The Weekend Edition is pulled from the daily Stansberry Digest.

 We wrote it... Did you buy it?

You might've seen some of the mainstream headlines last weekend. And if not, well, here you go...

They're all talking about this...

Late last Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") approved a breakthrough weight-loss drug made by Danish company Novo Nordisk (NVO).

As soon as later this month, the company plans to launch the drug, called Wegovy. It's a higher-dose version of the company's existing diabetes drug, Ozempic (generic name "semaglutide"), which is now approved for treating chronic obesity...

Here are the attention-grabbing details from Stansberry NewsWire analyst Nick Koziol...

The FDA said that the drug was safe and well-tolerated across trials...

The drug is administered via a shot once a week, NVO said. Wegovy is used as an addition to diet changes and exercise for obese and overweight adults with at least one other comorbidity, NVO added.

The data behind this drug are incredible. NVO said that trial patients without Type 2 diabetes who received the drug reported weight loss of 17% to 18% over the 68-week period. According to a doctor interviewed by MarketWatch, patients only see 5% to 10% declines in their weight using existing drugs.

According to Stansberry Venture Technology editor Dave Lashmet, in trials, Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug helped obese people increase their daily activity levels as they lost weight...

Dave, who has been way ahead of this story, says the drug can help people lose 15% of their weight in a year. And the trials were so effective that many people in them stopped taking the weekly injection because their quality of life improved significantly.

As Dave wrote in a special alert to Venture Technology subscribers recently...

Every step was lighter.

This turned people who had trouble walking down the street into folks who could walk around the block, then half a mile, and then join an exercise group.

This news might stun most people...

It's hard to believe that a drug could help someone lose 15% of their weight in a year by reducing appetite and increasing physical activity.

But Dave has clued his readers into dramatic medical breakthroughs before. He likes to conduct "boots on the ground" research more than most analysts we know... And it frequently pays off in a big way for his subscribers.

That's the case here...

Dave was at a cardiology conference in Paris in 2019. He sat among hundreds of doctors in a breakout session hosted by Novo Nordisk that convinced him of the potential of the weight-loss drugs the company was working on back then...

Dave and analyst Alan Gula – who later visited Novo Nordisk's headquarters in Denmark to do more research and tour the facilities – believed in the long-term potential for the company's drugs to expand their reach beyond diabetes treatment. As they wrote in Stansberry's Investment Advisory...

We attended Novo Nordisk's Capital Markets Day in Denmark last month. There, the company laid out new, long-term goals for 2025. We had a chance to speak with Martin Holst Lange, head of global development for Novo Nordisk, about the company's ambitious obesity strategy.

Novo Nordisk is seeking to develop drug treatments that are as effective as weight-loss surgery. It's hard to overstate the significance of this goal...

If the company is successful, it will have a potential solution to the obesity epidemic.

Remember, this was before COVID-19 entered our lives... and before talking about threatening "comorbidities" for the virus, like obesity, became as common as the early advice to wash your hands and stay out of public.

The research team behind our flagship Stansberry's Investment Advisory newsletter recommended owning shares of the company back in December 2019, when the stock traded for less than $60 per share. It's now trading for more than $80 per share and set a fresh 52-week high on Thursday.

We first heard Dave present in-depth about the obesity epidemic itself in early March 2020...

This was about the time the world was shutting down.

Dave sat on stage in a large meeting room at our Spring Editors' Conference in Florida, with giant images from his PowerPoint slides projecting behind him. He talked about several big opportunities to invest in companies working on solutions for the growing obesity epidemic.

He rattled off statistics about the problem – like the fact that about one in three U.S. adults are obese and that rates have tripled in recent decades. We wrote more about this topic last August in the Digest...

True obesity affected about 10% of adults in 1990. Now it affects nearly 40% of adults. Obesity is the most rampant health problem in the U.S. today. And we can measure its growth easily.

Dave pointed out that at least 20% of the population of every state in America is overweight today. None of these states met that threshold in 1995, just 26 years ago. More from Dave, courtesy of that August 2020 Digest...

Here's why this matters to the country and our economy: Obesity shortens lives. It stresses bones and hearts, brains and digestion. Plus, it complicates success for any other medical procedure, from surgery to infection control.

Novo Nordisk's pipeline of drugs were among those that could help stop the costly epidemic, he said.

When we caught up with Dave again last summer to get an update on the obesity story, he told us that most non-COVID-related FDA trials had been interrupted or hadn't started yet because of the pandemic, but that Novo Nordisk's treatments were well on their way to approval.

As word got out more recently on Wall Street about that likelihood, NVO shares gained 20% from a recent low on March 24 through May 25, when Dave wrote in his Venture Technology newsletter to expect Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug to get FDA approval to treat general obesity by the end of this month.

That was good news for them...

Dave had already doubled down on owning NVO shares back in in June 2020...

He recommended the stock then to subscribers of Venture Technology...

And folks who watched Dave's online presentation on the obesity epidemic will remember that he was so convinced in the science and data he had seen about Novo Nordisk's drug in development that he "gave away" the ticker as a free pick in his event.

Back then, NVO shares traded at a significant discount to where they are now... And as word spreads of this breakthrough drug, its effectiveness in trials, and more to come from the company, prices could head even higher.

In short, there's still plenty of room for NVO shares to run...

All the best,

Corey McLaughlin

Editor's note: Dave has found three other little-known companies that are fighting to end the obesity epidemic. These incredible opportunities each have the potential to return 1,000% or more... so Dave has agreed to offer a 55% discount on his Stansberry Venture Technology newsletter to help folks looking to profit from the weight-loss fight. This is by far the biggest discount he has ever offered, or ever plans to... and will last for a limited time only. Click here to get started.