The Nuances of Food Noise

Food noise is a novel term propagated by social media. It may have no clinical relevance but there is a groundswell of laypeople who identify with the concept. However, as with most social media phenomena, clinicians need to recognize the term and create clinical meaning for it.

Food noise represents the unwanted and persistent thoughts about food that some people experience and which are purportedly diminished or eliminated by GLP-1 agonist medications like Ozempic.

The most significant problem with the term is the implication that anyone with thoughts about food and weight has food noise and that this experience is similar for everyone.

Using a colloquial term to describe the experience of thoughts about food and weight is helpful. When people have an easy way to describe their internal stress, they feel less alone and less afraid of the reason their thoughts are so pervasive. Certainly, the glorification of thinness and fear of fat in this country create both anxiety and fear about eating regularly which leads many people to have these types of thoughts.

There is a big difference between concerns about food and intrusive, distressing eating disorder thoughts. These thoughts can be so consuming it is hard to function at school or at work. The thoughts can be so loud that people struggle to engage with anyone in their lives since they have no ability to focus on anything else. The severity of eating disorder thoughts typically exceeds the concept of food noise by many orders of magnitude.

The last concern about food noise is the promise that new metabolic hormone medications will make the thoughts go away. The promise of a magic fix for eating disorders and disordered eating that plague our society is too good to be true. These new medications are more likely to line the pharmaceutical company pockets rather than solve a cultural epidemic.

As I have written extensively in this blog, many people with metabolic dysfunction benefit greatly from these medications, as do people with diabetes. On the other hand, anyone who takes a high enough dose of these medications won’t feel hungry or have food thoughts, for a while, essentially until their body demands more food or shuts down from a lack of food.

Once the dam of hunger breaks or the body breaks down, some people will be back in the same place they were, struggling with food thoughts and likely hungrier than before due to an extended period of time undereating.

The concept of food noise has significant benefit by helping people normalize their experience around hunger and body image. Food noise makes the most sense as a spectrum of severity of symptoms. Understanding the various ways these thoughts can diminish, not just from the new medications available, is the underlying goal.

For the large majority of people, regular meals through the day and cognitive work on body image thoughts will have more success than any other treatment.