admin
Oprah sat on The View this week and told America that “overeating doesn’t cause obesity,” flipping a decades-old message about discipline into a comforting excuse for bad behavior. Her clip—played and replayed across social media—frames obesity as something that happens to you biologically, not something you can combat with personal responsibility.
She was on the couch to promote a new book and to recast her own long public struggle with weight as a medical inevitability rather than the result of choices. The segment aired as part of a broader appearance in which she described feeling ashamed for years and said she had been “ill-informed” about the causes of obesity.
Oprah has openly embraced pharmaceutical fixes, telling audiences she found relief in GLP-1 medications and urging that obesity be treated like a chronic disease worthy of medical intervention. That shift is real and consequential: when a cultural icon with her reach normalizes lifelong drug dependence as the primary pathway for weight control, it changes how millions think about willpower, diet, and health.
To be clear, there are biological factors that make weight management harder for some people, and medicine has a role. But Oprah’s narrative erases an inconvenient truth that conservative Americans understand: habits, discipline, and self-control matter. For years she celebrated dramatic weight losses on stage and sold messages of personal transformation; now she wants to turn those very struggles into a pardon for quitting.
This rhetorical pivot pairs with a political push to make these expensive drugs more available, with high-profile hosts and guests calling for insurance to cover GLP-1 medications as a public entitlement. Turning weight loss into a taxpayer-backed lifelong prescription market should alarm anyone who values fiscal responsibility and the notion that we should encourage self-reliance rather than subsidize permanent dependence.
There’s a moral hazard here that liberals and celebrities ignore at their peril: when you tell people they aren’t responsible for their choices, you undermine the culture that produces strong families, steady workers, and disciplined citizens. We should have compassion for those who struggle, but compassion is not the same as surrendering to a narrative that absolves people of accountability. Opinion and education matter as much as medicine.
Americans deserve honest messaging. Wealthy media moguls who have built empires on the back of “you can do it” pep talks shouldn’t be recasting decades of public health advice into comforting science to sell books and drugs. If elites want more people healthy, they should promote policies that bolster work, family, and community norms that encourage good habits, not normalize a lifetime of prescriptions.
Hardworking Americans know the truth: freedom depends on responsibility. Call out convenient celebrity narratives when they undermine that truth, insist on a real national conversation about prevention and personal accountability, and refuse to let cultural icons rewrite common sense into a new entitlement.
