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Key points
- The term surged after 2023 as GLP-1 users described relief from intrusive thoughts about food.
- Scientific study is very limited: we do not know what “normal” or “healthy” food noise is.
- Telehealth and weight-loss companies are pushing tests around the concept and suggesting medical treatment.
- Food environments and diet culture help create the very problem medicine seeks to quiet.
Have you heard the term “food noise”? If you have, you probably first heard it only recently. Over the past couple of years, it has burst from social media into scientific journals, pharmaceutical marketing, and medical clinics. I heard it casually mentioned in my own doctor’s office last week
I have been working with a global team of social and nutrition scientists to figure out why food noise wasn’t a thing until a couple of years ago, and to consider some of the ethical and practical implications of its sudden arrival. It turns out there is a lot to be concerned about. This week, we published a commentary in the journal Appetite outlining some of our collective observations and proposing some ways forward
The recency of “food noise” as a recognized concept seems linked to the wide release of the new generation of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. Thelinguist on our team analyzed Google searches for the term and found very little before 2023. She also went back through transcripts of interviews with weight-loss patients prior to 2023, and nothing emerged using the term “noise” or similar ideas. Our colleagues who have conducted earlier studies in quite different places and languages—likeBrazil and Denmark—say the same thing. Other members of our team analyzed TikTok videos and found that the hashtag #foodnoise exploded in 2024.
Food noise’s sudden popularization is best explained by the surge in people using GLP-1s and experiencing the appetite changes these drugs trigger as a quieting of cognitive preoccupation with eating. We don’t think this means the experience of food noise itself is new. Rather, the extreme effectiveness of the drugs, combined with the number of people using them, has created a novel-for-many shared experience that people started talking about online, and presumably offline too
The idea of food noise has been captured and massively amplified by the telehealth and weight-loss industries. Take, for example, theweb page description provided by Oviva, a for-profit provider of virtual weight-management services across Europe: “Do thoughts about food pop into your mind throughout the day – even when you’re not hungry? Maybe it feels like food is always on your mind. This is often called food noise and it can get in the way of your weight loss journey.”
Companies like Ro and WW International now offer online tests that tell potential consumers whether they have “too much” food noise and might benefit from a pharmaceutical fix that can then be provided directly to consumers. Ro’s spokesperson is no less than Serena Williams, who has shared details of her own use of GLP-1s for what appear to be cosmetic and psychological—rather than clinically necessary—reasons to help her feel better about her post-baby body
As an anthropologist who studies bodies, health, and stigma, I find these developments fascinating. Not because I doubt people’s experiences, or because I am against the psychological benefits of feeling good about yourself. Rather, it’s because of what happens to how we understand and treat our bodies when something that wasn’t previously defined as a medical problem is suddenly redefined as one needing expensive, powerful—and presumably lifetime—medication. Food noise is not a well-established medical or psychological category, and yet there is a commercial push to suggest that it should be treated with GLP-1s as if it is.
Our team’s commentary this week was not an argument against the concept of food noise. Rather, it was a call for greater scientific and medical caution. Nutrition researchers—including those on our team—are still attempting to determine whether food noise is distinct from concepts that have been studied for decades, including food cravings, food preoccupation, intrusive food-related thoughts, and food cue reactivity. Likewise, the first questionnaires developed to measure food noise contain many items that closely resemble older, validated measures.
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Before we begin using food noise to guide treatment decisions, we need to know whether it identifies something genuinely new that requires new methods of treatment or simply gives a new name to experiences that nutrition scientists already understand reasonably well. We also don’t know what a “normal” or “healthy” level of food noise is, making it impossible to say what a good treatment outcome would look like
Clearly, fully silencing food noise would be bad, because eating is fundamental to human well-being and survival. But beyond that, the most basic research is just beginning. For example, a person recovering from anorexia may experience persistent thoughts about food very differently from someone living with binge eating disorder, someone with otherwise good nutritional practices who wants to stay slim for cosmetic reasons, someone struggling to manage weight to avoid chronic <a href="https://healthylife7.com/gene-edited-car-t-expands-rare-disease-horizons/” title=”Gene-Edited CAR T Expands Rare Disease Horizons”>disease, or someone with a history of facing hunger and food insecurity.
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Across cultures, food itself carries different meanings, as do ideas about hunger, restraint, and eating well. Across languages, the term is being translated into quite different ideas, as we explain in our commentary: in our searches of Japanese-language online forums and social media, Japanese GLP-1 users instead use shokuyoku—a craving or longing for food with more positive connotations. In Brazil, informal conversational terms include potentially more stigmatizing terms, such as cabeça de gordo, or “fat people’s ways of thinking.” In Czech, food noise is translated as potravinový šum or jídelní šum, terms that allude to murmuring, which need not be unpleasant.
These nuances make it difficult to assume that one definition—or one standardized questionnaire translated into different languages—captures the same phenomenon for everyone. It may, but the basic research hasn’t happened yet
Now for an additional perspective that didn’t make it into the published commentary. “Food noise” cannot be understood solely as something to be analyzed and treated at the level of the individual eater. Modern food environments are extraordinarily good at making us think about food. Food companies compete relentlessly for our attention. Highly processed foods are engineered to be rewarding. Portion sizes have steadily increased. Advertising follows us from billboards to streaming services to social media feeds, where recipes, restaurant reviews, influencers, and diet advice appear alongside one another in an endless scroll. Thinking about food is not simply a private psychological event; it is a predictable response to environments designed to keep food constantly visible, desirable, and difficult to ignore.
At the same time, many societies—including the US, Brazil, Denmark, Australia, the UK, and Japan, all places where members of our team conduct research—celebrate dietary restraint. Thinness is admired. Weight is moralized. Health is often framed as an individual achievement secured through discipline and the right lifestyle choices. We are encouraged to consume while simultaneously being expected to resist consuming. That contradiction places many people in an impossible position
Seen from this perspective, food noise is not simply biological. It is a biopsychosocial experience emerging from food environments designed to stimulate appetite while culture simultaneously demands appetite control. And with regard to food noise, a growing marketplace now offers products, programs, and medications that promise to quiet the very experience that the broader system of which they are part has helped create
This is the part of the story we think deserves much more attention. Current discussions of food noise often focus on individuals and their biology. That biology is unquestionably important. GLP-1 medications are clearly helping many people, and the relief that patients describe should not be dismissed simply because broader social forces are also at work. Both things can be true at once. Medications may reduce biologically mediated food-related thoughts while people continue to live in environments that constantly amplify those thoughts. Recognizing the structural side of the story does not diminish the biological one; it makes our understanding more complete.
The goal should not be to dismiss food noise just because it has emerged as a popularized idea. As an anthropologist, I know people are great observers of the worlds they live in and see important things before medicine and science catch on (long COVID being a good recent example). But we should be extremely cautious about the rush to medicalize every persistent thought about food. The better goal is to understand what makes food feel loud, for whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Only then can we decide when quieting food noise is helpful—and when we should instead be asking why the world around us has made food so hard to tune out.
Facebook image: Unai Huizi Photography/
