Why fork over thousands of dollars a month for prescription weight loss jabs when store-bought supplements claim to have the same effect?
Trendy GLP-1 supplements are being touted as “nature’s Ozempic”, promising to deliver a similar outcome as the wildly popular injectable — all for a fraction of the price.
Ozempic and sister drugs Wegovy and Mounjaro are semaglutides that mimic the GLP-1 hormone to slow digestion, help the pancreas produce insulin and regulate sugar production in the liver.
The store-bought supplements are a little different, however.
The pills feature ingredients that allegedly boost your body’s GLP-1 production naturally, with no nasty artificial additives.
Kourtney Kardashian’s supplement brand Lemme this month launched a GLP-1 daily pill, being billed as “a breakthrough innovation in metabolic health, formulated to naturally boost your body’s GLP-1 production, reduce appetite, and promote healthy weight loss.”
The $90 supplement — just a fraction of the eye-watering out-of-pocket cost of Ozempic, which rings in around $1,200 per month — claims that the ingredients, Eriomin lemon fruit extract, Supresa saffron extract and Morosil red orange fruit extract, curb hunger, support metabolism and reduce body fat.
Doctors, however, aren’t so sure about such supplements.
Dr. Roshini Raj, a gastroenterologist based in New York, told Today that, despite the labels on the bottles, “they do not contain GLP-1” nor “an agonist or mimicking hormone.”
“They contain extracts, maybe from fruits or vegetables, that purport to boost your body’s natural GLP-1. But to me, that’s a big difference,” Raj said, warning about the unknown ingredients in store-bought alternatives and calling it “a bit of a Wild West.”
“I’m not saying these are actually bad supplements — we just don’t know. We don’t know what they actually do.”
Registered dietician nutritionist Lauren Harris-Pincus told PageSix that no supplement can compare to a true GLP-1 agonist medication.
“It’s like the difference between an eye dropper and a garden hose,” she said, adding that it’s “unlikely” any of the “natural Ozempic” alternatives on the market “will result in any real, sustained weight loss.”
New Jersey bariatric surgeon Dr. Hans Schmidt raised concerns over the efficacy of the supplements as a whole, echoing that they’re not “anywhere near the strength of the injectable.”
“If you can just go buy a supplement and lose 20 or 30, 40 pounds, you couldn’t hear the end of it,” Schmidt told TODAY. “It would be all over the place. But they’re not.”
