London | If you suffer from obesity, Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has two talk-of-the-town drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, that might be able to help you slim down. But for Denmark as a whole, the reverse is true: these miracle medicines are actually fattening up an otherwise shrinking economy.

Denmark’s GDP increased 1.7 per cent in the first half of this year, outpacing the anaemic 0.2 per cent in the 20-country eurozone. But if you strip out the contribution of Novo Nordisk, which sold $4 billion in weight loss drugs alone in the first half of the year, the Danish economy would have shrunk 0.3 per cent.