A new review in Nutrition & Diabetes marks an effort to get serious about lifting an important concept – food noise – out of the realm of inane pop diet chatter. Emily Dhurandhar and colleagues take care in defining food noise:

“The formal definition of food noise is persistent thoughts about food that are perceived by the individual as being unwanted and/or dysphoric and may cause harm to the individual, including social, mental, or physical problems. Food noise is distinguished from routine food-related thoughts by its intensity and intrusiveness, resembling rumination.”

Definition and measurement are critical first steps toward bringing rigor to the subject. In Obesity recently, Hanim Diktas and colleagues published on the development and validation of the FNQ (Food Noise Questionnaire) for measuring the experience of food noise.

Dhurandhar et al describe their own work to develop the RAID-FN Inventory with a similar purpose.

Pop Chatter

Even in this age of better medical insight and medicines for obesity, pop diet chatter is not fading away. Eager for a profitable angle, the chatter latches onto new concepts that emerge from medical care settings. So the emergence of a diet book that targets food noise is no surprise. Likewise, Women’s World is here with a diet to solve the problem. “The carnivore diet plan quiets food noise and ends cravings to help women lose weight fast,” they claim.

So rigor in understanding, measuring, and reducing the distress of food noise will be welcome. We only hope that it can stay ahead of the nonsense that popular culture adds to the mix.

Click here for the new review by Dhurandhar et al, here and here for further perspective.

Nightly Noise, painting by Georg Scholz / WikiArt