Studies show that the crops the U.S. government subsidizes are linked to the high-sugar, high-calorie diets that put Americans at risk for abdominal fat, weight gain and high cholesterol.

But in the same span of years Ozempic took hold of those buzzy sets, I began noticing that regular people like my friends were being reclassified as insulin-sensitive, insulin-resistant, and the utterly terrifying “prediabetic.”

Over the next two decades, the organization expanded the definition of the condition, so that by 2019, as Charles Piller reported for Science magazine, 84 million Americans had prediabetes, “the most common chronic disease after obesity.”

Given all these changes, I wondered what Dr. Richard Kahn, the former chief scientific and medical officer at the American Diabetes Association, who helped establish “prediabetes” as a term, now thought about the phenomenon.

Glancing at my blood test results she began describing her professional interest in “metabolic medicine.” What followed was a 20-minute presentation on the advancements in weight loss drugs.

She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.

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