The supplement industry has a long, tangled history with the world of weight-loss products. Prior to the age of Ozempic, many of the trendiest diet aids were supplements, not prescription medications: green tea extract, caffeine pills, ephedra. According to the US National Institutes of Health, more than 15 percent of adult Americans have tried a weight-loss supplement. Now, the supplement industry is leaning into the GLP-1 boom. They can’t sell Ozempic—but they’re hitching a hefty wagon to it anyway, spinning up entire businesses built around existing demand for this blockbuster drug, or something like it.
Two different types of supplements are glomming onto the popularity of GLP-1 agonist drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide, which mimic a natural appetite-suppressing, blood-sugar-regulating hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1. (Ozempic is one of the most well-known brand names for semaglutide.) First, there’s a rise in efforts to market supplements as complementary to GLP-1 drugs. The online storefronts for large supplement retailers like the Vitamin Shoppe and GNC now offer separate sections devoted to selling products to take in tandem with prescription meds. “GLP-1 Side Effects? Get Support for Your Journey,” the GNC website proclaims. The Vitamin Shoppe offers actual GLP-1 drugs through a partnership to launch a telehealth company, as well as more traditional supplements it markets as “nutrient support,” including probiotics, fiber, and multivitamins.
Brian Tanzer, the Vitamin Shoppe’s director of scientific and regulatory affairs, says that the company offers products that will compensate for the nutritional deficiencies that can arise when people taking GLP-1 drugs cut calories. “Current data shows that a significant percentage of the population does not meet their daily requirement for several nutrients, and this may be exacerbated by a drastic reduction in calorie intake because of the use of GLP-1 medications,” he says.
Food and supplement giant Nestlé is getting in on the action, too. In addition to launching an upcoming line of foods aimed specifically at people who take GLP-1 medications, the company also launched a website, GLP-1nutrition.com, selling a variety of supplements to “complement your GLP-1 journey.” “We are the first major food company to enter this space,” Nestlé external communications lead Dana Stambaugh told WIRED via email. Meanwhile, meal delivery services have also started courting GLP-1 patients. Daily Harvest offers a “GLP-1 Support” bundle of meals designed to appeal to people on these medications; a smaller service called BistroMD peddles similar fare.
While GLP-1 drugs are remarkably effective, they often also cause side effects like gastrointestinal distress and muscle loss. Side effects can be severe enough that people stop taking the medications. A recent study from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association found that over half the people it surveyed who had been prescribed these drugs in the past decade stopped taking them within three months.
Obesity medicine physician Alexandra Sowa recently launched a line of supplements aimed at people taking GLP-1 meds. “I was cobbling together what I could find out on the market to meet the needs of my patients,” she says. “Nothing has been made just for the GLP-1 user.” Sowa, who still runs her Manhattan-based practice, says the goal is to keep patients comfortably on the medications by helping to alleviate side effects. Her system sells three powdered supplements (electrolytes, protein, and fiber) that can be purchased together or separately; they were designed to appeal to the tastebuds of people on GLP-1 meds, who might not tolerate sweet products as they once did.
The other type of Ozempic-adjacent supplement on the rise right now is positioned not as a helpmeet to pharmaceutical offerings but instead as an alternative. These products often have “GLP-1” in their name, signaling to potential customers who are familiar with the prescription medications that they offer something in the same universe. A brand called Supergut touts prebiotics as “nature’s Ozempic” in its marketing and claims that its products “trigger your body’s hunger-quieting GLP-1 hormone naturally.” The supplement brand Pendulum offers a “GLP-1 Probiotic,” which it also claims helps increase GLP-1 production “naturally.” Other lines, like Codeage, offer blends like the “GLP Advantage+,” which contains L-taurine, decaffeinated green tea leaf extract, boron, prebiotics, and a variety of other ingredients, including berberine, an antibiotic-like ingredient popular with wellness influencers on TikTok who tout its appetite-suppressing properties. When asked if Codeage intended the product as an alternative to GLP-1 drugs for people who don’t want to take prescription drugs, cofounder Auggie Quancard said it was “designed for individuals interested in supporting their metabolic health.” (Codeage also offers a product the company says is to be taken in tandem with GLP-1 drugs.)
