About 60 years ago, 1 out of every 8 American adults was overweight enough to be considered obese. Today, it’s 3 out of every 7.

Some see that increase as the greatest medical failure of our time. Search a website that catalogs scientific research however, and you’ll see the failure, regardless of its degree, does not stem not from a lack of effort.

Pub Med, for instance, houses more than 33,000 papers published on obesity - from the year 2022 alone.

Go back at Pub Med as far as 1990, as Jerilyn Covert did for a three-part series on obesity for WebMD, and you’ll discover nearly half a million papers devoted to the matter. Yet despite all this research, the number of adult Americans who gained enough weight to be considered obese since 1990 has increased by 37 million.

If that fact alone doesn’t suggest our current battle with obesity is the epitome of a mystery, consider other information Covert cites in part two of her series.

A relatively new group of drugs known as the GLP-1 agonists have become the “most effective” drugs available to ameliorate obesity, according to Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, a cardiologist and nutrition professor at the Tufts School of Medicine in Boston. But the GLP-1 agonists, such as Trulicity, Ozempic, and Wegovy, all share one truly mystifying fact.

No one knows for sure why they create weight loss.

The entire line of drugs was originally intended to undo type 2 diabetes. The often accompanying weight loss - usually between 10 and 20 percent of total body weight - creates the rarest of pharmaceutical rarities: a serendipitous side effect.

An additional bit of serendipity Covert notes adds to the mystery. In a phase II clinical study, people taking retatrutide, a still-experimental GLP-1 agonist, lost even more weight than that after nearly a year - an average of 24 percent.

That amount of weight loss in that time falls just short of what’s expected from bariatric surgery, currently considered to be the most successful treatment for severe obesity.

But long-term success isn’t a bariatric surgery guarantee. Between 15 and 35 percent of the patients who undergo it never achieve their desired weight-loss goal, according to an article in the February 2020 issue of the medical journal BMC Endocrine Disorders.

And while the Penn Medicine website calls bariatric surgery “among the safest medical procedures,” with minimal risks when “compared to the risks of living with obesity,” a once-a-week injection of Trulicity, Ozempic, or Wegovy is still safer than any form of elective surgery.

So will the use of these GLP-1 agonists not only make bariatric surgery obsolete but also stop - or at least stymie - the obesity epidemic?

It’s too early to say. What can be said right now is the current cost makes it impractical for many people.

According to the GoodRx website, a month’s worth of Trulicity, even with the GoodRx discount, will cost you at least $800 a month in the Carbon County area. If you qualify for other medical programs, though, you could pay less.

Pick Ozempic and expect to pay about $900 for one marked-down month. Choose Wegovy and it’s $1300.

So why tell you about the GLP-1 agonists when they’re still so cost prohibitive and before they’ve withstood the test of time? Because of something the GLP-1 agonists share in common with the obesity they’re now used to combat.

Both the effectiveness of the drugs and the prevalence of obesity are unequivocally mysteries. It’s just that the obesity mystery is surely a less than serendipitous one.

Obesity is now second only to smoking as a leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. The best estimate is that 300,000 Americans now die each year because they’re either obese or getting there.

Moreover, the medical cost per year that comes from battling obesity now approaches $150 billion.

So we need to end the obesity epidemic and as quickly as possible. But quickly in the medical world can mean a decade.

In the meantime, here’s what you need to do.

See the increase in obesity as a mystery and focus on creating dieting serendipity, an eating pattern that allows you to feel great and maintain a healthy weight.

You don’t need to be - or become - part of the 42 percent of adult Americans who are that word that means more than overweight. Not if you do what I’ve suggested in the past as a way to improve every facet of your health and fitness.

See yourself as both the researcher and the lab rat and experiment, experiment, experiment with how, what, and when you eat.

This advice may be old hat, but new research on the gut microbiome and in the emerging field of epigenetics makes it clear the old hat fits perfectly. And that’s because, while there are often similarities, no two digestive systems are entirely alike and no two people process calories in exactly the same way.