and restaurant transactions for a nationally representative panel of about 150,000 US households.<\/p>\n
That data allowed the team to compare households before and after medication use \u2014 and against similar households that never took the drugs \u2014 isolating changes tied to GLP-1 adoption.<\/p>\n
Households that start taking blockbuster GLP-1 appetite suppressants like Ozempic and Wegovy slash food spending within months. Lana Pietukhova \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
Ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods saw the sharpest declines. Spending on savory snacks dropped about 10%, with similarly large decreases in sweets, baked goods and cookies.<\/p>\n
Even everyday staples took a hit. Purchases of bread, meat and eggs declined, showing that the shift in shopping habits wasn\u2019t limited to indulgences.<\/p>\n
Only a handful of categories moved in the opposite direction. Yogurt purchases rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks \u2014 and those increases were modest relative to the overall decline.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe main pattern is a reduction in overall food purchases,\u201d said researcher Sylvia Hristakeva.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly a small number of categories show increases, and those increases are modest relative to the overall decline.\u201d<\/p>\n
For households that stayed on the medication, the spending cuts persisted for at least a year.<\/p>\n
But the changes weren\u2019t permanent for everyone. Roughly one third of users stopped taking the drugs during the study period.<\/p>\n
The study found that U.S. households cut grocery spending by an average of 5.3% within six months of starting a GLP-1 drug. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels \u2014 and grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before, driven in part by increased spending on candy and chocolate.<\/p>\n
That rebound offers clues about what\u2019s really driving the shift.<\/p>\n
The authors cautioned they can\u2019t fully separate the biological effects of GLP-1 drugs from other lifestyle changes users may make at the same time.<\/p>\n
Still, the sharp drop in spending after starting \u2014 and the snap-back after stopping \u2014 points to appetite suppression as a key mechanism.<\/p>\n
Weight loss drugs have rapidly spread across the country. <\/p>\n
The share of US households reporting at least one GLP-1 user climbed from about 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid-2024, the Cornell researchers noted.<\/p>\n
Weight-loss users skew younger and wealthier, while people taking the GLP-1 drugs for diabetes \u2014 their original intended use \u2014 tend to be older and more evenly distributed across income groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Americans on weight-loss drugs aren\u2019t just trimming their figures \u2014 they\u2019re shrinking their grocery bills, too, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[64,63,99,37911,44894,137,490,7716],"class_list":{"0":"post-367342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-fast-food","12":"tag-food-trends","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-medication","15":"tag-ozempic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}