Food Noise

Food noise is a lay term, not a diagnostic entity. It describes a continuous background of intrusive thoughts about food, planning meals, resisting them and returning to them, which patients report as cognitively costly independent of hunger. It entered general use through people describing what changed on GLP-1 receptor agonist therapy, and reached mainstream press coverage around 2023. Academically it overlaps hedonic hunger, food cue reactivity, craving and reward-based eating drive without matching any of them.

Those older constructs have instruments behind them and food noise does not. The Power of Food Scale, the Control of Eating Questionnaire and craving inventories are validated, and it is those, not the colloquial phrase, that appear in the trial substudies where semaglutide and tirzepatide reduced craving and improved reported control of eating. Biological plausibility is real enough: GLP-1 receptors are expressed in the hypothalamus and area postrema, and rodent work shows signalling into mesolimbic reward regions, but expression does not demonstrate the human experience.

The concept is useful clinically because it captures something a weight curve does not, and patients often rate it as the change that mattered most. What it cannot carry is mechanistic weight: it is a subjective report collected where gastrointestinal side effects routinely unblind the participant, so an improvement in it is not evidence that a compound acts centrally rather than peripherally.

The predictable misuse is a product marketed as quieting food noise on the strength of the phrase alone. It has no regulatory definition, no threshold and no instrument, so a claim about it cannot fail a test. Treat it as any unblinded patient-reported outcome without a validated scale: informative about experience, inadmissible as proof of mechanism.