Dr. Andrew Kraftson, a clinical associate professor at Michigan Medicine, said that over his 13 years as an obesity medicine specialist, people he treated would often say they couldn’t stop thinking about food. So when he started prescribing Wegovy and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that contains the same compound, and patients began to use the term food noise, saying it had disappeared, he knew exactly what they meant.
As interest has intensified around Ozempic and other injectable diabetes medications like Mounjaro, which works in similar ways, that term has gained traction. Videos related to the subject “food noise explained” have been viewed 1.8 billion times on TikTok. And some of the people who have managed to get their hands on these medications—despite persistent shortages and list prices that can near or exceed a thousand dollars—have shared stories on social media about their experiences.
There is no clinical definition for food noise, but the experts and patients interviewed for this article generally agreed it was shorthand for constant rumination about food. Some researchers associate the concept with “hedonic hunger,” an intense concern with eating food for the purpose of pleasure, and noted that it could also be a component of binge eating disorder, which is common but often misunderstood.
Obesity medicine specialists have tried to better understand why a person may ruminate about food for some time, said Dr. Robert Gabbay, chief scientist and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association. “It just seems to be that some people are a little more wired this way,” he said. Obsessive rumination about food is most likely a result of genetic factors as well as environmental exposure and learned habits, said Dr. Janice Jin Hwang, chief of the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Why some people can shake off the impulse to eat, and other people stay mired in thoughts about food, is “the million-dollar question,” Dr. Hwang said. The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide, a compound that affects the areas in the brain that regulate appetite, Dr. Gabbay said; it also prompts the stomach to empty more slowly, making people taking the medication feel fuller faster and for longer. That satiation itself could blunt food noise, he said.
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