Let me recommend The Compass of Pleasure, even though I'm not even done with it. It is a fantastic book that ties together all kinds of addictive behaviors, behaviors which have haunted my family for generations. A central tenet of the book is that addicts DON'T get more pleasure from the things they do, they want things more and enjoy them less. I think the confusion here is mistaking pleasure, which is a subjective experience, with reward, which is an animal compulsion buried deep in primitive parts of the brain. It ties together the other addictions I've been studying- sex, gambling, and alcoholism. To suggest that any kind of addict just "does it to themselves" is a testament to our history of puritanism. NO, there is NO WAY for someone to will themselves to fix that part of the brain. Telling people to stop drinking, eating, or sexing doesn't work AT ALL.

Fixing it requires acknowledging it as a disease caused by faulty brain wiring. Fixing it requires not more self-control, but more hacking to trick your brain into behaving and more nourishing to heal your brain.

Seth Roberts wrote a long time ago that he lost a lot of weight when he was in Europe eating novel food all the time. I personally find it impossible to overeat at the Michelin-starred restaurants. It hits my buttons in terms of pleasure, but doesn't trigger a compulsive reward reaction. That is the real talent of those chefs that I have come to appreciate. They are working with tiny amounts of extremely expensive ingredients and have to cook in a way that makes guests satisfied with tiny truffles, a sliver of abalone, or a dot of foie gras creme. In that way, these chefs are absolute geniuses and I've learned SO much from studying their craft in terms of how to blend pleasure and satiation. They are the opposite of food scientists who work for industrial companies who simply want to design foods that hit the compulsive reward system. Here is a perfect example from a chef who I think is a real rising star: a tiny little liver mousse, about the size of a quarter. It's so beautiful and complex and pleasurable to eat. And most importantly- satisfying (which is crucial since god knows how long that took her to assemble).

The mistake Stephan makes is to think that it's easier than it actually is because he is a neurotypical. You wouldn't tell an alcoholic to meditate and just try to drink weak alcohol. That is why Stephan has failed to convince people. Seth Robert's stuff is a bit more convincing, but I guess more people don't know about it because it relies so heavily on self-experimentation? I find Stephan's philosophy on food somewhat alienating personally because I find it ascetic and I'm the opposite of an ascetic.

Food reward hypothesis- "If you use food reward and palatability in a sentence, even if you stumble through it, you still sound smart and people like it."

See Nikoley. :)

This stuff is semi- interesting, but it does not connect the dots or explain the real world. Obesity and T2 diabetes increased since 1980 when food was changed by suppliers to remove fat and add things to make it more palatable (I used the word). Then people were hammered with anti fat propaganda. Now, here we are. Do we blame the people eating that modified food because they want the reward (I used the other word!), or because they believed the propaganda, or because they bought what was in the store?

Is there anyone else out there that looks at food based on what you know it contains and you make choices based on what you know, as best you can, what is good for you?

The last time I called BS on this, I got 16 downs and 23 ups. Food reward is a trendy mind exercise, but not everyone is taking the bait. People who are not buying it are a bit apprehensive to speak up because they don't want to get shouted down.

Also, it needs a better explanation than "You don't understand it, go to SG's site and read it. I can't explain it, but it's true."

If Paleo digs in on this topic and plants the flag on it, it's time to trade up, whatever that turns out to be.

You're misunderstanding the study, at least as far as I'm reading in the abstract. The highly rewarding ice cream stimulates the dopamine receptors more than the isocaloric low-density meal. In response to excessive stimulation, the dopamine receptors are downregulated and there are fewer of them. It might seem like that means the brain would lose its taste for highly palatable food given that it's turning down the volume on dopamine, but the function of dopamine is to cause seeking/wanting behavior whenever you're not stimulating your dopamine receptors enough. In the past, this is what has kept people alive, active, and hunting, instead of laying on the ground in a stupor. However, because your receptors have been downregulated, things that were previously satisfying are no longer sufficient. This leads to seeking out higher stimulus behaviors, be they food or otherwise (drugs, gambling, sex, risky behavior, etc.). This is why people who have genetically reduced D2 receptors are more likely to be ADHD, obese, addicted to drugs, etc. It's also why people who quit one dopamine-stimulating addiction tend to pick up others (recovering alcoholics picking up caffeine and nicotine, recovering smokers picking up sugar, etc.) I think there will prove to be at least some genetic component (D2R variation, specifically) in determining what part of the population is likely to be affected by hyperpalatable food reward in the context of obesity.

Food reward is explaining why a person chose to eat a food that has more of a drug-like effect. The study results have to do with needing a larger dose to get that drug-like effect. Unfortunately, everyone already has a definition for words like "reward" and "palatable" while the food reward hypothesis is defining these terms in a very specific way that might be different than your definition (that's what is happening here).

