Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

A lot has happened this week. That there’s some sort of a credit crisis is now an established narrative, building steam from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week to yesterday’s events at Credit Suisse. On Wednesday, Yahoo Finance wrote that while a full-blown credit crisis might still be a long shot, the events of last week were “likely to have lasting consequences for the banking sector, and may be enough to tip the scales toward a recession.”

The SVB collapse has also blown back the veil a little on the undercurrent of outright falsehoods that pervade modern media—fact-free myths, Time magazine calls them, capable of dangerously confusing the general public. Time sorts these false narratives into four categories: ideological opportunism, hysterical hyperbole, ‘I told you so’, and shifting the blame. The article is a good primer if you want to learn how to quickly separate truth from fiction, so check it out when you can. 

For today’s edition of Inciting Incident, however, I’ll decode another narrative that has gained strength in recent times—one as complex as what unfolded around SVB, and affecting a far larger portion of the global population. 

Nearly 12%, actually. 

Let’s dive in.

Bandaids don’t fix bullet holes

If there’s something storytellers can take away from Taylor Swift’s lyrics, it’s their recurring focus on ‘how much?’. The tried and tested analogies she uses—like ‘bringing a gun to a knife fight’ or ‘bandaids don’t fix bullet holes’—are great ways to remember that the intensity of the solution provided should match the intensity of the problem if any story is to make sense. 

And obesity is a pretty major issue.

Most lifestyle diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancers have been linked to obesity in some form or the other over the last two decades. Rising obesity is one of the key foundations of sectors such as nutrition, nutraceuticals, and fitness. And even pop culture narratives on body positivity and personal responsibility are a fallout of how societies view obesity at large at some level. Nearly 12% of the global population will be obese by 2025, according to the World Heart Federation. 

No wonder, then, that a new class of more effective weight-loss drugs are being hailed as a miracle that can halt this epidemic. 

But are they really the solution they’re hailed to be? 

Consider the situation.