Weight Watchers Goes Bankrupt After Rise of Ozempic-Like Drugs

Image by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty / Futurism Rx/Medicines Ozempic and other drugs like it have been threatening the established diet industry since they premiered — and it appears that Weight Watchers is now getting the hatchet. In a note to investors, the long-running weight loss company is taking the "strategic action" of filing for bankruptcy in hopes of consolidating its immense $1.15 billion dollars' worth of debt. The move comes nearly eighteen months after Oprah Winfrey, a Weight Watchers investor who served as the celebrity face and body of the diet company, admitted that she had started taking weight loss drugs like Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy. Just a few months after that, Winfrey announced that she was exiting WW's board of directors and questioned the company's purpose alongside the advent of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist drugs, the class of medications to which Ozempic and other popular weight loss injectables belong. The drugs are bel ... Read full article.