I have controversial taste in entertainment.

While I’m a huge fan of trending shows like The Last of Us and Wednesday (I recently finished both first seasons and fell in love with the characters on both shows/mourn the fact that they likely won’t produce second seasons until 2025), I’m also really into what my mother calls “trash TV”.

This is synonymous with reality television – think along the lines of anything that the Bravo network plays. Most of those shows symbolize pure escapism and innocently mindless entertainment for me, and I’m addicted, so much so that my trash taste in TV translates to my podcast listening.

I listen to a handful of podcasts hosted by personalities that either appear on the Bravo network or talk often about Bravo-lebrity drama, and while I usually find them wildly entertaining, I’ve noticed an emerging trend on these podcasts in recent months that makes me incredibly irritated. And that’s how often diabetes comes up as a topic on these podcasts.

Nine times out of ten, it’s about Ozempic (the type 2 diabetes drug that famous and non-famous folks alike have started using in order to lose weight). Usually, the podcast hosts are poking fun at it or spending way too much time speculating who is and isn’t using it, and it drives me up the wall. NOBODY is talking about the morality of taking a type 2 diabetes drug when they do not have that condition themselves, or the fact that since it’s become so popular it’s made it scarce and potentially unavailable to the people that really need it. Now, I’ll take a step off the soapbox for a second because obviously I 1) don’t have type 2 diabetes and 2) don’t use or need to use Ozempic; therefore, I don’t have a true stake in the game other than that I could imagine myself being even more worked up if it were a matter of people taking Humalog for similar reasons (goodness knows the rage that I would feel if Humalog was becoming virtually fetishized because taking it resulted in some desirable outcome).

I also shouldn’t sit here and judge people who go on Ozempic who have maybe tried multiple other weight loss methods that have failed them, and they’re genuinely using the drug to try and get healthier – I can empathize with that more. No, what really bothers me is the resulting dialogue that seems to happen every time Ozempic is brought up, and that is pure ignorant bliss regarding what diabetes actually is and how significant of a role it plays in the daily lives of people living with it. Multiple podcasts that I listen to have covered the Ozempic “fad”, explaining to their seemingly naive audiences that it’s a drug for diabetes, followed by a punch line about how they don’t even know the difference between type 1 and type 2, and saying things along the lines of how they hope they get diabetes just so they have an excuse to take Ozempic.

It’s gross. And quite frankly, embarrassing for these podcast hosts to admit that they know so little about a condition (and I’m speaking broadly here about both T1D and T2D) but then claim they want to be diagnosed with it so they can maybe indulge in their vanity and lose weight. There’s much better ways to make clever little jokes about diabetes and I’m getting tired of people being lazy in their comedy by continuing to be misinformed.

Maybe all of this is a signal to me that it’s time to take the trashy podcasts out of my rotation…