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Aimee Donnellan, HarperCollins, UK; St. Martin’s Press, US

I’m not looking to get into a debate about how well old comedy shows have aged. But when I rewatch Friends, I feel uncomfortable at how Monica is depicted as a younger person: not just overweight, but laughable, greedy, lazy and, frankly, unattractive.

More than two decades on from the final episode of the iconic series, I am optimistic that the tide is turning on how society responds to people who are overweight or have obesity. And I wonder if some of that is due to drugs like Ozempic.

This and other GLP-1 drugs, which mimic a gut hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, are the subject of Off the Scales: The inside story of Ozempic and the race to cure obesity. Its author is Aimee Donnellan, a Reuters columnist who covers the pharmaceutical industry. She sets out the highs and lows of the development of GLP-1s, and why she thinks they will transform medicine.

Obesity is clearly a significant problem: it is expected to affect over half the world’s population by 2050, by which time it will also cost the UK’s health services up to £10 billion a year. Effective interventions are sorely needed, given we now know that just telling people to exercise more self-control – and exercise more in general – hasn’t helped. Nor has shaming them.

Donnellan encourages us to understand people who are obese by highlighting obesity as a medical condition of modern times. She also movingly describes many case studies where people have become ill or experienced hardship because of their size. They often tried to lose weight, but we don’t choose our genes, which play a strong role in obesity.

Recognising that obesity can be linked to early-life trauma may further boost considerate thoughts. Then there are the junk food marketing campaigns, particularly rife in “food deserts” – typically low-income areas where healthy options are scarce.

At the end of 2017, Ozempic, the most famous GLP-1 drug, was approved for type 2 diabetes in the US. Almost as a side effect, it induced weight loss by reducing appetite, slowing the passage of food through the stomach and possibly even dampening the “food noise” behind persistent cravings. Treat obesity medically and you have a shot at improving the situation, just as with cancer, asthma and other conditions.

I agree with Donnellan that these drugs have transformed how we view and treat obesity. But I also think she presents them as a cure-all, when the World Health Organization recently stressed that the drugs should be rolled out alongside policy changes and timely preventive interventions.

What’s more, although Ozempic typically causes people to lose around 15 per cent of their body weight, this will not take someone with severe obesity down to a healthy size, and not everyone with obesity responds to the drugs. But Donnellan barely touches on these limitations.

She does, however, explain some of their other setbacks, particularly their gastrointestinal side effects, which can be intolerable. Donnellan also rightly outlines concerns about unsafe knock-off versions being sold online, people with low incomes missing out on the drugs in countries like the US and how beauty ideologies may become more harmful if already svelte celebrities take these drugs to be even more red carpet-ready.

While this is all very engaging, Off the Scales also has some fairly slow sections in which Donnellan explains how firms have battled over patents for these drugs, and who deserves recognition for their discovery or development.

But in her defence, this is useful information, driving home the message that drug development is rarely done for philanthropic reasons. While the people who have been helped by GLP-1s should arguably be at the heart of this success story, the global market for GLP-1 type drugs is estimated to reach about $100 billion by 2030, and, at the end of the day, it’s hard not to look at it as a business.

The issues Donnellan outlines will no doubt become more pronounced if the experimental weight-loss treatments in trials (which seem to be more effective and convenient than our current options) are approved. We mustn’t shy away from the concerns, but, for now, I am grateful to her for shining a light on what GLP-1 drugs have done: exposing the medical side of obesity that can be treated by infusing the right combination of hormones.