Americans on weight-loss drugs aren’t just trimming their figures — they’re shrinking their grocery bills, too, according to a new study.
Households with members who start taking blockbuster GLP-1 appetite suppressants such as Ozempic and Wegovy slash food spending within months, with the steepest pullbacks hitting snacks and other calorie-rich products, Cornell University researchers found.
The study, published last week in the Journal of Marketing Research, showed that US households cut grocery spending by an average of 5.3% within six months of starting a GLP-1 drug.
Among higher-income households, the drop exceeded 8%.
Spending fell outside the supermarket, too.
Purchases at fast-food chains, coffee shops and other limited-service restaurants declined by about 8%, the researchers found.
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.
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.
That data allowed the team to compare households before and after medication use — and against similar households that never took the drugs — isolating changes tied to GLP-1 adoption.
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.
Even everyday staples took a hit. Purchases of bread, meat and eggs declined, showing that the shift in shopping habits wasn’t limited to indulgences.
Only a handful of categories moved in the opposite direction. Yogurt purchases rose the most, followed by fresh fruit, nutrition bars and meat snacks — and those increases were modest relative to the overall decline.
“The main pattern is a reduction in overall food purchases,” said researcher Sylvia Hristakeva.
“Only a small number of categories show increases, and those increases are modest relative to the overall decline.”
For households that stayed on the medication, the spending cuts persisted for at least a year.
But the changes weren’t permanent for everyone. Roughly one third of users stopped taking the drugs during the study period.
When they did, their food spending reverted to pre-adoption levels — and grocery baskets became slightly less healthy than before, driven in part by increased spending on candy and chocolate.
That rebound offers clues about what’s really driving the shift.
The authors cautioned they can’t fully separate the biological effects of GLP-1 drugs from other lifestyle changes users may make at the same time.
Still, the sharp drop in spending after starting — and the snap-back after stopping — points to appetite suppression as a key mechanism.
Weight loss drugs have rapidly spread across the country.
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.
Weight-loss users skew younger and wealthier, while people taking the GLP-1 drugs for diabetes — their original intended use — tend to be older and more evenly distributed across income groups.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
