Is Food Noise Just Hunger We’ve Been Conditioned Not to Trust? A RDs Honest - Yet Controversial Take

Abbey Sharp (0:00)

Your body might not be broken, it just might be grossly underfed.

Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Today, we are talking about food noise, a now widely recognized phrase that I have some very complicated feelings about. Because on the one hand, it has given people language for something that is genuinely so exhausting. So the constant mental chatter about food, cravings, rules, guilt, and what you are going to eat next. And that validation is critical for evidence-based obesity care. But not unlike a lot of other well-intentioned concepts, it has very quickly been co-opted by diet culture and the wellness industry to make normal appetite, hunger, cravings, and even pleasure sound like psychological symptoms that need to be snuffed out. In today's solo episode, we're going to be interrogating this new mainstream phase food noise. And instead of simply asking, how do we eradicate or fix it? We're going to ask how much of it actually needs fixing and how much of it is simply a critical survival tool that we've been socialized to distrust. Okay, friend, I also want to remind you that if you are not already, I would really appreciate if you would hit that follow button so you get notifications whenever I release a new episode. And if you want more visual diet culture discussions, check out my social platforms at Abbey's Kitchen. All right, friend, let's get into it.

Okay, so I usually like to set the stage in these conversations with some clear definitions. But according to our 2025 paper in the International Journal of Obesity, it isn't so cut and dry here as our scientific definition of food noise hasn't yet caught up to its cultural use. But generally, when people say food noise, they are usually talking about the persistent, intrusive, unwanted or hard-to-ignore thoughts about food. That can include cravings, urges to eat, preoccupation with what you're going to eat next, difficulty feeling satisfied, or the feeling that food is taking up more mental real estate than you would like it to. And while we're still very early in scientific discussions around food noise explicitly, the GLP-1 receptor agonist BOOM has stimulated a lot of interest in its pathology. So let's talk about the biological side of food noise. So the Aptite, Satiety, Reward, and Q-Reactivity pathways that GLP-1 medications seem to influence. So right now we know that GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic induce weight loss by reducing energy intake, partially by slowing gastric emptying, partially by improving glucose regulation, and most important to this conversation, by acting on brain reward circuits like the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and the mesolympic dopamine system. So one of the results here is that food cues, which are a key driver of food noise, just feel less urgent and less magnetic. Now a lot of research in this area has been on animal models, but we actually did just get an early human study on folks with severe obesity and binge eating-type symptoms, where they used implanted brain electrodes to track the reward center activities. The researchers found that severe food preoccupation was associated with low frequency activity in the nucleus accumbens, and that the GLP-1-tiered zepatide at least temporarily helped to suppress it. And while we're a long way from explicitly testing everyone's nucleus accumbens for abnormal activity, we are slowly inching towards establishing kind of food noise genes that seem to play a role in taste perception, appetite and satiety, emotional eating, disinhibition, snacking, craving, and binge eating. Some of our best research so far has been on the genes that affect the leptin-melanocortin pathway, like variants of the MC4R gene, which has been associated with emotional eating, food cravings, binge eating, and hedonic eating. FTO is another famous obesity-associated gene related to satiety responsiveness and preference for energy-dense foods. Now, we're still a long way from establishing an explicit quote-unquote food noise phenotype, but there is a lot of interest in using gene mapping to help determine who may be the most likely to benefit from GLP-1s based on their biology. But not all food noise can be pinned on a pathological reward circuit disruption. This is where we need to address the well-established role of restriction in amplifying food noise. One of the earliest and most famous studies to explain the impact of deprivation on food preoccupation was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. In this arguably unethical study, 36 healthy men were put through a period of severe caloric restriction. So I'm talking like half their calorie needs plus 22 miles of walking per week. And again, these were healthy men in healthy baseline bodyweights with no histories of disordered eating. Within weeks, they became deeply obsessed with food. So they collected recipes and cookbooks. They talked compulsively about their favorite meals. They developed rigid and strange food rituals and habits like hoarding, stealing, and sneaking food. And when they did get access to food during the re-feeding phase, they binged to the point of making themselves sick. And perhaps most shockingly, the food noise didn't just disappear the moment that they were re-fed. For some men, appetite dysregulation, obsessive food thoughts, and binge-like urges persisted years into recovery. Helping researchers understand that the psychological effects of restriction can well outlast the restriction itself. And this is why I think the Minnesota study is still so relevant to the food noise conversation today. Because it shows that food preoccupation can be generated by deprivation. It can be a response to scarcity. It can be the brain basically doing exactly what it's supposed to do when it thinks that food access is threatened. So before we can call every intrusive food thought a pathology, we really have to ask, has this person's body, brain or food environment been giving them a reason to feel deeply deprived? And here's the ugly truth that modern wellness culture doesn't like to address.