Why are fewer Black Americans getting GLP-1s?
GLP-1s have become the newest celebrity miracle drug, with famous athletes like Serena Williams and Charles Barkley sharing that they’ve used it for weight loss.Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have become a status symbol. But before they were famous, GLP-1s were developed to treat Type 2 diabetes, a disease that occurs when a person’s blood sugar becomes too high. It affects nearly 40 million Americans and hits Black Americans especially hard. According to the CDC, about 12 percent of Black adults have diabetes, compared with roughly 7 percent of white adults. Yet when researchers reviewed 26 studies from across the country, they found that Black patients were about 20 percent less likely than white patients to be prescribed newer diabetes drugs.
That gap has deep roots. A century ago, doctors called diabetes a “luxury disease” of wealthy white and Jewish people, and many didn’t believe Black people could get the disease at all. Even after the landmark 1985 Heckler Report exposed stark racial disparities in American health, Black patients’ diabetes was often blamed on lifestyle rather than on the housing, food, financial, and healthcare inequities shaping their health.
Hosted by Kahlil Greene, this video is part of our series, Kahlil Explains, which unites Vox’s unique brand of explainer journalism with Greene’s expertise in how politics and culture shape society. This episode traces the history of race and diabetes in America to unpack why Black patients are still less likely to get access to GLP-1s, and why closing that gap will take more than a prescription.
Read more about GLP-1s, diabetes, and race in American medicine:
- Arleen Tuchman’s book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv14rmqdm
- JAMA Health Forum’s study on racial and income disparities in GLP-1 prescriptions: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2787276
- The Journal of General Internal Medicine’s review of racial disparities in diabetes drug access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-026-10178-z
- University of Colorado Anschutz’s explainer on how GLP-1 drugs went from lab discovery to weight-loss breakthrough: https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/how-glp-1-drugs-went-from-lab-discovery-to-weight-loss-breakthroughs
- Tablet magazine’s article on Diabetes, the Jewish disease: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/diabetes-jewish-disease-tuchman
- The original 1985 Heckler Report on Black and minority health: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ext/heckler/8602912X1/PDF/8602912X1.pdf
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