India's FAT LOSS GAMBLE | Is Ozempic a Medical Miracle or India's Most Misused Drug

Ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to have perhaps the most consequential and controversial debate of 2026, and that is about GLP-1.

For that, on one side we have JC who believes that GLP-1 is an absolute disaster, and it is a capitalistic instrument for the pharma companies to leverage the insecurity of Indians to make millions of dollars.

On the other side, we have Arjun, who's a nutritionist and a trainer, and we have an OG surgeon, Dr. Mufassal.

He is the founder of Diagnostic Health Institute, and he is one of the most renowned bariatric surgeons in the world.

And they believe that under supervision, GLP-1 is a miracle for people to lead a healthier and happier life.

So today we will try to answer the question, is GLP-1 really a miracle drug or a capitalistic disaster to leverage the insecurity of Indians to make millions of dollars for the pharma companies? Let's start with the proposition.

Doctor, go first.

Today, as we sit in India, we are sitting on an epidemic of proportions that we've never seen before.

That's obesity coupled along with type 2 diabetes that goes almost hand in glove with it.

So let me just state figures.

All right? India remains the second largest number of people with type 2 diabetics.

It's probably the largest if you really count our numbers.

So an average diabetic today, uh, spends around close to 17,000 rupees per year, okay, just on drugs, diet, exercise, whatever he wants to do.

Now look at these numbers when he gets, uh, accelerated blindness, diabetic foot, renal disease or cardiovascular disease.

90,000 Indian rupees per hospital admission.

So these are numbers that we cannot trifle with.

Uh, they say that the cost of just, uh, diabetes and obesity management is about 2.3 to, uh, 2.8 lakh crores in India.

That's around 1% of our GDP, and by 2030, if things don't get under control, they say it'll go to 6.7 lakh crores, and that's a huge, huge number.

And that is why it's very, very important that the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, declared his campaign a- in his fight against obesity.

I think that was a, a landmark statement coming very close onto the heels of a Lancet publication that actually defined obesity as a disease.

Obesity was first as, defined, uh, as a disease in 1947 when we got our liberation, uh- But till now, nothing really did happen.

For the first time, the needle or the paradigm shift has happened when we talk about obesity and drugs.

So far, we had no drugs that were successful.

Either you had less than 5% total body weight loss, which is not important, or you had too many side effects and the drugs were taken off the market.

Bariatric surgery was probably the only one with sustained weight loss and results, but less than 0.1% of the population picked it anyways, and people thought that surgery was too dangerous.