Word.ws English Dictionary

food noise

food noise noun: a mental preoccupation with food that is differentiable from hunger and from cravings but tends to urge people to overeat.

Noun

food noise (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, nutrition) A mental preoccupation with food that is differentiable from hunger and from cravings but tends to urge people to overeat.
    • […] the concept that once the meal is over, it's time to move on to other tasks. When you use one or more of them at the end of a meal or snack, you help to quiet the part of your mind that distracts you with thoughts about food, thus creating more mental energy for work, hobbies, and other tasks....2007, Joy Bauer, Prevention's 3-2-1 Weight Loss Plan: Eat Your Favorite Foods to Cut Cravings, Improve Energy, and Lose Weight, Rodale Press, →ISBN, page 98
    • As more and more people took the drugs, stories spread about “food noise,” and researchers started looking even more closely at what was going on in the brain.2024 December, Lauren J. Young, “Turning Down the Food Noise”, in Scientific American, volume 33, number 4s, →DOI, →ISSN, page 36

Origin of food noise

By a metaphor in which mental preoccupation is portrayed as noise inside one's head that cannot be turned off, somewhat like an earworm. Widely used since the early 2020s, when indications for using the GLP-1 receptor agonist medication class expanded beyond diabetes treatment into weight control for anyone with or without diabetes; not in widespread use before that. Attested since 2007.

Questions about food noise

What does food noise mean?
Food noise means a mental preoccupation with food that is differentiable from hunger and from cravings but tends to urge people to overeat.
What part of speech is food noise?
Food noise is a noun.

Words near food noise in the dictionary

  1. food miles
  2. food mill
  3. food mills
  4. food mixer
  5. food mixers
  6. food noise
  7. food oases
  8. food oasis
  9. food pantries
  10. food pantry
  11. food pill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: food noise (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “food noise.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/food_noise. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.