Until around 2021 “food noise” was simply the sound of somebody scratching about in a box of popcorn in the cinema. Or perhaps the sizzle of bacon rashers in a pan. But with the advent of weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide (it was originally licensed in 2017 as the diabetes drug Ozempic and then again, at a higher dosage, as the weight-loss drug Wegovy, in 2021), food noise became widely recognized as the enemy—the constant chatter about food in the mind, the internal voice of constant craving, which these drugs, fans claim, silence.
This is now the basis of the multibillion-dollar weight-loss drug industry. The Danish manufacturer of Wegovy, Novo Nordisk, is now valued at more than half a trillion dollars, more than the rest of Denmark’s economy combined.