These products and the companies selling them are already seeing rising profits from interest in the GLP-1 boom. The Vitamin Shoppe reported an increase in “sugar control” categories of supplements, particularly berberine—sales were up nearly 40 percent in 2023 across the whole category, and berberine sales jumped 50 percent. Supergut CEO Marc Washington told WIRED that the company’s sales in 2024 were three to four times previous years’ sales as a result of increased interest in non-pharmaceutical ways to increase GLP-1 production.
Some health experts question whether these offerings are worthwhile. “Both of these categories of supplements are very opportunistically taking advantage of the lax laws around supplements to jump in and try to profit from a group of medications that are truly effective,” says Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies supplements. Compared to conventional drug products, supplement regulation—and enforcement of those regulations—is markedly lax. While drugs require approval from the Food and Drug Administration before hitting the market, supplements do not. In fact, the FDA cannot force supplement-makers to conduct premarket testing to demonstrate that their products contain what they say they contain. The regulatory environment is often described as a wild west.
When asked directly, many complementary-supplement purveyors will acknowledge that evidence is limited. “At the present time, controlled human studies on the benefits of supplement support for GLP-1 users are not available,” the Vitamin Shoppe’s Tanzer says.
Alternative GLP-1 supplements, too, face skepticism about their claims. Molly Natchipolsky, a spokesperson for the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, told me via email that the NCCIH’s research team studying natural products is “not aware of any supplement that can have similar effects or mechanisms to current GLP-1 agonists.”
One reason why GLP-1 agonist drugs work so well is because they increase the presence of the hormone in the body for a prolonged period of time. While there are substances known to naturally increase GLP-1 in the body, they can only do so for a short period of time. “No matter how much GLP-1 you get your intestines to produce, it’s never going to be as effective as the Ozempic you’re taking,” says Frank Duca, a University of Arizona assistant professor who studies metabolic disease. A fiber or probiotic supplement can increase your GLP-1 levels, he says, “but it’s not going to work like Ozempic.”
Duca is concerned that the marketing claims made by some of the supplements purporting to provide alternatives to GLP-1 drugs may be dubious, and he worries they will set back how research is received. “It’s so scary,” he says. “The field is very close to making some really good headway in metabolic disease, but now you have so many startups seeing how well Ozempic is doing and saying, ‘This is just like Ozempic.’ It’s really not.”
Some of the alternative supplement purveyors themselves say they agree that the two are not really comparable. “If you’re just talking in terms of absolute impact, there is no supplement or food or beverage or, frankly, other forms of pharmaceutical anywhere close to as effective at weight loss as these GLP-1 drugs,” says Supergut’s Washington, despite the conspicuous “nature’s Ozempic” branding his company uses.
Still, Washington believes his products offer smaller-scale benefits for people who want improved digestive health but don’t want, or don’t meet the medical criteria, for prescription drugs. “We specifically chose unique prebiotics that have clinical evidence around appetite control, blood sugar control, and GLP-1.” Indeed, in addition to drawing on other studies on prebiotic fibers, Supergut ran its own double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, which is not yet common in this corner of the industry. It found that taking Supergut’s prebiotic shakes helped regulate blood sugar better than placebos in the study participants. “Many people will call this a gold-standard clinical study.”
Not everyone, though—even a study like this is subject to scrutiny from some experts. Gregory Lopez, the research lead at the supplement and nutrition database Examine.com, sees Supergut’s study as “a bit weak” in the way it was designed. Overall, he finds it “suggestive, but not definitive.” (Supergut’s Washington defends his study as rigorous: “It was significant and compelling enough to pass a peer review and publication for a leading medical journal,” he tells WIRED.)
Lopez takes a skeptical stance toward this new category of supplement sold with “GLP-1” branding—and, indeed, supplements sold for weight loss and weight management in general. “I don’t trust weight-loss supplements,” he says. “Maybe they’ll work a little bit but not a whole lot. They’re not going to be life-changing compared to things that we know actually work.”
Life-changing or not, as long as demand for GLP-1 drugs stays booming, the supplement industry is unlikely to curb its appetite for adjacent products.
