Do you often reach for a snack after a meal even though you feel full? Or find yourself craving food throughout the day despite not being hungry? You may be experiencing "food noise," a phenomenon that affects nearly one in five people in the U.S. but doesn't yet have a universally accepted scientific definition.
A new study from Penn State, published in Obesity Science and Practice, has found that 18 percent of people in the United States report frequent or constant food noise, and some demographics are more affected than others. Daisuke Hayashi, a postdoctoral fellow in nutritional sciences and the study's lead author, told Newsweek that scientists currently know very little about what happens in the brain during food noise. One hypothesis is that people who experience food noise may have heightened reactions to cues that signal opportunities to seek out and consume food, whether from seeing a fast-food advertisement while scrolling online, feeling their stomach rumble or holding learned associations, such as craving popcorn when watching a movie.
"Think of it like a hypersensitive smoke alarm that goes off too easily and won't stop beeping, to the point that it might become disruptive," Hayashi said. In the 2026 Society of Behavioral Medicine Omnibus Survey, an online survey of 1,000 adults representative of the population of the United States, researchers asked participants, "How often do you experience 'Food Noise'?" on a scale from 1 (never experience food noise) to 5 (always experience it), and the results were surprising. The findings indicated that women were about 1.8 times more likely to report frequent food noise than men.
They also showed that younger adults reported a higher level of food noise compared to older demographics, and people who identified as Asian were twice as likely as other races to report the phenomenon. Respondents who reported losing control of their eating were nearly six times more likely than the average person in the survey to experience frequent or constant food noise. Current and former GLP-1 users were also about 1.5 times more likely than average to report frequent food noise.
Some of these results were expected. According to the study, women may experience more food noise than men because they are more likely to attempt to lose weight. Other results were surprising, and researchers caution against making generalized assumptions based on the findings, particularly regarding Asian participants experiencing more food noise.
"This is something for researchers to look at in the future," Hayashi said. "But there is no existing data or theory to support this result, and we wouldn't want to make generalizations based on one result, especially from a study with only about 50 Asian participants." More broadly, Hayashi said researchers have several hypotheses for why susceptibility to food noise may vary. His team's CIRO (Cue-Influencer-Reactivity-Outcome) model proposes that heightened and persistent reactions to food cues may be shaped by a person's genetic makeup, appetitive traits, weight status and differences in levels of and sensitivity to appetite-regulating hormones.
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