Tenzin Seldon: The GLP-1 boom is the biggest climate story no one is pricing in

The most consequential thing to happen to the American food system in the past two years arrived as a weekly injection. As of late 2025, roughly one in eight U.S. adults reported taking a GLP-1 medication for weight loss, roughly double the share from a year earlier. This class of weight-loss drugs is now delivering the one thing two decades of climate policy never could: a voluntary, durable reduction in how much carbon-intensive food Americans eat. What GLP-1s Are Doing to Food Demand GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide suppress appetite through the gut-brain axis, producing average body weight reductions of about 15% in clinical trials, driven mostly by people eating less: adults on these medications consume roughly 21% fewer calories and cut their grocery spending by roughly 5–6%, per peer-reviewed research from Cornell University and Numerator. Wall Street has already repriced the consequences — JPMorgan estimates the trend could erase $30–$55 billion in annual U.S. food and beverage sales as soon as 2030, when it expects about 25 million Americans to be on treatment (up from roughly 10 million today). Goldman Sachs estimates the 2035 user base at nearly 70 million, or about one in five adults. The revenue hit is only the visible half of the story; the same pullback is rippling upstream, into the fields, feedlots, and water tables that supply all that food. Where Food-System Emissions Actually Come From The reason that withdrawal matters for the climate is because food’s emissions are concentrated. Food production generates roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that footprint skews heavily toward one category: meat. Animal-based foods produce more than half of all food emissions. Beef is the extreme case, with a carbon footprint roughly sixty times that of beans. This is where the demand shift becomes a climate story. The categories GLP-1 users give up first sit at the very top of that ranking, and clinical data shows they cut t