“We examine how consumers modify their food purchases after adopting appetite-suppressing GLP-1 receptor agonists, such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Using survey responses on medication adoption linked to transaction data from a representative U.S. household panel, we document the prevalence, motivations, and demographic patterns of GLP-1 adoption. Households with at least one GLP-1 user reduce grocery spending by 5.3% within six months of adoption, with higher-income households reducing spending by 8.2%. While most food categories see spending declines, the largest reductions are concentrated in calorie-dense, processed categories, including a 10.1% decline in savory snacks. In contrast, a small set of categories show directionally positive changes, with yogurt experiencing the only statistically significant increase. We also find an 8.0% decline in spending at fast-food chains, coffee shops, and limited-service restaurants. These food demand adjustments persist through the first year of medication use, though with some attenuation after six months.”

From Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

Summary: With plausibly up to a trillion burgers sold worldwide, McDonald’s has become one of the most recognizable symbols of abundance and convenience. Its cheeseburger now takes far less work time to afford than in the past, reflecting broad gains in prosperity. McDonald’s has grown into a cultural touchstone, serving communities across the globe.

In 1948, McDonald’s offered nine items on its menu. This helped simplify operations and lower costs. McDonald’s stopped officially counting its hamburger sales after surpassing 100 billion burgers in 1994. However, based on recent estimates of roughly 75 burgers sold every second—or approximately 2.36 billion per year—the total number of burgers sold by McDonald’s is likely in the hundreds of billions, with some sources suggesting McDonald’s has already sold its trillionth burger.

My favorite McDonald’s item is the cheeseburger. It’s been my top choice since 1973, when McDonald’s first came to my hometown. This product will provide you with 300 calories, 15 grams of protein, 31 grams of carbohydrates, 13 grams of fat, and 720 milligrams of sodium. I think it’s delicious and a great food value.

In 1948, entry-level workers were earning around 66 cents an hour. A 19 cent cheeseburger would cost them around 17.4 minutes. Today they’re $1.99 and entry-level food service workers are earning $18.67 an hour, putting the time price at 6.4 minutes. The time price has dropped by 63 percent: You get 2.7 cheeseburgers today for the time price of one in 1948.

Today, with over 41,800 stores in 118 countries and global sales of $130 billion, chances are, wherever you go in the world you can find the Golden Arches calling you. Approximately 93 percent of the restaurants are owned and operated by independent franchisees, which has made many of them millionaires.

Chris Arnade has written extensively about how important McDonald’s is to American culture. He has a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University and worked for 20 years as a trader at an elite Wall Street bank before leaving in 2012 to become a photojournalist. His writings include many beautiful photographs that reveal the central role McDonald’s plays in many communities. Please take a few minutes to enjoy his work here.

Writing this has made me hungry. Time to add to that trillion burger count.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Summary: Work has changed dramatically over time, shifting significantly from physical to mental labor. Today, office jobs demand far less physical energy and carry far lower risks of injury or death compared to physically demanding trades. This transition shows how progress has allowed us to create more value with less strain on our bodies—and with far greater safety than workers of the past could have imagined.

Economist George Gilder points out that using blue-collar hourly wage rates to calculate time prices underestimates the gains we’re enjoying in an economy that’s no longer driven by muscle but by mind. Knowledge workers earn more in an hour, consume fewer calories, and risk far less death or injury than other workers. In other words, they do far more with far less. This is the true compounding of progress—and we can see it mapped on a single chart.

Calories Per Hour of Work

I asked several AI models about the number of calories per hour that different kinds of work require and this is what I got:

The energy demands of physical work versus knowledge work reveals a dramatic difference in caloric expenditure. Workers in physically demanding jobs burn significantly more calories than do their office counterparts:

High-energy physical work:

• Construction tasks such as masonry or hanging sheetrock: 400–500 calories per hour (equivalent to running or high-intensity aerobics)
• Heavy lifting and transport: 285–300 calories per hour for a 170-pound worker

Moderate physical work:

• Manufacturing: 228 calories per hour (men), 180 calories per hour (women)

Office work:

• Standing desk: 186 calories per hour for a 170-pound person
• Sitting desk work: 100 calories per hour

As we transition from working with atoms to working with knowledge our bodies require a lot less energy to perform that work. Moving from construction work to sitting at a desk in an office requires 77.8 percent fewer calories per hour. Put another way, the calories needed to fuel one construction worker can power 4.5 office workers. The result is an economic system that creates more value with less resource consumption.

Fatal work injury rate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on fatalities on the job:

Farming, fishing, and forestry are the most dangerous professions at 24.4 fatal injuries, with transportation and material moving at 13.6, and construction and extraction at 12.9. Office and administrative support are the least risky professions at 0.6. Farmers, fishermen, and loggers are more than 40 times likely than an office worker to be killed on the job. Moving from construction work to sitting at a desk in an office reduces the risk of a work fatality by 95.3 percent. Adjusted for population size, construction workers experience a work-related fatality rate more than 21 times higher than that of office workers.

And it was much worse in the past—something that we tend to forget when looking at present statistics. In 1900, deaths in the mining and oil extractions fields (lumped under mining) was estimated at 333 per 100,000 workers and remained that high through the 1920s. We can hardly comprehend just how good we’ve got it now.

Calorie-fatality index

If we combine these two factors into a calorie-fatality index and compare the construction and office industries, we note that office work is 99 percent lower than construction work on the index. Moving from blue-collar construction work to an office job indicates an overall improvement factor of 96.75 (or 9,575 percent) on the calorie-fatality index.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

“In Indonesia … The rate of exclusive breastfeeding among infants under six months has steadily increased, rising from 52% in 2017 to 66.4% in 2024. However, many infants are not exclusively breastfed for the full six months – the duration required to achieve the full health benefits.”

From World Health Organization.