When the temperature in North Pole, Alaska, dips below a bone-chilling minus-30 degrees, Brandon Phillips occasionally heads to the front yard with his KitchenAid mixer. To the delight of his kids, the 40-year-old former Army Black Hawk repairman and crew chief takes a heap of local snow and mixes it with cream, milk and sugar for a homemade ice cream.
Phillips once craved sweets like ice cream all the time. But now, after around seven months on Wegovy, an FDA-approved medication for weight loss that has rapidly gained popularity and is derived from the diabetes drug Ozempic, he prefers a single small scoop.
He used to drink more alcohol too, but now, almost 30 pounds lighter and free of what he calls “food noise” that coincided with service-related post-traumatic stress disorder, a single beer is too filling. A vodka soda, heavy on the soda, is plenty.
While the class of drugs that includes Wegovy, semaglutide injections also widely known from the brand Ozempic, has boomed in America, vets looking to start them may be out of luck, according to officials. The meteoric popularity of the drugs has triggered an ongoing global manufacturing shortage.