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Food noise is gaining awareness among both scientists and the general public.

GLP-1 medicines have revealed a new biological understanding of food noise symptoms.

There are at least two distinct biological pathways to food noise, one overlapping with alcohol cravings.

Food noise is having a moment. After decades of people, including clinicians and researchers, mostly dismissing food noise as a psychological symptom—or even as an excuse to justify poor eating habits—the tide is turning. We're finally recognizing that food noise is a real thing.1 Specifically, a real biological thing instead of a lack of willpower.

In this post, we will review recent science to offer clarity on several pressing food noise questions: 1. What is food noise? 2. What causes food noise and can understanding these causes improve treatment? 3. How can the science behind food noise explain individual differences in food noise symptoms and treatment responses?

What is food noise? Ancient and modern forms

Although we can't confirm this with our Homo sapiens ancestors, people have probably always experienced food noise. Given the critical role that eating played in our survival and reproductive success, evolutionary pressures likely shaped our primitive early biology toward excess thinking and emotional energy about food. Particularly in its absence. The landmark "Minnesota Starvation Study" conducted by Dr. Ancel Keys, for example, revealed that food noise symptoms increased dramatically among participants following low-calorie diets.2 Food deprivation studies universally showed that food noise could be created by external food conditions and was related to but psychologically distinct from hunger. This form of diet-induced food noise is experientially unpleasant. But, importantly, it is also an essential survival mechanism that prioritizes nutrition-seeking behaviors during periods of food scarcity. Humanity without this form of food noise would likely have been a short-lived species.

The later 20th and early 21st centuries, however,........

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