British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to relieve the burden on the health system and the economy. Diet injections are intended to solve the problem of overweight and unemployed people.
The British government is promoting weight loss injections – for example to enable obese unemployed people to return to work and to relieve the burden on the health system. The drugs are “very useful for people who want to lose weight, who need to lose weight, and very important for the economy so that people can get back to work,” Prime Minister Keith Starmer told the BBC on Tuesday.
The government must take “pressure” off the health system, which is “in crisis after years of underfunding,” continued Starmer. The diet injections would help with that.
British Health Minister Wes Streeting wrote in the Telegraph newspaper that the population’s “increasingly widening hips” were putting a significant strain on the British health system. The costs amounted to eleven billion pounds (more than 13 billion euros) per year – more than the cost of smoking.
“Innovation laboratory” is supposed to investigate the effects of the weight loss injection
The government announced on Monday a partnership with the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of the Mounjaro slimming injection. Accordingly, the company wants to invest 279 million pounds in Great Britain.
The effects of the Mounjaro slimming injection will be researched for five years in an “innovation laboratory” near Manchester. According to the Telegraph, 3,000 overweight people who are unemployed, temporarily employed or on sick leave will take part in the study to see whether they can go back to work with the help of the slimming injection.
This is how the pounds fall off
Lose weight easily with these protein suppliers
The best-known weight loss injections are Ozempic and Wegovy from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. Mounjaro has been available in the US since 2022 and was approved in the UK in February this year. In Germany, Eli Lilly is also building a factory in Alzey in Rhineland-Palatinate.
In the UK, around 26 percent of adults are obese and 38 percent are overweight, according to January 2023 data. The unemployment rate was four percent in August this year – 1.39 million people over the age of 16 were registered as unemployed. In addition, there are 9.26 million people between the ages of 16 and 64 who are not available for the labor market.
Source: Stern

I’m Caroline, a journalist and author for 24 Hours Worlds. I specialize in health-related news and stories, bringing real-world impact to readers across the globe. With my experience in journalism and writing in both print and online formats, I strive to provide reliable information that resonates with audiences from all walks of life.