the cultural consequences of oatzempic
how a TikTok food trend situates appetite, body, and cultural food values
Growing up in 1990s small-town Ontario, oats were frequently praised as a “stick to your ribs” breakfast food at my family’s table. Undoubtedly, my understanding of oats being a hearty, long-lasting source of energy was informed by living in Peterborough, where the main Canadian Quaker Oats factory has been an established part of the local economy since 1902. I grew up assuming that it was perfectly normal to wake up to a city-wide smell of baking oats, only to be largely disappointed when I realized this was unique to my hometown.
Yet the recent TikTok fad diet, “oatzempic,” positions oats in a vastly different light. It plays off the rise in Ozempic and other glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonist drugs used for appetite suppression and positions a thick oaty beverage to quickly drop weight. While GLP-1 drugs are meant to support blood sugar regulation for those with Type 2 diabetes, they have quickly become off-label solutions for celebrity weight loss schemes. This has transcended into public consciousness; despite having potentially long-lasting and dangerous consequences (I’d encourage a listen to my interview with Emily Wright on her experiences with gastroparesis after using Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes management).
Oatzempic is the poor person’s Ozempic in a landscape of increasing thinness: it is a food-based concoction of oats, water, lime juice, and the possibility of cinnamon if you’re feeling spicier. There are no medications in it, only the promise of drastic weight loss if consumed daily. Some proponents of the beverage on TikTok claim to drink it twice a day, some only once, but all mention the caloric deficit needed for the drink to work its magic. (Though, any beverage or food eaten in a highly restricted diet, while operating in a caloric deficit, will likely “show results” of weight loss). While the inclusion of lime is unclear to me, oats are high in beta-glucan, a soluble fibre that acts to increase fullness.
As much as foods are a biological necessity, they are also symbolic, playing to how we define and shape our social and cultural relationships too. Foods or ingredients hold cultural value, which can shift through time as a society changes its sociopolitical structures. Oats have held various meanings in Western and North American contexts through time, and the advent of oatzempic represents a clear demarcation in how we culturally understand oats during a time of increasingly technological and AI-driven industries. With these pivots, fad diets like oatzempic can shift the cultural meaning of oats, representing newer values around the body and appetite during a time of food insecurity, high-tech, and personalized nutrition driving insatiable weight loss.
oats as restrictive
Despite the strong association between Quakers (formally known as the Religious Society of Friends) and oatmeal, the Quaker Oats company itself was established by a businessman named Henry Crowell. The image of a traditional Quaker for the logo was chosen so to represent values that would appeal to customers in the late 1880s, such as honesty, integrity, purity, and humbleness. While Quakers would periodically voice frustrations around their religious practices being used to ground a brand identity through the early 1900s, the broader symbolic representation has been maintained for over a hundred years.
A 2010 blog post by Religious Society of Friends member Shaun Chavis noted that it is quite hard to apply Quaker thoughts to food and food choices. They highlight the Testimony of Simplicity, which implies that faith-guided eating requires an avoidance of complex gastronomy or highly detailed recipes:
“Does the Testimony of Simplicity mean that I should reject Julia Child’s famous yet very precise ten-page recipe for French bread in favor of the ease of using a no-knead recipe or a bread machine? Does simplicity mean that I shouldn’t join other food editors for dinner at a restaurant where the chef is known for molecular gastronomy, and I shouldn’t spend several hundred dollars on a 12-course tasting menu with six flights of wine?”
Within this, it does not appear that food directly connects to any spiritual or divine entities, but rather seeks a more attentive or thoughtful connection to people and food systems. The co-opting of Quaker symbolism convolutes this perspective, aligning with a long Western history of using religious purity to brand food products. PhD candidate Rebecca Wolfe highlighted this in conversation about her research on American purity culture:
“At the very least, purity culture and general American diet culture come from these same Protestant roots. We see all our diet culture is riddled with religious language. We talk about clean and pure diet foods. We talk about things that are guilty pleasures or sinfully delicious. It's all really religiously coated, and specifically Christian religion coated is Halo Top, the ice cream. It uses angelic imagery to sell this low-calorie product. Or LaCroix, the sparkling water. It has it the word innocent on its packaging.”
Continuing with this, the ethical implications of a brand represented by a religious Quaker certainly helped to maintain its social and cultural status as a humble food — even if it was bought out by PepsiCo in 2001 for about $14 billion.
oats for profit and planet
There is a key pivot in the depiction of oats as a wholesome and sturdy staple crop with the rise of plant-based food bloggers and milk alternatives in an environmentally conscious 21st century public. Food bloggers of the early 2000s, like Oh She Glows, or the Minimalist Baker popularized quick, no-cook meal replacements, like overnight oats that could be soaked and ready for portable breakfasts on busy days. Google Trends identified the rise of overnight oat popularity at around 2012, during which time oats were messaged to represent a resistant starch that would keep you fuller for longer, with soaked oats breaking down more slowly in your body.
