Thoughts about food are a regular part of human cognitive processes, sparked by hunger, health, social expectations, and cultural norms. For an increasingly weight-conscious society, now accelerated by abundance and the GLP-1s, these thoughts have been given a name: food noise.
“Food-related decisions have become more complex with increasing awareness about the relationship between food and health… and may become particularly burdensome when using diet to manage conditions such as obesity or diabetes.”
From Anecdote to Clinical Definition
The concept of food noise first emerged not from laboratories or clinics, but from the testimony of patients, across social platforms, individuals, often “patients,” began describing a mental chatter surrounding food, the incessant hum of thoughts about eating, cravings, and control. From these accounts, interested clinicians generated two hypotheses: first, that food noise was a distinct psychological construct; and second, that excessive experiences of it might significantly disrupt food choices, mental well-being, and overall quality of life.
As the idea spread, data began to follow. According to Google search data, food noise peaked in spring 2024. Mainstream and social media amplified the term, highlighting “incessant mental chatter” or “constant rumination” about food—emphasizing its intrusive, inescapable nature, now relieved by GLP-1s.
Across patient accounts, several common themes emerged: the cognitive drain of constant food decisions, cravings without relief, a sense of dysphoria marked by anxiety or shame, and the wish for quiet from one’s own mind. These personal accounts soon began shaping professional definitions.
The once descriptive, patient-originated phrase began to acquire the contours of scientific legitimacy, as experts began weaving food noise into peer-reviewed discussion and clinical concern. Building on an evolving literature, an expert panel convened to synthesize existing colloquial and empirical perspectives. Drawing from clinical observation, they identified several defining features that elevated food noise beyond mere preoccupation with eating:
- Cognitive Burden - Food noise consumes mental energy, disrupting focus and decision-making.
- Dysphoria - It carries an unpleasant emotional tone of varying intensity.
- Self-Recrimination and Stigma - Feelings of shame or failure often accompany it.
- Persistence and Loss of Control - It resists conscious effort to suppress or ignore.
These criteria culminated in a formal clinical definition:
Food noise refers to persistent thoughts about food that are perceived by the individual as unwanted and/or dysphoric and may cause harm to the individual, including social, mental, or physical problems.
From anecdote and metaphor to measurable analytics, food noise has become defined and fully medicalized, illustrating how subjective experiences can enter diagnostic language. What began as a shared language for personal struggle has become a recognized entity in the clinical lexicon, reflecting the broader cultural trend of translating “lived experiences” into diagnostic categories.
Measuring the decibels of Food Noise
Thinking about food is an ordinary, often pleasurable, part of human life. The medicalized concept of food noise does not pathologize everyday thoughts about food; instead, it explores the psychological and emotional burden of the intrusive, dysphoric, and uncontrollable dimensions of food-related thought. To explore that distinction, researchers developed a new way to measure it.
Researchers created the Ro–Allison–Indiana–Dhurandhar Food Noise Inventory (RAID-FN) [1], a questionnaire designed to pinpoint when everyday food thoughts cross into distress. It groups questions into four domains: persistence and intrusiveness, cognitive burden, dysphoria, and self-stigma—each representing a facet of how food noise disrupts mental balance.
- Persistence and Intrusiveness - the incessant, rumination-like quality of food noise, ever-present and hard to control. Questions identifying a pattern of mental preoccupation that resembles cognitive intrusion rather than simple interest or craving.
- Cognitive Burden and Interference - the mental workload created by constant food-related thoughts. Responses reflecting how food noise competes for attention and contributes to a sustained sense of cognitive fatigue.
- Dysphoria and Emotional Distress - food noise is experienced not just as persistent but as unpleasant or distressing, the emotional weariness and cost of the cognitive burden, and the potential to diminish well-being.
- Self-Stigma and Self-Recrimination – the internalization of the experienced struggle, intertwined with self-judgment and social perception, leading to eroded self-confidence.
Food noise in context
Food noise overlaps with established psychological concepts, particularly rumination, in which repetitive, intrusive thinking interferes with other mental activities. It involves a heightened “cue reactivity,” our automatic mental and physiological response to food-related stimuli. Cue reactivity is the same thought experiment where clinicians continue to struggle in defining a “food addiction.” Given food noise’s roots in patient experience, it also shares similarities with eating disorders, including the “need” to diet or eat specific foods.
