Food Noise: When Thinking Too Much About Food Causes Obsessive Disorders

"What should I cook for dinner tonight? Maybe I should eat this dish that contains less calories and fat than that other one." How many times have you had "intrusive" and constant thoughts about food that in certain circumstances have influenced your daily life? This phenomenon is called food noise, a din that is not intended in a literal sense. The little word "noise" stands for noise intended metaphorically and affects those people whose thoughts dwell too often on food to the point of becoming a real obsession that changes (not always positively) their daily life. This "problem" has been widely discussed in recent days at the European Congress on Obesity held in Malaga, Spain, and was addressed by researchers from Pennsylvania State University who discussed their study.

When Food Becomes an Obsession

The study explains that food noise is essentially a constant thought about food that turns into a disorder. Characterized by a persistent worry about what to eat, it is not actually physical hunger but an incessant search for food as if it were a primal impulse. Sometimes even just an advertisement or a smell can trigger an uncontrollable desire to eat.

All this can lead to difficulty feeling full or satisfied and to thinking, even during or immediately after a meal, about the next one. Obsession with food is, as described by researchers, a condition of intrusive thoughts that affect normal daily activities and interpersonal relationships. There are different types of food noise or obsessions, one of these is orthorexia nervosa. In this case there is a continuous fixation for healthy eating that can lead to extreme food restrictions by excluding entire food groups, causing nutritional deficiencies and stress and social isolation.

Some also talk about emotional or nervous hunger where the feeling of appetite is triggered by different mood states such as boredom, anger, loneliness, anxiety, fatigue or depression. Many anthropologists say that food becomes a means to manage these emotions that give way to the creation of a real vicious circle of binges that as a consequence lead to various feelings of guilt. At the Malaga conference, scholars from Pennsylvania State University also discussed the Tik Tok trend of the phenomenon. Many creators have addressed the topic of food noise and, data in hand, the videos have had feedback equal to over 1.1 million views. The content creators have not all turned out to be health professionals but some of them, through a pharmaceutical therapy, have recommended counteracting food noise with drugs that belong to the ‘ozempic‘ family (medicines studied for the treatment of obesity).

There were several doubts about these contents, users wondered if the treatments worked or if they were just mere advertisements economically paid by pharmaceutical companies to the creators. Essentially, experts therefore recommend not to rely too much on social media when it comes to health issues but to always turn to experts, in this case in nutrition.