‘Food noise’ discussion on social media helps define the term

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With the rise of weight loss drugs such as GLP-1 medications in recent years, the phrase “food noise” has taken off, particularly in conversations about health and wellness on social media. While thinking about food during the day is normal, food noise is often used to describe endless, looping thoughts about eating that are hard to ignore. Yet, there’s no official definition for what constitutes food noise and evidence of food noise is based on anecdotal evidence.

“The term food noise is everywhere. It’s being picked up by lots of people, and businesses are trying to capitalize on the term for marketing purposes,” said Travis Masterson, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State. “By exploring how people describe food noise, what it maps to and what can alter it can help bring evidence to differentiate between which claims are backed by science and which are not”

Better defining the term could guide future research and interventions that may be able to help quiet the mental noise, Masterson said. That was the motivation for a recent study — led by Masterson and researchers from Penn State and published in the journal Nutrition and Diabetes — taking a closer look at how the term is discussed on TikTok and what information is being offered on the topic. The team found that the majority of videos were personal testimonials that described food noise as something negative and distressful, a relentless preoccupation with what to eat that persists regardless of physical hunger. Nearly half of the videos mentioned GLP-1 medications and how these medications acted like a mute button, quieting the brain and the accompanying food noise.

“What we’re seeing in the videos, for example, are people saying that food noise isn’t problematic just for their eating behavior and health but it’s distracting them from other activities,” Masterson said. “It could impact how effective they are at work or if they have the cognitive resources to exercise or spend quality time with their family.”

While the term food noise is new, Masterson said that it may be related to an existing line of research in the nutrition and behavior literature called food cue reactivity. Food cue reactivity describes how the mind and body respond to internal and external signals that the mind associates with food, creating a desire to eat — like a grumbling stomach or craving popcorn upon entering a movie theater. But the concept of food cue reactivity is not a widely known or used phrase, even among nutrition or medical practitioners.

“It was important to us to understand food noise from the perspective of real people,” said first author Daisuke Hayashi, a postdoctoral scholar in nutritional sciences at Penn State who also earned his doctoral degree at the university. “Oftentimes, people are not listened to if they struggle with their weight or eating. They’re told it’s an individual failure or they’re labeled as lacking willpower when that’s rarely the case.”

The research team created a new TikTok account in June 2024. At the time, there were over 3,600 videos tagged with the hashtag #foodnoise. The researchers analyzed the top 100 recommended videos to understand the online discourse around food noise — who was talking about the concept, how they were discussing it, what they were saying as well as other associated themes. They also compared the online videos to the team’s proposed definition of food noise, which they previously published in the journal Nutrients, to determine if how people talked about food noise aligned with their theoretical definition of food noise.

After excluding one duplicated video, they found that the remaining 99 videos were primarily created by women who were aged 30 and older. Over 70% of the videos were personal testimonials while 22% of the videos were created by healthcare professionals. More than 85% of the videos described food noise negatively — all-consuming, relentless and intrusive thoughts about food — and nearly 94% of videos that provided a definition of food noise portrayed it in a way that was consistent with the researcher’s current theoretical definition. Food noise was most commonly associated with candies, desserts and fast foods.

“Based on these online testimonies, people who experience food noise seem to feel like their lives revolve around food,” Hayashi said. “The vast majority of content creators described food noise as something overpowering, saying things like ‘It’s this overwhelming preoccupation with what to eat, when to eat, how to satisfy your cravings. It’s different from physical hunger and happens regardless of physical hunger.’”

Even though the researchers did not explicitly look for videos that mentioned weight loss medications, approximately half of the videos mentioned them, mostly GLP-1 receptor agonists, and described how they helped to turn the volume down on the pervasive thoughts about food.

This study is just part of a larger effort by Masterson and Hayashi to understand food noise. For instance, the researchers plan to follow-up this study with one that analyzes comments on social media videos about food noise to understand how people respond to content on food noise.

“We’re trying to understand the whole spectrum around food noise — the patient side, the clinical side and the theoretical underpinning of it,” Masterson said. He explained that food noise signals could occur right before an eating event, which can then be a normal eating event or lead to an abnormal one like a binge eating episode. Ultimately, the team hopes to design strategies to intervene in the moment when food noise or food cue reactivity is the highest.

Other Penn State authors on the paper include Janelle Kort, research assistant who earned a master’s and undergraduate degree from Penn State; Diana Orabueze, medical student at Penn State College of Medicine; and Katrina Bakhl, who earned her medical degree from Penn State College of Medicine. Isabel Robles-Martinez, a psychology student at the University of California, Merced and who was a summer intern at Penn State, also co-authored the paper.

Funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Brazilian Fulbright Commission supported this work.

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