Los Angeles private school students’ appetite for Ozempic

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Peter Kiefer also recently wrote about A new private school arms race in Hollywood.

“I was screaming internally.”

During the last academic year Dr. Allie Melendez she taught sex education and wellness workshops at many of the most elite independent schools in Los Angeles, and every time she left one of them, the pit in her stomach got a little bigger. Something was wrong.

Not just in one of these schools, but in almost all of them.

“I have a slide in one of my presentations that shows the Ozempic logo, and I ask students, ‘What do they know about it?’” Melendez tells me. She asks the question when she gets to a section of her presentation where she explores notions of beauty in media and advertising. “I ask them with a show of hands—the slide actually says to give them a thumbs up—if they’ve considered, are currently using, or are in the process of accessing Ozempic.

“More than a third of the students who were in their final year gave the thumbs up,” he adds. “Honestly, it’s probably more because I’m sure some students didn’t feel comfortable admitting it.”

If it had only happened at one school, she might have considered it an aberration. But Melendez kept showing the slide and examining students as she moved around Los Angeles

As the school year progressed, she kept getting similar results—at seven of the top private academies—and it troubled her deeply. While she was hurting internally, “on the outside I was saying to the students, ‘Thank you all for sharing.’” (Melendez declined to publicly name the schools because she didn’t want to jeopardize her ability to help students or her relationship with any one school.)

Melendez knows that world. A graduate of UCLA Lab School and then Windward High School, she is a product of elite Westside schools and understands the myriad of pressures students face. As a Windward student (class of 2014), she saw firsthand the eating disorders that some of her peers suffered from. That experience inspired her to pursue a master’s in education, a doctorate in human sexuality, and a career as an educational consultant.

Thumbs up isn’t exactly a scientific poll, and Melendez understands that. But early data on young people’s use of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro (known as semaglutides or GLP-1) is consistent with rising use. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of people ages 12 to 25 who received a prescription for diabetes or weight-loss drugs rose from 8,722 to 60,567 per month, according to a recent University of Michigan study report. This represents an almost 600 percent increase, with the majority of prescriptions being given to women.

It doesn’t take a concerned therapist to realize that combining this new class of injectable drugs with a generation of teenagers who are increasingly plugged into their phones and trying to enter adulthood in a body-conscious city like Los Angeles could potentially help with some undesirable effects.

The pressure to look good starts early: Sephora gift cards are the go-to birthday gift for teens across Los Angeles, and Brazilian beauty brand Sol de Janeiro’s Bum Bum cream reigns supreme among them. hot beauty product for the junior set. (The scented cream costs $48 and, according to its website, “helps visibly smooth and tighten the appearance of skin.”)

Los Angeles full of stars is already occupied by semaglutides and talk about it openly, and everyone from restaurant owners to personal trainers to plastic surgeons are feeling the effects of a thinning clientele. It’s not an exaggeration to say that many of the incredibly shrinking entertainment executives, parents of prep school children, are also experimenting with weight-loss drugs.

Given that sex education and human development programs emphasize strong body positivity and are aimed at removing shame from appearance, it’s easy to miss the impact of mixed messages on impressionable minds.

“I think it’s a real problem,” Melendez says. “As a Western society, especially in a city that’s the capital of entertainment, we value thinness, and I think that’s why it’s such a problem.”

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Second Generation AngelenoMelendez grew up in Cheviot Hills. She is the daughter of two advertising executives, which gave her a keen understanding of the power of persuasion.

In recent months, she has noticed how aggressive and pervasive the marketing of anti-obesity drugs has become, even in satirical form. “Family member I did this organic ad about Ozempic and then South Park I dedicated an entire episode to it,” she says. “Growing up in Los Angeles, especially on the Westside, you just can’t avoid the media.”

In South Park episode – yes, satirical – Cartman is denied access to semaglutide under insurance, and the other kids conspire to find a way to make sure he gets the drugs.

Especially on social media, where – according to data – teenagers spend almost five hours a day American Psychological Association, Ozempic and other GLP-1s are ubiquitous. Type “semaglutide” into Meta’s advertising library and you’ll find thousands of ads on Facebook and Instagram promoting these new drugs. As manufacturers like Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant that created Ozempic and Wegovy, struggle to keep up with demand, the FDA is allowing compounding pharmacies to make weight-loss drugs. That’s led to digital, free-for-all Hawking GLP-1 models.

