Kourtney Kardashian’s ‘Natural’ Weight Loss Gummy Supplements Are Wildly Suspicious

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 18, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 18, 2024 |

Never let it be said that the Kardashian clan isn’t at the front of the line when it comes to finding new ways to exploit people for profit. They’ve conquered fast fashion, stuck their fingers into the crypto/NFT pie, and even stuck their faces on a credit card. If there’s a way to make money, and a handy side-effect of making women everywhere hate themselves, they’ve got Mama Kris stirring the pot and signing the deals.

Kourtney, the one who married Travis Barker and sees herself as ‘not like the other Kardashians,’ has a supplements line called Lemme. Her products, mostly gummy vitamins, offer solutions to lethargy, low sex drive, and cellulite. One product claimed to help increase vaginal health, an assertion that pretty much everyone with a medical degree noted was nonsense. Her newest offering is Lemme GLP-1 Daily, which her website describes as “GLP-1, Appetite & Weight Management Capsules.” It “supports your body’s GLP-1 hormone, reduces hunger, promotes healthy insulin function and supports healthy weight management with 3 clinically-tested ingredients.* GLP-1 Daily does not contain synthetic GLP-1 and is not a GLP-1 agonist drug.*”

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The *, by the way, which appears dozens of times on the site for this product, is for a disclaimer that notes these statements “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

The gummies are already being described as ‘a natural alternative to Ozempic’ in marketing and write-ups of the launch. British Vogue Kourtney herself said that she wanted to develop the product because “GLP-1 medications have been helpful to so many people. The drug clearly has so many benefits, but it also has a lot of side effects.” That’s her supposed gap in the market: people who want to use medicines like Ozempic to lose weight but not have the potential side-effects like nausea. Really, this is her attempting to sell a cheaper and more readily accessible version of a much-needed treatment to those who can’t afford or get hold of it.

British Vogue asked two doctors to assess the product, and they seemed skeptical of the outlandish Lemme claims. At best, it’s a field that needs more research, and that “while some plant compounds may indirectly influence GLP-1 pathways or mimic some GLP-1 effects, they are not equivalent to pharmaceutical GLP-1 receptor agonists.” You won’t find anything anywhere near as effective as a properly made GLP-1 drug like Ozempic or Wegovy in a supplement you can buy online. “The effects from these naturally occurring extracts are typically mild and likely not effective enough to treat people who are overweight or obese.”

So, who’s going to buy this? Desperate people, maybe? Ozempic has become extremely tough to get a hold of, particularly for diabetics who require it for the management of their conditions. Ozempic is a game-changing treatment for a lot of people, including those using it for weight loss. But as with all things relating to health and fatphobia, it’s been hijacked by corporate powers as the hot new fad and another excuse to hate people whose bodies have been declared unruly or unacceptable by the masses for decades.

The Kardashians are now in their skinny era. After spending years appropriating Black womanhood via BBLs, lip fillers, and heavy contouring, they’ve stripped things back for a kind of minimalist whiteness that is perfectly in line with the current Ozempic era. Skinny was never out, of course, but this brand of rail-thin drop-weight-fast body negativity has horrifying echoes to the “heroin chic” fetish of the ’90s. Once I saw that high-rise jeans were making a comeback, I knew we were doomed. The Kardashian Klan has always benefitted from establishing (or copying) beauty trends, making them over-filtered and unattainable to the masses, then selling it as an aspirational quality via their make-up, jeans, shapewear, etc. You don’t have huge lips? Just buy a lip kit and fake it, as long as you don’t mind the seller lying about her own fillers for a few years until it becomes acceptable for her to sell a “new me” brand with the next line of products. Hyper-skinny is back? Put on your Skims, take your Lemme Ozempic, and wait for the next trend.

So, in this context, it’s hardly surprising that Kourtney is packaging a quack gummy that makes grand and unrealistic promises in the midst of a medical shortage and mass hysteria over a drug that deserves a more nuanced understanding than it’s received. It’s also yet another sign of how “natural” health treatments and alternatives to traditional medicine appeal to the growing conspiratorial anti-health movement. The supplement market and its questionable lack of regulation in many areas has frequently pandered to pseudoscientific rhetoric that claims “natural”, however that is defined, is always better. The woo-woo “holistic” movement has long since descended into hard-right conspiracies and anti-vaxx propaganda, and a lot of it has gained the sheen of legitimacy through crap like Goop and Lemme.

The craven shamelessness of the Kardashian brand is hardly new or innovative. It’s just ruthlessly effective. This family is the weather vane of celebrity capitalism, pointing the way the wind blows with what’s in and how it can be commodified. They’re not innovators; they’re followers, albeit ones with a lot of money and followers. When the trend train pulls in and unloads a new fad for our bodies, they’ll be chasing behind with a product while on the phone to their surgeons. It’s f*cking exhausting.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you all, dear readers, not to spend your hard-earned money on Kourtney Kardashian’s gummy vitamin pseudo-Ozempic scam. Just get the cake instead.