About That “20 Seconds a Week” Claim

Bullshit claims in commercials is one reason I soured on television a few decades ago. Occasionally watching some news programs, I see they’re still around.

Here’s the ad that is currently most annoying to me: the “20 seconds a week” ad from Ro. The voiceover states: “20 seconds a week to lose 20% of your weight in a year with diet and exercise,” while showing a person injecting the drug into their subcutaneous abdominal fat. Sounds too good to be true, right? I can’t speak directly to that, but I will point out the linguistic sleight of hand used in the claim.

It takes 20 seconds for the injection—so just 1,040 seconds per year, or 17.3 minutes. However, the ad says “with diet and exercise,” which surely requires a larger time investment to be helpful. Those tend to be the difficult parts of most people’s efforts to lose weight. They require self-discipline and persistence … and even with diligent effort, they don’t always produce results for some people.

And it isn’t even true to say that everyone will see that degree of weight loss while using the med. I’ve encountered (I haven’t read them all) several articles that discuss the side effects of the drug, and the tendency for weight to be regained once the drug is discontinued. Other articles have revealed that these drugs (GLP-1 receptor agonists, usually abbreviated to “GLP-1s”) don’t work for all people, either.

So no, it isn’t just 20 seconds per week of effort to achieve and maintain meaningful weight loss. Framing it that way makes it easy to ride right past the important of the deal: dietary changes and regular exercise are still necessary. And they require much more time each week than pumping the drug into one’s body.