The needle Americans are reaching for has quietly become a mainstream habit. About one in nine U.S. adults — 11% — now say they are currently taking a GLP-1 medication such as Ozempic, Wegovy or Zepbound to lose weight, according to a Gallup survey released on Tuesday, July 7, 2026. That is a record, and the climb behind it is steep: current use stood at just 3% in 2024 and 8% in 2025.
Run the trend forward and the shift is hard to overstate. Lifetime use — the share who have ever taken one of the injectables for weight loss — reached 15% this year, up nine percentage points from 6% two years ago. Awareness is now near-universal: 91% of respondents in 2026 knew the drugs could be used to shed pounds, compared with 80% in 2024. In the span of a single presidential term, a niche diabetes therapy has turned into something a large minority of the country has either tried or seriously considered.
The number that has doctors watching: obesity is falling
What makes the Gallup release more than a marketing scorecard is the second line moving in the opposite direction. The adult obesity rate, which peaked at a record 39.9% in 2022 — the year after the Food and Drug Administration cleared Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy for weight loss — has slipped to 36.4% so far in 2026. Gallup’s Dan Witters, who wrote the analysis, framed the two curves as linked rather than coincidental.
“After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually dropped to 36.4% thus far in 2026, a statistically meaningful decline that continues to inversely track with increased usage of GLP-1 medicine nationally.”
Dan Witters, Gallup
A caveat is baked into the method. Gallup calculates obesity from respondents’ self-reported height and weight, which tends to run lower than clinically measured studies because of what the firm calls a “vanity effect.” But because the approach has stayed consistent, the direction of travel — down, year after year — is the signal worth trusting. Diabetes diagnoses, meanwhile, have held roughly flat since 2023 at about 13.5%, after 15 years of creeping upward alongside obesity.
Currently using a GLP-1 for weight loss: 3% → 8% → 11%
Have ever used one: 6% → 12% → 15%
U.S. adult obesity rate: 39.9% (2022 peak) → 36.4% (2026)
Web survey of 5,065 U.S. adults, May 28–June 5, 2026; margin of error ±1.5 points.
Why so many users are quietly leaving the brand names
Beneath the headline figure sits a quieter story about money. Brand-name prescriptions — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound — still dominate, accounting for 68% of current use, against 19% for compounded or custom-mixed versions that the FDA has not approved (12% of users weren’t sure which they were taking). But the traffic is moving one way. Among people now on a compounded drug, 35% switched over from a brand name, while only 10% of brand-name users made the reverse trip.
The reason is almost entirely the price tag. Of those who switched to a compounded product, 66% cited the cost of the branded version as their main motive and another 34% pointed to insurance problems. As Witters put it, the cheaper mixes are “likely making GLP-1s available to broader sectors of the population” — which may be exactly what is driving overall usage higher. That democratization comes with a warning label, though. In June the FDA cautioned that compounded GLP-1s can be “risky for patients,” a tension patients are evidently weighing against the difference in their monthly bills. It is a familiar bind for anyone who has watched Medicare inch toward covering obesity medications while the sticker prices stay stubbornly high.
Do the drugs actually work? Users say yes — the cheaper ones slightly more
Interestingly, the patients buying the discount option are not reporting worse results. Roughly three-quarters of each camp call their medication effective or extremely effective — 77% of compounded users and 74% of brand-name users. If anything the compounded group is marginally more enthusiastic, with 39% rating the drugs “extremely effective” versus 32% among brand-name patients. That is self-reported satisfaction rather than a head-to-head clinical trial, and it should be read that way, but it helps explain why cost-driven switching has not triggered a wave of buyer’s remorse.
None of this settles the questions clinicians keep raising about what happens when people stop. Independent research still points to real-world results that lag the clean numbers of randomized trials, largely because patients drop off or ration doses — a reminder that a national usage rate is not the same as a national cure. The debate over whether these are lifestyle shortcuts or genuine chronic-disease treatments runs straight through the way the drugs are marketed and understood.
The market forces behind the shots
Zoom out and the poll doubles as a business story. Novo Nordisk had the field to itself when Wegovy arrived in 2021, but Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, approved in November 2023, changed the balance of power. Lilly crossed a $1 trillion market capitalization for the first time in 2025 and reported 56% revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026, lifting its full-year guidance by $2 billion. Novo, by contrast, has been bracing for its first revenue decline since the weight-loss era began. The compounding surge that Gallup documents is, in part, a pricing revolt playing out inside those balance sheets.
It is also not the first survey to catch the trend. Last August, a RAND study led by Robert Bozick found that more than one in ten Americans had tried a GLP-1, with the highest uptake among women aged 50 to 64 — “One in five women, or 20%, reported having ever used GLP-1 agonists,” the researchers wrote. Different pollster, different method, same trajectory. When two independent teams using different questions land on a rising curve, the curve is usually real.
For public-health officials who spent two decades watching obesity climb, a nearly four-point drop in four years is the kind of number that changes budgets and screening guidance, not just headlines. The harder part is what the Gallup data cannot answer: whether the decline holds if insurance tightens, if compounded supply is squeezed, or if the millions of new users simply stop. A drug-driven improvement lasts only as long as the drugs do — and, on the evidence of who is switching and why, only as long as people can still afford them. For now, the trend lines are pointing the right way, which is more than the country could say a few short years ago. Readers weighing the wider picture may find it worth revisiting how semaglutide moved from a diabetes therapy to a weight-loss phenomenon.