While oats are a nostalgic reminder of my hometown, they are also part of a broader national dialogue in Canadian agriculture. Oat’s popularity as a milk alternative was a boon for Canada, and they remain one of Canada’s largest exports globally. Canada produces around four million tonnes per year on average (with Saskatchewan leading the production of roughly 50% of all Canadian oats each year). While oats have maintained their nutritional status through the decades, there’s been more emphasis on their energy-efficient plant-based milks (compared to almond or coconut options), and the versatile and sustainable farming practices that come through oat farming.
oatzempic, fatphobia, and restriction
To leap from environmentally friendly milk alternative and staple crop to trending weight loss beverage makes a bit more sense when considering the efficiency angle of oat production. The cognitive leap lies in situating oats not only as an optimized staple crop, but an optimized food for fuelling the body. There remains an intentional murkiness in health food rhetoric when it comes to restrictive eating, which makes it more straightforward to frame a boring, simple oat as the foundation for affordable thinness.
What troubles me with oatzempic is that it is coupled with a transition in body-talk discourse. Ozempic has irrevocably changed how people perceive and publicly talk about fatness and appetites. Toronto influencer Kenzie Brenna called this out in online spaces, noting that the body positivity hashtag was being used by thin women (and James Charles) to do Skims try-ons or physique check-ins. Brenna identified that while she’s not one to police the body positivity concept, her discomfort stems from the avoidance of confronting the reality of fatness:
“When you don’t use the term fat, even the term fatphobia, I think that you’re missing something. We stay in these safe pockets… we say love your stretch marks and they’re beautiful, but the reasons why it’s hard to love your stretch marks in the first place is because it’s a representation of your body growing, which can represent being fat.”
While not outwardly connected, those making oatzempic recipes on TikTok also post weigh-in video updates, track their personal nutrition intakes, calculate their size and their goal weights in rapid fire pace alongside each other. These position oats as part of a larger symbolic effort to be thin and maintain social beauty constructs. It disheartens me, as I had naively hoped that we left the desire to be thin in the last decade.
captures these tensions so fully in her most recent essay:“If eating disorders are back (though, in truth, they never left), then maybe, as Bordo says, it is because our bodies are carriers of culture on a much deeper level than that of absorption pads for celebrity and influencer image.”
Appetite suppressing drugs are part of a new cultural reality in North America. Oatzempic is already being situated as a “friendly” entry point into portion-controlled plant-based eating. The Canadian Grocer recently provided highlights from a Toronto and U.K.-based webinar on food and beverage trends. Major takeaways were the popularity of weight loss, portion control, and “users looking to get more functional value out of less food” as key, optimizing quality of calories over quantity. The article also identifies AI and technology-driven food trends, such as using AI-driven personalized nutrition to monitor glucose levels or gut microbiomes.
A 2024 study from the Agri-Food Analytics Lab surveyed 8,662 Canadians to understand how GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) are being used, and how these relate to food choices. The survey found that 57.1% were using these drugs exclusively for management of type 2 diabetes, but 27.2% were exclusively using the drug for weight loss:
Food choices changed in relation to use of GLP-1 drug use, with 30.6% ate less sweet bakery goods, and 30.4% consumed fewer sweet treats or snacks:
While it seems logical that GLP-1 drug use reduces appetite and thus changes food and beverage intake, how this data gets used to tell particular stories can have consequences for our collective appetites and body ideals. Already, media is framing this GLP-1 study as proof that Canadians are intentionally restricting snack intake and grocery purchases, which is a hefty stretch! And as a result, go-to talking head researchers (like Sylvain Charlebois) have begun advocating for food industry changes to align with these so-called consumer values, such as prioritizing low-carb and low-calorie food alternatives.
To draw grand conclusions about how and why people are cutting back on their groceries and food consumption is risky, particularly when it is from a small survey of targeted Canadians who are using GLP-1 drugs. Coupled with fad diets like oatzempic, it risks enforcing a message of caloric quality over quantity as “good food.” This insinuates that the public wants to restrict their eating (and thus their bodies), rather than maintain standards of care for socially and biologically nourishing foods for all.
The public and political and private for-profit industry all come together through this: there is rising hunger, rotting food, billionaire price-fixing schemes, and cost-of-living inflation. There is renewed social interest in weight loss, doctors prescribing GLP-1 drugs ad nauseam, unrealistic beauty ideals exacerbated by social media face filters and cheap Botox, and AI being used to make art and war all at once.
Asserting control in a culture that feels hopeless may take the shape of controlling the individual body and appetite. Restrictive eating can easily be framed to optimize financial health as much as bodily health. Oats make sense in this landscape as a shifted cultural food, in that there’s been such talk of their optimization and energy-efficiencies from a sustainability lens, and the historic cultural value (and successful PR campaign) of oats places it as pure, humble, and simple. Twisting these two realms together allows for oats to be maintained as a cheap food to prescribe thinness for those that can’t afford off-market weight loss drugs. It sets up thin bodies as the only way to beat a broken food system, that to suppress the appetite is not just trend but necessity for consumers, making any consequences or outcomes of broader recession into part of the beauty ideals of our time: quiet luxury meets cheap oats.
Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify.
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