Kate “absolutely loves” watching food content on social media. “Sometimes I’ll find myself deep in a rabbit hole, watching an influencer eat six vegan pastries in Taiwan or something,” she says. Sometimes, though, that kind of content can trigger intense, incessant cravings. “I’ll realise that all day tomorrow, I’m going to really struggle with wanting something sugary, because I’ll be thinking about the video I watched.” The 32-year-old says that, at times, her relationship to food has been “a very difficult thing” to navigate, adding that she experienced binge eating disorder in her 20s. While she now has “more of a handle” on things, “the deluge of advertising” doesn’t make it easy. “It’s become immeasurably more difficult to resist thinking about food,” she says.

Kate has a point. Today, images of food are everywhere – not only in traditional advertising spaces like billboards and TV, but all over social media too. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are saturated with pictures and videos of food designed and edited to appear extra indulgent: think Wingstop mukbangs with creators drenching their tenders in ranch, or the endless hype around limited-edition sweet treats (like M&S’s ‘speckled egg cookies’). At the same time, as the cost of living creeps ever higher, many of us are finding it harder to resist small luxuries like Uber Eats deliveries or expensive chocolate, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “lipstick effect”.

There’s nothing morally wrong with indulging in food that tastes good. Taking pleasure in eating is something to cultivate and celebrate, not atone for. But in a context where food advertising continues to proliferate, many of us are grappling with near-constant, overwhelming and distinctly unpleasurable thoughts about food. So common is the issue that, in recent years, a term has emerged to describe the feeling: food noise. “Food noise is a term people have started using to describe constant or intrusive thoughts about food,” explains Professor Suzanne Higgs, a researcher in the psychology of eating at the University of Birmingham. These thoughts, Higgs says, can become “so frequent and intrusive that they feel like constant background noise”.

Modern life has likely exacerbated food noise for many of us; research suggests that seeing food images can activate brain systems involved in appetite and reward. “From a food policy perspective, food noise reflects the outcome of living in a highly stimulating food environment,” says Dr Olivia Brown, research fellow at the Centre for Food Policy at City St George’s, University of London. “We are constantly exposed to cues to eat on high streets, across billboards, supermarkets, corner shops, train stations – and increasingly, within our digital spaces. There has been a clear and rapid expansion in the scale and sophistication of food-related marketing, particularly over the past five years.”

At the same time, Brown says, “consumer culture has intensified the constant availability of food. Digital platforms, delivery apps, and targeted promotions mean that food is now accessible and promoted 24 hours a day. The result is an environment where food cues are not only everywhere, but also highly personalised and difficult to opt out of.” 

“There has been a clear and rapid expansion in the scale and sophistication of food-related marketing, particularly over the past five years”

“I’ve struggled with food noise my whole life,” says Callum, 19. “I grew up in a ‘snack’ household where junk food was always at my fingertips. It became a regular habit – that ease of going to the cupboard is what created the food noise.” Today, he still struggles with intrusive thoughts about food. “It’s mostly at night: when everything’s quieter, the food noise becomes louder.”

Both Kate and Callum agree that social media made their experiences of food noise worse. “Sometimes I try to use social media as a distraction from food noise, but in the end I’m just led back to food through TikToks of people getting takeaways and ‘come with me to this new food spot’ type videos,” Callum says. “As someone with an interest in food, I don’t necessarily realise that I’m being cued to eat or encouraged to buy a certain food,” adds Kate, highlighting how subtle social media marketing can be. “I just think: ‘this is a mukbang, this is someone taste-testing cookies…'”

It’s perhaps telling that, during a time when food noise has become more prevalent, the use of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic – which some users describe as being able to “silence” food noise – has also surged. Callum says he’s been tempted. “I know people in my circle who have started using Ozempic and Mounjaro, and they say it eases food noise massively. It’s something I have definitely considered – people around me are swearing by it – but I don’t think it would be constructive for me.”

Experts agree that these drugs are far from a silver bullet. According to John Warner, emeritus professor of paediatrics at Imperial College London, using Ozempic to treat food noise is akin to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”. It is ultimately a short-term sticking plaster for an issue with much deeper roots; as Higgs says, while Ozempic’s appetite-dulling effects “can be helpful at an individual level, [they do] not change the broader context in which eating takes place.” In Brown’s view, “addressing food noise in a meaningful way requires reconsidering the scale and nature of food marketing, product placement, and digital food environments.”

It’s not just adverts for so-called junk food that can trigger food noise, either. “Food content spans everything from indulgent treats to ‘high protein’ [ideas], often linking food to broader aspirations of health, appearance, performance, convenience, or even identity,” Brown adds. “While this content can be engaging, it also contributes to a sense of pressure. In my own research, when individuals were asked about dietary trends, exposure to conflicting and sometimes extreme messaging led them to feel as though they were ‘getting it wrong’, with many reporting feeling confused, overwhelmed, and pressured.”

This chimes with Kate, who stresses that her food noise doesn’t only show up as cravings for rich food. Often, she becomes fixated on whether her diet is “good”. “It’s not just thinking about what I’m going to eat next or craving food,” she says. “It’s constantly thinking about the topic of food: whether I should or shouldn’t be eating in a given moment, whether I’ve completed my nutritional goals for the day, whether I’ve had enough vitamins, whether I’ve had enough water, whether I’m even hungry or if I’m overthinking it… I get myself in a bit of a spiral with it.”

None of this is to say that all food-related content on social media is an insidious ploy to sell highly processed foods or extreme dietary trends. Many foodie influencers have helped viewers embrace intuitive eating and normalised nourishing yourself across a broad range of food groups (case in point: Maddi Neye-Swift’s popular series “carbs before a night out are a must”, where the creator shares videos of her favourite stomach-lining dinners). But equally, many creators do push distinctly unbalanced ideas about food. Warner’s suggestion? “Be critical of all you read and hear” online. Which, really, is sound advice for any kind of content — food-related or otherwise.