What Happened to My Wine??

Some fancy fruity drink. With a flower.

My kids did two years of school at home during COVID. My husband's immunosuppressed, and we really weren't sure how he would tolerate a COVID infection during those early days. Our family closed ranks, and I added yet another job to my list at the time: doctor, military commander, farmer wife, elementary/middle school teacher. One of those jobs was not my strength, and shout out to all the people who educate our children because that is a talent! I was so happy to send my kids back to the experts and let them take over.

One thing I did notice was how well a nice malbec went with math homework during those days. I have never really been a big drinker, but I was up to about 2 glasses of wine a day during the height of the pandemic. Those were hard days professionally, personally, all over the place. Two drinks a day is the maximum recommended (or maybe a bit over) for a woman, so I wasn't crazy about how much I was drinking. However, I only drank on school days so that seemed... yeah. Let's not unpack that now.

About that time, I went on semaglutide for weight loss, and I just stopped drinking the wine. It didn't taste as good, and I didn't enjoy it as much. We now know that semaglutide actually alters our sense of taste slightly (another post about this in the future), but it also works on the reward parts of the brain to decrease the reward for drinking alcohol. It also seems to decrease other addictive behaviors, such as gambling addiction, substance use, and smoking.

This is an active area of research, but it's an exciting development in the treatment of diseases that we don't have good ways to treat. TL:DR on the Study The basics: A study published in The Lancet (April 2026) tested whether semaglutide — the drug in Ozempic/Wegovy — could help people cut back on alcohol. Spoiler: it worked pretty well.

Who was in the study: 108 adults with both obesity and alcohol use disorder. Most had severe AUD — averaging about 17 heavy drinking days per month at the start.

What they did: Half got weekly semaglutide injections for 26 weeks, half got a placebo. Everyone also had access to up to 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The results: The semaglutide group had significantly fewer heavy drinking days than the placebo group — a roughly 14 percentage point greater reduction. They also drank less overall, had fewer drinks per drinking day, reported less craving, and even lost more weight (about 11 kg vs 2 kg in the placebo group).

Why it matters: Right now there are only three FDA-approved medications for alcohol use disorder, and they're underused and not terribly effective. The editorial commentary noted the "number needed to treat" was just 4.3 — meaning for roughly every 4 people treated, one had a meaningful benefit beyond what placebo offered. That's competitive with, or better than, current options.

The catch: The study only included people with obesity (BMI ≥ 30), so we don't know yet if it works the same way in people at a healthy weight. Bigger, broader studies are still needed.

How it works (probably): These drugs appear to dial down the brain's reward response — the same pathways involved in cravings for food and alcohol. Check out this article for the details: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/glp-1-semaglutide-promising-alcohol-use-disorder-2026a1000e5q?ecd=WNL_tp54u_JRNE_pos3_260508_etid8326519&uac=208117SG&impID=8326519