FOOD NOISE: They Said It Was Just in Our Heads. Turns Out, It Was.
- Dave Knapp
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
And as of today, science can measure it.
Original posted at obesity.news/ on Oct 24, 2025
Researches have found a way to actually measure Food Noise in our brains, and this is a massive breakthrough for obesity medicine.
For years, people on GLP-1 medications have tried to explain something that felt both miraculous and impossible. They’d say things like “for the first time in my life, I’m not thinking about what I’m going to eat next, while I’m eating.” Or, “snacking in between meals has become optional, not a necessity.”
That endless internal chatter about food became known as food noise, something so many of us lived with for decades. The problem for patients was that medicine had no language for it. No way to measure it. No way to prove it was more than a viral tiktok hashtag. That all changes today.
This morning Ro announced the creation of the RAID-FN scale, which is the first clinically validated tool to comprehensively measure food noise and use in the treatment obesity.
The RAID-FN (Ro Allison Indiana Dhurandhar Food Noise Inventory) is more than a scale. It’s proof that what patients have been saying all along is scientifically measurable.
It’s super quick, only 7 questions, under two minutes to complete, and it’s powerful. Backed by peer-reviewed research, the scale measures three dimensions of food noise:
Preoccupation: when your thoughts are stuck on food even when you’re not hungry
Persistence: when you can’t shut those thoughts off once they start
Dysphoria: the frustration, guilt, and distress that come with it
This is the first time that lived experience has been translated into psychometric language, and it’s coming from a company that actually listened to patients living with obesity. While others jockey for credibility with tough words online, Ro actually innovated. Ro did something that matters for us, and has the power to help millions of people put science to what was once brushed off as a lack of willpower.
Ro and a team of obesity researchers built RAID-FN by analyzing the experiences of more than 35,000 people seeking GLP-1 treatment for weight management. They began with 29 questions and narrowed them down through four large studies until they had the most accurate snapshot of food noise ever created.
The result? A scale that’s statistically rock solid:Cronbach’s alpha of 0.90, test-retest reliability of 0.89, and proven validity across age and gender.
Have you ever taken a survey and kind of known what the “right” answer was supposed to be? This one accounts for that. It was designed so that people’s responses reflect what they actually feel, not what they think they should say. For the first time, food noise is no longer anecdotal. It’s hard data.
Because this isn’t just about numbers. This is about validation.
Millions of people have lived with food noise so loud it drowned out their thoughts, their focus, their peace. It’s nearly impossible to focus on anything, when you’re consumed by this one thing. Food Noise. When patients finally found relief on GLP-1s, some in our community were even told it was a placebo effect. That the chatter was a figment of their imagination.
Now, there’s a scale, RAID FN, that proves it is real. And it’s not just about the medications. It opens a door for research into why food noise exists, who experiences it most intensely, and how it might be treated even beyond pharmacology.
This means doctors, therapists, and researchers now have a shared language to talk about something that patients have been screaming (and whispering) about for years.
We’ve been covering this story at On The Pen from the beginning.
Earlier this year, a Nature Medicine study used fMRI scans to visualize food noise in the brain. It showed how GLP-1s quiet activation in regions like the orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and hippocampus, the very circuits tied to craving and reward.
RAID-FN is the next step. It bridges what we can see in the brain with what patients feel in their minds.
This is what happens when the right people listen to patient stories, it becomes the foundation for discovery.
It’s no understatement to say that this scale is going to change the conversation about obesity forever, and perhaps even the course of obesity care overall.
For the scientific community, it’s a new clinical endpoint, one that pharma can use to measure the emotional and cognitive impact of treatment. For patients, it’s a mirror. A way to understand that the noise wasn’t a lack of willpower. It was always one of the most bothersome symptoms of living with the chronic and relapsing disease of obesity.
And for those of us who’ve lived with it, this isn’t abstract. It’s deeply personal.
Because food noise isn’t just about hunger, it’s about the mental weight that comes with it. The space it takes up in your day. The life so many of us got back, once our biology finally got the help it needed.
For the first time, food noise has a name, a measure, and a future in medicine.
And that, more than anything, is the sound of progress.
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