For a few months now, a new question has been coming up at the California restaurants I work with: how much more can a customer still eat? More and more diners are ordering less, sharing dishes, or skipping dessert. A weekly injection has begun to alter the size of people's appetites, and with it, a way of understanding the restaurant business built over decades on the assumption that there's always room for a little more.
California is where I've started to see it most clearly, but Barcelona is not that far behind. The names Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro keep popping up at meals, in work conversations, at tables where someone explains, with growing ease, that they're on treatment. We haven't reached American levels yet, but it's hard to imagine restaurants not being affected. If people are starting to change their eating habits, sooner or later menus will have to learn to respond to this new kind of appetite.
If people are starting to change their eating habits, sooner or later menus will have to learn to respond to this new kind of appetite.
Drugs based on GLP-1 intervene in mechanisms related to glucose, satiety, and reward. Semaglutide and tirzepatide slow gastric emptying and also affect brain circuits linked to appetite. Many people, however, describe the effect in a much simpler way: they think less about food and certain foods lose some of the appeal they once had. This does not necessarily mean ceasing to be hungry. Sometimes, it means feeling hungry in a different way.
This change also modifies what one craves. Many people explain that they prefer fresher or more nutritious foods, while ultra-processed foods, abundant portions, or especially fatty dishes lose appeal — they can even become harder to tolerate. It's as if the drug were rewarding broccoli and punishing brownies without ever having read a single nutrition manual.
The industry has caught on fast. In the United States, data already points to a reduction in the purchase of sweets and snacks among people taking these drugs (about 30 million people), while major brands are beginning to adapt their offerings with smaller portions, more fiber, and, above all, more protein. Nestlé has developed products specifically designed for this consumer, and Healthy Choice, owned by food giant Conagra, already identifies some of its products as "GLP-1 friendly."
Supermarket labels also tell you a lot about where food trends are heading. In Barcelona, while not directly attributable to GLP-1s, there's one trend that's hard to ignore: protein. Suddenly, yogurts, desserts, breads, snacks, and all kinds of products announce in huge letters that they are "rich in protein," as if any food now had to present its gym credentials. After decades spent trying to convince us to eat just one more fry, the industry is now also gearing up for a consumer who looks at food differently.
The shift is showing up in even more unexpected places. In the United States, there has been talk of an increase in belt sales, an almost comical consequence of bodies changing faster than wardrobes. But the most interesting transformation is not seen in the supermarket or clothing. It's happening in people's minds, and it has a name that's gone from virtually unknown to everywhere in just a few years: food noise.
Food noise is that background noise that turns food into an almost permanent presence.
Food noise is that background noise that turns food into an almost permanent presence. "What will I have for lunch? What if I have a chocolate croissant for a snack? Better order two desserts so I can try more." When you live with this noise for years, it's easy to think that thin people simply have more discipline. Oprah Winfrey has explained how GLP-1 treatment made her see a much more unsettling possibility. Maybe some people weren't resisting temptation better; maybe temptation simply wasn't taking up as much space in their heads to begin with.
There is a concept from neuroscience that helps explain what might be happening: salience. It describes the extent to which a stimulus stands out among everything else and manages to grab our attention. A bottle of water can go unnoticed after drinking and become almost the only thing we see when we are very thirsty. The object has not changed; the importance the brain gives it has changed. Something similar happens with food. A cookie or a bag of fries can end up taking up a surprisingly large amount of mental space, even before hunger becomes intense.
It is at this point that Ozempic and other similar drugs stop being just a story about weight. For decades we have tried to modify our relationship with food by changing its meaning. This is healthy, this makes you fat, I can afford this, I have earned this. We have built an entire moral architecture around what we should want. GLP-1s introduce an almost inverse possibility. First, salience can decrease, and with it, the conditions under which we decide can change. Maybe part of what we've spent years calling discipline was really just living with very different levels of salience.
Byung-Chul Han has repeatedly written about an economy that competes for our attention, because whatever manages to capture it stands a good chance of shaping our desire as well. The food industry has known this for decades. Colors, textures, smells, sugar, fat, and constant advertising compete for one food to stand out a little more than the next. What is fascinating about GLP-1s is that, in some people, they seem to intervene before this battle becomes conscious. They don't teach you to ignore the craving — they simply make it call out less loudly in the first place.
That's why their impact on how we eat out could end up being much bigger than just leaving half a plate behind. We are talking about people ordering less, choosing different foods, splitting a portion, or discovering that a glass of wine is no longer essential. And the same question starts showing up outside the world of food, too. Semaglutide is also being studied in relation to alcohol use disorder after some trials have observed reductions in the desire to drink and in certain consumption patterns.
But the fact that a drug can dampen the intensity of a craving doesn't automatically make that a good thing.
But the fact that a drug can dampen the intensity of a craving doesn't automatically make that a good thing. If a hormone can make a thought lose importance or a temptation almost disappear, what exactly happens to willpower? The person still makes the final decision, but the forces pushing them are no longer the same. And here an even more uncomfortable frontier opens up: where do we draw the line between treating a compulsion and optimizing a person to desire "better"?
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a society where soma served to dull discomfort and modify the way individuals experienced reality. Ozempic is, obviously, something else entirely. But Huxley formulated a question that today seems strangely contemporary. What happens to willpower when we can intervene pharmacologically in what we feel, desire, or think?
Perhaps GLP-1s will end up changing portions, menus, and eating habits in the city. But the debate they open goes much further than gastronomy. In reality, it is a question that belongs far more to philosophy than to pharmacy. What happens to freedom when what we feel are truly our own (desire, attention, even choice itself) can be shaped before we are aware of it?