There are over 91,500 of them TIK Tok videos with the hashtag #Ozempic (and many others with some variations). TikTok removed the ability to see the total number of views of the hashtag in February, but not before the 2023 study in Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Public Health of the top 100 videos tagged #Ozempic. The authors found that these videos amassed nearly 70 million views, more than 225,000 shares, more than 2 million likes, and nearly 55,000 comments. Eighty of the 100 videos had a female presenter; 86 of them were created by consumers, not healthcare professionals.

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For everyone who has grown up in Los Angeles, the appeal of drugs like Ozempic to students at elite private schools probably comes as no surprise. Earlier this year, Reported drama unfolding behind the scenes at some of these schools. Although the spread of GLP-1 is not included in the story, it seems to be barely out of the picture. As I noted at the time, adolescents who attend high-achieving schools often are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and abuse psychoactive substances two or even three times more than the national average.

These GLP-1 drugs may have been designed to treat type 2 diabetes, but they also suppress appetite and slow the rate at which food moves into the small intestine. After the FDA approved the use of these drugs as anti-obesity drugs, there was a huge increase in demand, so much so that it was difficult for diabetics to find the drug. In 2023, Novo Nordisk reported that sales of its obesity drugs increased by 154 percent, with the US market accounting for more than half of Novo Nordisk’s total sales.

Hollywood has drawn a huge amount of attention to celebrity drug users, but there are no city-level data to date on how Los Angeles as a whole has embraced them. As a state, California ranks relatively low nationally in GLP-1 prescriptions (just 5.5 prescriptions per 1,000 residents, compared with Kentucky, which tops the list with 21 prescriptions per 1,000 residents). But it’s easy to imagine that the city’s wealthier neighborhoods at least somewhat mirror New York’s Upper East Side, which last year saw a highest Ozempic consumption in the Big Apple.

As the entertainment capital of Los Angeles, there is a warped approach to these drugs—and that is a problem. “There is a level of risk in all schools, but it is especially so in private schools and high-achieving public schools because there is a culture of high achievement that reinforces it,” he says. Krystyna Króla Manhattan Beach psychotherapist whose practice treats dozens of children with a variety of issues, including eating disorders. King has yet to see an increase in the number of patients she works with who are taking the medication, a sentiment echoed by several Los Angeles school therapists I contacted.

But King predicts that could soon change. “As a culture, we’re swept up in these fads, and this is one of those universal miracle solutions. I fear that over time — like vaping or social media — it’s a great thing on the surface, and then we start to see the dangers.”

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Last yearfor the first time in more than a decade, the American Academy of Pediatrics released new guidelines for the treatment of childhood obesity, which included the use of anti-obesity medications in children 12 years of age and older. Certainly, many children in Los Angeles who struggle with obesity are coming off their medications out of medical necessity; But the richer people are, the thinner they usually are.

After speaking with Melendez, I reached out to family members and friends’ children who attend some of the independent schools in Los Angeles. Of the dozen or so students I reached, half said they knew at least one person who took Ozempic or one of the other popular antiobesity drugs. “If you have money and you’re overweight, you’re definitely taking this medication,” says one student, who added, “there are ways to do it without your parents knowing.”

These methods include navigating the so-called “dark web” to purchase them or playing in the growing telehealth industry that has made it much easier to obtain certain medications.

Research is still ongoing into the long-term effects of these drugs on teens. Experts are reportedly concerned about everything from the drugs’ impact on growth and development, to reduced bone mineralization, reproductive problems, and even harassment of teens participating in sports such as gymnastics and wrestling. “We wrote this paper to say, ‘Hey, let’s think about these things before we start prescribing these drugs to kids.’” Dan Cooperpediatric pulmonologist at UCI Health in Irvine, California, and author of the “2023 Call to Action,” she told NBC News.

Melendez, as an external consultant, found herself in a difficult situation. She says she tried to warn several school therapists about her concerns, but notes that she had to be tactful about the information she shared given privacy concerns. “I tried to get kids to think critically about issues that plague our society today, like the use of Ozempic,” she says, “but I wouldn’t tell (staff) therapists in schools everything that kids would share in my workshops.”

So why did she decide to reveal it now?

“We just don’t know what the long-term side effects of all this will be.”

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