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King Erysichthon, so the ancient Roman legend goes (Ovid, Book VIII), was arrogant and contemptuous of the gods, for which he was severely punished: He was made to experience a voracious hunger, a “hurricane of starvation” (Hughes, 1997). All he could think about was an uncontrollable desire to procure food. “In the midst of feasts, he craves other feasts” (Marder, 2025). For Erysichthon, “food calls for food…” (Mandelbaum, 1993).
There is much more to this myth, and it does not end well for the king (Karasu, 2018). For purposes here, though, Erysichthon’s total insatiable preoccupation with food, though admittedly with considerable poetic license, is a metaphor for those who experience what we call food noise.
Human survival, of course, depends on obtaining food. Ancel Keys began his monumental, almost 1,400-page tome, The Biology of Starvation (1950), with “…the history of man is in large part the chronicle of his quest for food. Hunger, or fear of it, has always played a major role in determining the actions and the attitudes of man.”
Keys demonstrated that the 36 men who took part in what would come to be called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment exhibited symptoms of depression, irritability, “nervousness,” and general emotional instability, with social withdrawal, difficulty concentrating, and loss of any sexual interest. Through the course of six months of semi-starvation, though, food and eating became their dominant concern, an “obsession,” “the most important thing” for these human guinea pigs, wrote Kalm and Semba (2005), who interviewed some of these men almost 60 years later. “…if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate,” reported one man.
Like Erysichthon, these men were led by circumstances to experience an extreme form of food noise, “incessant mental chatter” related to food (Dhurandhar et al., 2025).
No one knows from whom or where the term food noise originated. But it has taken social media by storm in recent years, and there are now thousands of references to it in the lay press, including in Scientific American (Young), The New York Times (Blum), and Weight Watchers. Both the Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia now include it, though the Oxford English Dictionary has yet to create an entry.
The concept grew out of anecdotal reports from patients that their total preoccupation with food lessened or even disappeared—”an uncanny mental silence regarding food” (Cook, 2026)—when they began taking the new GLP-1 medications, which affect both appetite and the reward circuits of the brain, for weight control (Chong et al., 2026; Lenharo, 2025; Tongta et al., 2025).
Dhurandhar and colleagues (2025) speculate that food noise may have evolved adaptively and developed as a “biological alarm” to remind humans to seek food, just as thirst signals a need for water.
Some researchers emphasize the importance of external or even internal cues to elicit food noise—“food-cue reactivity” (Hayashi et al., 2023; Hayashi et al., 2025). Cues, such as the smell or availability of food, physical hunger, dieting, or advertising, may induce food noise, but not necessarily. Diktas et al. (2024), who were the first to develop and validate a tool (a five-item questionnaire) to measure food noise clinically, for example, note that patients have described experiencing food noise without food cues.
Researchers, such as David B. Allison, formerly the Dean of the School of Public Health at Indiana University and now Chief of Nutrition at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor in Houston, and his colleagues, have now begun to take food noise seriously (Dhurandhar et al., 2025; 2026), creating “the contours of scientific legitimacy” and providing “valuable visibility for an under-recognized experience” (Dinerstein).
In an attempt to codify food noise more precisely and study it methodically, Allison et al. have created the Ro-Allison-Indiana-Dhurandhar Food Noise Inventory (RAID-FN), a questionnaire that assesses when thoughts of food become distressful (Dhurandhar et al, 2025; 2026).
They found that food noise is a “distinct psychological construct” that may “significantly affect food choices, mental health, and quality of life.” Food noise may exist “to varying degrees” (Dhurandhar et al., 2025) and can occur in the presence of specific eating disorders, such as binge eating (Tongta et al.).
The researchers began with 29 items and conducted four studies, but were able to create a 23-item scale and a shorter seven-item version of their questionnaire that was both reliable and valid in the population they studied. They found that their scale did not differentiate between men and women, nor did it correlate with a person’s body mass index (BMI). Further, their definition focused not only on a preoccupation with food, but food noise as having a “deleterious impact on well-being,” that may lead to dysphoria, anguish, self-stigma, and self-recrimination because it is “intrusive, incessant, and obsessive” (Dhurandhar et al., 2026). In other words, food noise becomes “clinically relevant” when it is persistent and morphs from thoughts about food into “rumination that interferes with normal cognitive functioning” and presents a significant “cognitive burden” (Dhurandhar et al., 2025).
One caveat that researchers have recognized: Some people may indulge in “diagnostic inflation” (Dinerstein) and exaggerate “in pursuit of some perceived advantage” (Dhurandhar et al., 2026) to qualify for GLP-1 medications, and present themselves as more symptomatic than they are.
Food noise research remains in its infancy and requires further investigation, but it has clearly moved beyond anecdotal reports. As researchers continue to measure it, they will be better able to understand its causes, consequences, and responses to treatment.
Note: For the poets among you, my title comes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Seventh Elegy.
