to think “food noise” is becoming one of those phrases people hide behind rather than actually dealing with their eating habits?

[foodywoody]

I keep hearing people say they have “food noise” and that’s why they’re constantly thinking about food or snacking, but isn’t that just hunger, boredom, habit, or emotional eating dressed up in a nicer label? I’m not saying it’s not real for some people, especially where there are medical issues involved, but the way it’s thrown around now makes it sound like no one has any control over it at all.

It just feels like another way to remove any personal responsibility. Not everything needs a label. Sometimes it’s just about eating properly and getting enough protein and actually addressing emotional eating.

@tryingtonotrage what you describe as “food noise” in your post (that I can’t find to quote) IME, and the experience of normal weight friends & family, is that stream of thoughts is completely normal when on a diet/while restricting calories. It’s why diets never last! You think about food and battle with your willpower all day in your head. Everyone gets it! It’s your brain’s way of telling you you’re not eating enough calories because your brain doesn’t know you’re overweight and need to restrict calories in order to lose weight. It’s not the same as true food addiction & emotional eating issues that morbidly obese people have (which is what these people seem to equate food noise to, like it’s only obese people who get it). If it was the same as that you wouldn’t be “just a bit podgy”, you’d be obese because you’d have zero control over your eating

Yea i read it the same - restricting calories, too small meals, no protein etc to reach satiation, obsessing over food because you’ve told yourself you can’t have it, target weights that are probably unattainable…. Thinking you need to eat only salad to lose weight. Been there as have many many others but doesn’t sound like ‘true’ food noise

Yes but what I think the OP is getting at is people being a bit clumsy and saying oh I’ve dyspraxia when the 2 things aren’t the same - no one is doubting the obsessive food thoughts that border on mental illness/ eating disorders but not everyone who finds it hard to control their eating has intolerable levels of food noise, so using it as an excuse is avoiding personal responsibility, same as someone who hates sports and is bad at them and doesn’t want to practice shouldn’t say I can’t do it I’ve dyspraxia (no hate to you at all I’ve a close friend with dyspraxia just trying to add to your example)

Wow. That's.

I'm not sure what that is.

Stay humble @aluna

Here is an exerpt from an article from 2023 by a professor at Cornell:

"Before 2022, there was barely a whisper about it. Now the concept of “food noise” is ubiquitous on social media; a quick TikTok search, for instance, finds that videos related to “food noise explained” attracted 1.8 billion views as of this summer. Coined to name the experience of thinking about food, longing for food, planning our next meal and so on, “food noise” is a slick rebrand of some of the most basic human drives: hunger, appetite, craving. But now these are being framed as bugs, rather than features. We should resist this reframing.

References to “food noise” invariably appear in connection with the new, much-hyped class of drugs that often induce weight loss, such as Ozempic and Wegovy. To be critical of the concept of food noise isn’t to doubt that some people have come to experience their former relationship with hunger this way while taking these drugs, with their powerful appetite-suppressive effects. But to call something noise is to go beyond describing it: It’s to invoke the normative claim that simply loving food, letting food occupy our thoughts and responding to our hunger is suspect. It isn’t."

Opinion | What if ‘Food Noise’ Is Just … Hunger? - The New York Times

Yeah, it’s to do with the way that obesity has recently been classified as a ‘disease’. It’s actually not, but the reason it’s been classified this way is to do with funding (I read something about funding only being available when if it has a ‘disease’ classification).

I don’t think it’s helpful to be honest. It paints people as victims and reduces sense of control.

This is the million dollar question.

I think a lot is about more money, new social habits like snacking or eating while watching tv, electric light, and easily accessible and easy to eat ready made foods.

Some researchers believe the gut bacteria etc in the gut microbiome are sending "feed me" messages to the brain. So if you eat junk food (along with its designed cravability features) the gut bugs who thrive on junk are shouting to the brain via the vagus nerve to get them the food they need. If you are starving your biome of complex carbohydrates that will set off alarm systems in the populations of healthy gut bacteria. Something like that. Apparently more than 80% of the messages along the vagus nerve are from the gut to the brain, not the brain to the gut.

Cetainly if you cut out a food group - and demonise it by calling it "carbs", ignoring complex carbohydrates - your body will let you know.

Yes as in you, personally, can stop thinking about food? Or are you speaking on behalf of others because slim people can’t possibly think about food as much as fat people? Yet, no one can really know what is going on in anyone’s else’s brain and, personally, as a skinny person constantly thinking of food, or suffering with “food noise”, you have not helped me at all.

Never heard of good noise..When l.f is rest read thought . Someone was complaining about people making loud and unpleasant noises when they are eating.

You know slurp, slop, chomp, burp..crunch gulp etc
.
What you describe sounds like some kind of uncontrollable eating problem. or addiction..Which people need help with.

I think most people get food noise to varying degrees . For some it’s so overwhelming they can’t control their reaction to it. For others, they have developed tools and systems to overcome it. Intuitive eating is something that doesn’t work for me now im older. I track what I eat to stay a healthy weight. To me, WLI’s are just another tool, like MFP or fasting. A means to an end. Some people need them and others don’t.

