SmartBrief editor Tom Parks covered multiple presentations on obesity, weight loss and GLP-1 medications at the American Association of Nurse Practitioners National Conference. This story is a follow-up to GLP-1s help patients lose weight, but obesity is still a chronic condition
Food noise – persistent, unwanted, negative thoughts about eating – has received more attention in the past few years as researchers have honed in on ways to measure the experience, even as evidence has emerged that GLP-1 receptor agonists may turn down the volume in ways that improve quality of life.
“Food noise is important because it relates to well-being and happiness and quality of life,” said Emily Dhurandhar, Ph.D, whose research is helping to define and measure food noise
What the research has found so far
A 2024 expert panel of the American Society for Nutrition agreed on this formal definition of food noise, according to a report in the journalNature: “Persistent thoughts about food that are perceived by the individual as being unwanted and/or dysphoric and may cause harm to the individual, including social, mental, or physical problems.”
Dhurandhar and DNP Angela Golden shared what is known about food noise at a session of the 2026 American Association of Nurse Practitioners National Conference. Food noise is not something solely experienced by people with weight loss. Although there are small correlations between food noise and body mass index, people across the BMI spectrum experience food noise
In fact, food noise is not highly correlated with concern about weight and shape, and it is not correlated with time spent on food preparation. Food noise, however, is linked to frequent dieting, but whether either one causes the other is an open question
Researchers have found that food noise is dysphoric, meaning that it feels bad. The thoughts are persistent — they don’t just go away. Food noise carries a cognitive burden, making it difficult to think about other things. Finally, the experience is self-stigmatizing. It makes people not just feel worse but feel worse about themselves
Studies – including inJAMA Network Open, CureusandNature Medicine– suggested that GLP-1 receptor agonists may quiet food noise. If that’s so, the benefits for patients may be significant.
Future research may bear out the impact of GLP-1s and their benefits for patients when food noise is turned off. Dhurandhar and Golden, though, said clinical experience suggested a few hypotheses about the effects of food noise, and they laid out four questions to explore it:
- Does food noise interfere with weight loss?
- Does food noise contribute to weight regain after loss?
- Is food noise made worse by dieting?
- Is food noise more intense with obesity, degrading quailty of life?
Measuring food noise
TheRo Allison Indiana Dhurandhar Food Noise Inventoryis a questionnaire that measures all four aspects of food noise, and it includes a 23-question scale for use in research, along with a seven-question scale for clinical settings. Studies are underway about how baseline levels of food noise may affect clinical outcomes. The RAID-FN tool has been detailed in a report in the journalNutrition & Diabetes.
Ironically, food noise has been receiving more attention in part because people taking GLP-1s have been talking about how noticeable it was when it went away. Dhurandhar likened the experience to a loud fan that you’ve grown so used to hearing that you become aware of only when it has been turned off
The ASN expert panel shared this perspective from a patient taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist:
“All of a sudden, it was like some part of my brain that was always there just went quiet. It felt almost surreal to put an injector against my leg and have happen in 48 (hours) what decades of intervention could not accomplish. If I had lost almost no weight, just to have my brain working the way it’s working, I would stay on this medication forever.”
In a separate presentation, Sandra Christensen, MSN, said food noise comes up frequently in her obesity care practice
“People consistently say how much nicer it is to live life without food noise,” she said. “And honestly, I hear that more than that they are thrilled with the weight loss.”