Many factors can influence food noise, but it cannot be reduced to a single cause. Environmental triggers, hunger, or dieting may all heighten food-related thinking —the 'why' of food thoughts. Food noise addresses the how of those thoughts.
Funding
In its coverage, STAT takes a cautious yet probing stance on Ro, the telehealth company that funded the development of the Food Noise Questionnaire.
Ro’s business model centers on obesity care and the prescription of weight-loss medications, including GLP-1s. The company not only funded the research but is already using the questionnaire to monitor its own patients, licensing it to pharmaceutical firms, and positioning it as a potential clinical endpoint. Does this blur the line between scientific inquiry and product development? Or did that blurring occur when food noise developed an operational definition by clinicians?
The concern over industry influence is not dissimilar to pharmaceutical campaigns and educational partnerships by companies like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which have reframed obesity as a chronic disease.
While advancing legitimate scientific inquiry, there is a risk in creating a feedback loop in which the industry both defines the problem and provides the solution. In this instance, is Ro, a marketer, putting its thumb on the scientific scale by involvement in determining a metric?
Historically, medical concepts have often crystallized at the intersection of patient narratives, scientific curiosity, and commercial interests. Industry funding can accelerate discovery, but it can also narrow the scope of inquiry, “privileging” definitions that are most compatible with therapeutic products. Food noise as a metric may provide valuable visibility for an under-recognized experience, but it also carries risks, including medicalizing normal variation driven by commercial priorities. That tension becomes visible when data itself starts to cooperate too neatly
Data Too Eager to Please
One of the strengths of the new assessment lies in its remarkable consistency: when people take the test more than once, their scores tend to line up almost perfectly, suggesting that it captures something real and stable in our thinking.
However, when researchers looked closer at the measure’s dysphoria factor, the reflection of distress or negative emotion around eating, the reliability was more modest. Dysphoria may be fleeting, a ripple in someone’s psychology, not a permanent fixture, changing with stress or social media’s cultural messaging. The intra-personal variability of dysphoria means that it can be susceptible to dissimulation, where individuals consciously or unconsciously shape their answers. In a world where GLP1s are tied to specific diagnostic thresholds, there can be incentives to “qualify.” A higher score could open the door to medication access, insurance coverage, or the attention of a clinician who otherwise might not intervene.
This raises an uncomfortable point that has been largely missing from the popular media’s reporting [2] on food noise research: diagnostic inflation doesn’t just skew data—it can quietly benefit the companies developing and marketing the therapies. If inflated self-reports feed into prevalence statistics or expand eligibility pools, they can help normalize more widespread prescribing.
Amid these entangled incentives, the story of food noise offers a cautionary tale about how new disorders are born
The Science of Food Noise—And the Echoes of Influence
The Food Noise Questionnaire shows how an idea born from patient experience can evolve into a measurable construct—bridging science, psychology, and public health. Yet it also reveals the fragile balance between exploration and influence. The same partnerships that propel discovery can also shape the questions asked, the language used, and the boundaries of what counts as pathology. Whether food noise marks clinical progress or another chapter in the medicalization of everyday life remains an open question—one that invites readers to consider how industry, medicine, and meaning intersect in defining the contours of health.
[1] Ro refers to the telehealth company that provides health and pharmaceutical services, the primary founder of the work.
[2] The researchers were transparent about this “glitch” in data validity, but it was not mentioned in the study used by the media. It was reported in an earlier paper describing the validity of the RAID-FN Inventory. You had to be curious or skeptical enough to do a little more digging, a time constraint greatly hampered by the 24-7-365 attention-demanding “news” cycle.
Sources: Food noise: definition, measurement, and future research directions Nature Nutrition & Diabetes DOI: 10.1038/s41387-025-00382-x
Development and rigorous multistep validation of a psychometric tool to measure food noise Appetite DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2025.108339
Can ‘food noise’ be measured? Telehealth giant Ro rolls out a new scale for obesity care STAT
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
