In the early 1990s, the diet industry was under pressure.
Representative Ron Wyden began convening hearings in March 1990 titled “Deceptions and Fraud in the Diet Industry.” Weight Watchers went from a profit of $45 million dollars in 1992 to a $50 million dollar loss in 1994. Jenny Craig’s earnings went down by 84 percent in 1993. NutriSystem declared bankruptcy in 1993. The FTC filed deceptive advertising claims against both Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers. (1)
This low point for the diet industry led to a sustained campaign of misinformation and stigmatization and led to a partnership between Weight Watchers style diet companies with pharmaceutical companies selling diet pills. These partners used the same tactics oil companies would use to confuse the issue of climate change- lobbying members of Congress, funding fake “grassroots” campaigns, paying for scientists to write favorable papers to support them, placing members of their industry inside the regulatory and watchdog arms of the government.
The company selling diet pills was called Wyeth. And the diet pill was fen phen.
Wyeth has many other names through different mergers and sales of the company, but to keep it simple, I’m going to just refer to them as Wyeth.
We will be taking a deep dive into fen phen, because it is Wyeth’s campaign to have a version of fen phen called Redux approved by the FDA that set in motion an institutionalization of fat stigma as government policy, which we continue to see today.
Wyeth wanted to get into the business of selling diet drugs, specifically something they could combine with a drug they already had on the market called Pondimin, fenfluramine, the fen in fen phen. Pondimin worked partly by releasing serotonin into the bloodstream, the way SSRIs can work to treat depression. It’s major side effect was intense drowsiness. People couldn’t stay on the drug for very long because it caused them to sleep for 18 hours at a time.
Wyeth also had another drug that was very similar to Pondimin that they believed solved the drowsiness issue. It was called Redux, but it had not yet been approved by the FDA. (2)
The Food and Drug Administration was very hesitant at this time to approve drugs for weight loss. Many people were prescribed Dexedrine for weight loss in the 1930s – 1960s, which resulted in what came to be known as America’s first amphetamine epidemic.
Wyeth needed to overcome the FDA’s hesitance around diet drugs. They did this with a three pronged attack- pressure on the FDA by lobbying Congress, skewing the data on fen phen’s risks and side effects by hiding data and paying for bogus studies and papers, and by convincing the government and the public that being fat is a deadly disease killing hundreds of thousands of people every year.
1. Public Health Profiteering by James T. Bennett & Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Pgs 49-55
2. Dispensing with the Truth by Alicia Mundy. Pgs 37-38
The Recent History of Fat Stigma- Part 1
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