Noom, Found and Hims & Hers sell compounded GLP-1 microdoses without evidence they work

Three of the largest direct-to-consumer telehealth companies — Noom, Found and Hims & Hers — each opened programs prescribing compounded GLP-1 drugs at "microdose" levels during a three-month stretch in 2025, STAT reported on Nov. 4, 2025 ^[1][3]. Smaller telehealth operators had already been selling the same approach, and physicians and researchers say the lower doses have never been shown to work in rigorous clinical research ^[1][3].

The programs use compounded GLP-1 drugs at amounts that begin below the FDA-approved doses from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly ^[1][3]. The molecules involved are semaglutide, sold by Novo Nordisk as Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus, and tirzepatide, sold by Eli Lilly as Mounjaro and Zepbound ^[1][3].

Company marketing says the small doses can cut metabolic risk, bring down inflammatory markers and even reduce the odds of cognitive decline ^[1][3]. Doctors and researchers told STAT the drugs have not been proven to help patients with many of the conditions being promoted, and that there is no robust clinical evidence either semaglutide or tirzepatide does anything at very small doses ^[1][3].

"Essentially these patients are guinea pigs, both on the efficacy side and the safety side," said Reshma Ramachandran, a health services researcher and clinician at the Yale School of Medicine ^[1][3].

Promotion has come from outside the industry too. Noom rolled out its program alongside actor Rebel Wilson as a new celebrity spokesperson, and television host Andy Cohen has been speaking publicly about his own microdosing habit ^[1][3].

Roughly seven months later, the evidence had not changed. Writing in STAT on May 29, 2026, Jody Dushay, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending endocrinologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, called microdosing GLP-1s "not a thing," writing that no legitimate long-term data support it and that the field has not even settled on a single definition of microdosing for weight loss or any other condition ^[2]. Dushay, who prescribes GLP-1 therapy to people with obesity and weight-related metabolic disease, wrote that her patients ask her about microdosing while television and online ads push it ^[2].

Why it matters for patients

The dosing strategies being sold are not the ones that were studied when these drugs won FDA approval. The reference point in the reporting is the approved dose range from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly; the compounded programs start lower ^[1][3]. No large trial described in the reporting shows that a reduced dose produces weight loss or metabolic improvement, and the additional marketed benefits — lower inflammatory markers, lower risk of cognitive decline — are not established at low doses ^[1][3].

Safety is also unresolved. Because there is no shared definition of a microdose, one company's microdose may not match another's, so the actual amount of drug can differ from program to program ^[2]. Ramachandran's assessment was that patients in these programs are experiment subjects on both effectiveness and safety ^[1][3].

Several basic facts have not been reported: the specific doses each program uses, whether any of the companies have released data from their own patients, whether a clinical trial of microdosing is under way, how the compounded products are priced, and whether insurance pays for them ^[1][2][3].

As of the May 2026 opinion, the idea that a fraction of an approved dose delivers the same benefit remains untested in long-term data ^[2].