[
Here is the article:
Food Noise: The Compulsive Craving That Some Meds Can Sometimes Treat
Savannah Mendoza used to spend most of her paychecks on food delivery apps and at fast food drive-thrus, trying to satisfy a compulsive craving. But after she started taking a popular medication used for weight loss and diabetes, she saw it as something else: food noise.
"It’s so obsessive, and it’s not a good feeling. It’s a very ugly feeling, because you’re just locked down on that singular thought of you wanting to eat," she said. Mendoza, 27, started to constantly think about food when she was in her early 20s. She would claim she had to run errands but instead hit up a drive-thru and eat in the car. On some mornings, she would sneak bites of ice cream straight out of the tub while packing her daughter’s lunch.
Now that she’s using tirzepatide, she said she feels peaceful without the food noise and notes that part of what stopped it is a side effect of the medication: She physically feels "kind of always bloated and not hungry."
Summer Kessel, who has been using tirzepatide for over two years, said she was a "bottomless pit" who always felt hungry. "I would still be thinking about, planning for, trying to finagle how I could eat something else," she said. "I would have breakfast at home, then breakfast at work, and then lunch at work, and then a snack before I left work, and then fast food on the way home and then dinner when I got home."
A week after her first injection of the weight-loss medication, she said it was a "relief." "It was like, suddenly, all of that noise in my brain about ‘what can I eat, where can I eat, how much can I have, am I going to like it, how many calories is this, what’s the portion size?’ Like all of that sh** in my head was finally quiet, and I was able to just go about my life without obsessing about food or being hungry all the time," she said.
Kessel, a registered dietitian who has worked in healthcare for 20 years, now also doles out nutrition advice to a sizeable social media following. Yet she says it wasn’t until she got on tirzepatide that she was able to practice what she preached and actually eat three balanced meals a day.
"There are varying theories about the root cause of food noise, and there isn’t a clear number of how many people experience it. But most experts believe it’s real, even if awareness of it is only recently emerging," said Dr. Michael Lowe, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Dr. Lowe developed a theory called hedonic hunger, which he explains as "an intense desire for food-based pleasure for reasons other than physical hunger." He said this theory and its associated Power of Food Scale are being used in clinical trials of weight-loss medications in both adults and children to measure what he describes as the "desire for delicious foods when not hungry."
Some people with food noise have found that medications like GLP-1s, which are prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes, help reduce the noise. For these individuals, the medication appears to turn off the food noise, allowing them to approach food without being consumed by it.
Other experts believe that food noise is fueled by our environment and the things being pushed on us. "Food noise becomes a pattern through our environment," said Dr. Najaf Asrar, an endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist at Advocare North Brunswick Medical Associates in New Jersey. "I tell my patients that obesity is a lifelong disease, but medication doesn’t have to be lifelong."
Not everyone with food noise will respond to GLP-1 medications, and some without normal BMI may still experience food noise. "What we are starting to learn and come around to the idea of is the thinking that the experience [of food noise] may be driven by the signals from your stomach or your body in a way that we didn’t fully appreciate before," said Dr. Tom Hildebrandt, director of the Center of Excellence in Eating and Weight Disorders at Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
While GLP-1 medications may appear to be a solution for some people with food noise, they aren’t necessarily the only option – and they may not even be an option for people with food noise who have a normal BMI. Dr. Hildebrandt described food noise as a set of peripheral signals that lead to an excess amount of thinking and feeling food-related cues.
A new concept is being explored: the idea that food noise is correlated with certain metabolic signals that involve the brain, and that understanding and targeting these signals could lead to new therapies. "Maybe it’s not just personal responsibility, but in fact, they have a metabolic condition that changes the way a person’s brain experiences hunger, fullness, and how you feel in your skin, the body-image related problems that we think of when we think of eating disorders," Hildebrandt said.