It is a very real thing, scientifically. Just because you are ignorant to it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I ate so much crap in the 80s as a child and was very slim. That’s before the ED hit in my teens. My grandmother brought me bags and bags of sweets each month, lots of bottles of flavoured milk, I drank sugar squash all day, ate sugar cubes in cafes, had a chocolate bar of some description in my school lunch such as a Club or Twix or Animal Bar, a full of sugar and colours yogurt, Dairylea, and the best thing I remember were the cans of cherry Pepsi, Lilt, Coke, and tango. The proper full sugar versions. Imagine that at school these days! My mum cooked proper food for meals-very meat/fish, potatoes and veg type meals but also crispy pancakes, sausages and bacon. We often had a fry up for dinner and certainly had one on a Sunday for breakfast but otherwise it was bacon butties or cereal like Sugar Puffs or Frosties. We had a tuck shop at school selling crisps and sweets. I ate crisps and chocolate daily. There was always a big tub of ice cream for “afters” or those Super Mousses that I have fond memories of. We’d get bottles brightly coloured cherryade from the shops and bags of sweets. I don’t eat anything like that now and although I know ingredients have changed over the decades, I don’t believe that this is the main reason obesity is such a problem now.
In the 80s people didn’t eat in the street unless it was fish and chips and ice cream at the seaside. Manners around food and eating in general have gone downhill. People are eating in the go instead of sitting down and can’t seem to wait for meals. You see children kicking off at home time if they haven’t been brought a snack of Haribo or crisps when it’s a 5 minute drive home and they can eat once there. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of discipline in society as a whole with a big downward shift in manners and respectful behaviour across the board. Parents don’t say no to their children and children are growing up unable to wait for something to eat. If it’s an hour until the next meal most people can wait until that meal time. Everyone wants instant gratification on everything in life with little effort and food is one big example of that. I’m guilty of it myself and judge myself on it.

Is it, though? Because nobody talked about until about four years ago.

Humans have always craved food and experienced hunger and wanted to eat certain things.

You could say the same for vapers, smokers, drinkers, drug addicts. Its a type of addiction. Yes we know what food noise is, excessive food makes us put on weight affects our health etc etc
Yes we all have personal responsibilities but 'just' because its food we are labelled as greedy, not taking responsibility for our actions. Have you never fallen off the gluten wagon and regretted it?

I have food noise, with anorexia. I chronically undereat by a large margin and this gives me food noise all the time, insatiable hunger all the time. The only thing is, I don't react to it. I don't react to hunger signals by eating.

That's a flaw in me. A human is supposed to react to hunger signals by eating. If someone is getting excess hunger signals, and they eat in response, that's normal... Not a lack of willpower. It's what humans are supposed to do.

The abnormality is the excess of hunger signals.

I don't think obese people are at fault. You're supposed to feel ill and unwell when you overeat... For some reason, obese people don't / haven't done. It'd not meant to be pleasant, it's meant to be unpleasant.. Nausea, stretching the stomach, fatigue. These people arnt over eating for pleasure.

I think obese people are eating exactly what their bodies are telling them to eat, exactly as it does with a thin person who hasn't had weight struggles. I think obese people restricting on this and not responding to their hunger signals feels exactly like if a thin person didn't respond to theirs.

Something has gone wrong and it's not people's willpower imho. I think it's got to be whatever trash is put in our foods. It could also be mental health issues, but there's too many obese people for that to be the sole explanation.

I think a problem is being created so they can make money off of fixing it via "diet industry".

Skinny are you?

I see your point - but I have always had food noise, it's only since the WLI drugs that I've had words to put around it to define it. Until then I was putting it down as part of the ADHD background 'chatter'. It's actually been a relief to find that other people suffer from it too and that it's specific to food for lots of people. My brain is so full of odd compulsions that I never know what is ADHD, what is just me being me, and what might be an actual separate condition.

My control of my eating is part of my ADHD compulsion. I think. I don't really know because I've never been anyone else, so, again, I don't always know why I do what I do.

I feel you've misunderstood my post, or maybe I've misunderstood yours. I was replying to the original post. She's saying why do we need to label it and by giving it a name we are not taking responsibility for our eating.

Just because there's now a name for what 'food noise' is, doesn't mean people are making excuses. It's just a term for a condition, the same way every other condition has a name.

Is it a condition though? Or is it just human nature to crave things and to think about food?

Well, I did pause when i wrote 'condition' because I didn't think it was the right word. I guess a better word would be a symptom or urge.

If it were just 'human nature' everyone would have it, but they don't.

How do you know that they don’t?

I think food noise is yet another annoying rebranding of some concept that’s been around for a long time.

Food noise probably motivated hunters to go out or try a different berry.
I do think we all hear hunger and food noise to some degree or other, how much we listen to it and how we deal with it is going to vary.

Personally I know if I have certain foods in the house they will get thought about and eaten so I don’t have them in here in the first place. If I think I will buy the junk food when shopping, I do it online, eat before I go, take a list or go with DH if he has will power. I don’t even go down certain isles in the supermarket anymore. If I don’t want to eat high calorie meals out, I don’t go to the restaurant unless it would be considered exceptionally rude not too.

I find when I stay away from junk food and sleep well and exercise any food noise quietens down. It can be hard work getting to that stage but it’s worth it.

I think we are currently stick in a profit war between big food and big pharmaceutical companies both wanting profit, both advertising their wares and hoping we end up in a cycle of loosing and gaining and our government does very little to stop this or promote a better lifestyle. We have so much advertising and availability of the food thrown at us, it can be hard not to press a few buttons and a takeaway turns up. So I have no food deliver apps

Because I don't!

So maybe you’re an anomaly rather than people with food noise being the anomalies?