Mixing Food Noise, Addiction, and Ultra-Processed Foods

“It takes years for scientists to prove things we’ve always known were true – like food addiction.” This thought emerged from the meeting this week of the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions. The current science of food noise was a focus. In the course of some outstanding presentations, three distinct and distinctly challenging concepts mixed together in ways that made our poor little head spin. These concepts are challenging enough on their own. Weaving them together makes it worse.

The proposed line of thinking holds that food addiction is a problem caused by ultra-processed foods and thus, food noise must be a problem caused by those awful and addictive UPFs.

What Exactly Is Food Addiction?

There can be no doubt. Some very smart scientists have clearly convinced themselves that food addiction is a very real phenomenon. They even have a validated scale for measuring it. The Yale Food Addiction Scale. Expressing his belief in the concept, Neuroscientist Paul Kenny writes:

“I am a willing defender of the notion that a history of overconsumption of energy-dense palatable food can remodel brain motivation circuits in a manner that renders some overweight individuals persistently vulnerable to the desirable properties of such food, which negatively impacts their health and well-being.”

On top of that, plenty of people have come to believe that they themselves have an addiction to food. Food marketers even use suggestions of addictive properties to say they have a product consumers will clearly want.

But other scientists beg to differ. Countering Kenny’s claims, neuroscientist Paul Fletcher wrote:

“The science narrative that is offered that food, like a drug, has affected a person’s brain such that their inhibitory control centers do not work properly, and their reward centers are malfunctioning, is simple and readily accepted. But, the scientist who offers this as the explanation had better be sure that the evidence exists to support it. My view is that it does not. Lacking this evidence, I suggest, severely constrains the explanatory power of the food addiction concept, leaving it perilously close to the sort of ‘virtus dormitiva’ explanation sharply lampooned by Moliere.”

Looking for Parallels to Addictive Drugs

A new study in Cell Metabolism aimed to examine parallels between supposedly addictive foods and addictive drugs. Researchers looked at brain responses to these foods and found significant differences in comparison to drug addiction. They concluded:

“The etiology of common obesity is more complex than dopamine-mediated ultra-processed food addiction, and the neurochemistry associated with excess adiposity, such as increased dopamine tone, is not analogous to a state of drug tolerance.”

In other words, the simple story of addiction to ultra-processed food is simply not the whole story.

An Appealing Narrative, but Incomplete Science

No doubt, the narrative of food addiction is appealing. It appeals even more when you link it up with those nefarious ultra-processed foods and all the buzz about food noise. But the emotional appeal of a concept does not mean it is scientifically sound.

So as a wise obesity researcher, Gary Foster, told us, “We have to be careful not to start thinking that science needs to catch up with our own personal biases.”

Click here for the new study in Cell Metabolism, here for the pro/con discourse of Kenny and Fletcher. For free access to excellent reporting on this from Alice Callahan in the New York Times, click here.

Organic Power Snacks, photograph by Ted Kyle / ConscienHealth

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March 8, 2025