I found Melissa's answer very beautiful and J Stanton's beautifully logical. I will add a piece of my own story. On PH, I've always called myself a binge eater but based on the current discussions I'm starting to believe I'm not--what I have is a mental/stress disorder that has been expressed EITHER through binge eating or migraine attacks. I guess it could have been drug addiction or something but my lizard brain chose food and "brain fires" and I should probably be grateful. So, I don't know the official name of my personal demon any more but it's available to a good home.

Based on that, what I'm thinking about FR theory is that it makes sense if you overeat to some degree BECAUSE you've eaten a hyper-palatable food and gradually gain weight. In my case, experiencing strong emotions is what caused and fueled binge eating (or migraine although that was also triggered by other things such as storms, bright sunlight, etc.) Even now, after nearly a year of disciplined shopping and eating and socializing, extreme stress that generates strong emotion immediately causes my lizard brain to say the stress MUST be released by eating ice cream or chips. The compulsion to binge is incredibly strong and I used to eat MASS QUANTITIES of food, gaining weight incredibly fast.

That doesn't make Stephan's work invalid but it makes J Stanton's assertion that FR theory is incomplete spot-on for me.

In a more wild state, nearly all of the food one would eat would have a degree of satiety that correlates to its energy content and energy cost of acquisition. If one fills their stomach with meat and fat, digestion is slow, satiety is very high and acquisition is typically quite costly. If one fills their stomach with fibrous fruit or tubers, there's less satiety, but also less energy, and in the case of tubers, acquisition/preparation are costly as well.

Somehow I doubt that management ever instructs their food scientists to create foods that satisfy hunger for extended periods of time without being overly energy-dense. Bad for business. There's no need to create those foods as we've been eating them for a long time. Their job is to make things that are minimally satiating while being sufficiently food-like.

I guess I'm just moving away from the need for an elaborate theory to explain bodyfat gains on a diet rich in these foods that takes a negligible amount of energy to acquire alongside a lifestyle that itself requires a decreasing amount of energy. We can all now eat like kings and be as fat as they were. There are plenty who will say they got obese eating a bowl of steamed rice per day while training for a triathlon, but I'd say most people gained fat as a result of eating these pseudo-foods. I did.

One of the more horrifying animal experiments I've seen in the literature is something called "sham feeding" where they surgically alter an animal to still be able to eat the food, but it never actually reaches the stomach and is never digested. Naturally, in this state they will eat constantly since none of their satiety signals are being triggered. Sadly, Western diets are moving ever-closer to this effect, except that food is digested and the energy is made available. The more of these empty calorie food holograms one eats, the fatter they'll likely become since the overall volume necessary to match traditional levels of satiety from real food will result in a considerable, persistent energy surplus. There wasn't sufficient selective pressure for us to evolve toward a proportional down-regulation of appetite based on leptin feedback.

Food reward might be better framed as a means by which we can explain addictive responses to certain types of food that some obese people experience rather than calling it a dominant factor. This would probably offend fewer people, though I don't see the slightest tinge of blame attached to anything Stephan has written.

IMO, our senses are there for a reason, and if it were a bad thing to trust them, I think we wouldn't have them. I see the issue as more one of greed than senses that don't work right. I think we taste something we like, and we stop listening to the other senses in our gut... you know... the ones that say "ok, it's time to stop eating till later", and "i'm not hungry right now."

I use the phrase "eating below my neck" a lot, to explain things. I don't NOT eat tasty, healthy foods -- I just eat from foods that are low on the "processing" chain as much as possible, and take my cues about when to eat and when to stop from my gut, not my mouth or head (both of which can, in the absence of hunger, succumb to societal programming errors).

FWIW, I was recently writing about this study and this WSJ article.

I think we need to de-couple food reward and obesity. It's obvious you can have one without the other. It's only one factor in obesity, and obesity is only one of the issues that FR can cause. For instance, FR helps explains why my former co-worker developed T2D while being in his 20's and underweight. He only consumed extremely high-reward food. Yet it manifested as T2D in him rather than obesity.

FR makes sense in terms of my experiences. Having worked at restaurants and gyms for most of my adult life, it's been mentioned in some way countless times, by people who are healthy and extremely unhealthy alike. More over, the idea of reducing FR for one reason or another has also been mentioned to be time and time again. I don't think the concepts are new, just the science behind it.

My experience is the paleo sphere also provides ancetdotal evidence of this. Reducing FR has helped not only obesity, but binge eating and other problems. Sometimes this is explicitly explained as reducing FR, sometimes not.

It's one piece of the puzzle- how important of one depends on the person, just like everything else in paleo.

Food Reward Theory is interesting. I'm not sure it explains the universe or even my own history of obesity, but it's worth reading about. I think it's important to consider different viewpoints and keep an open mind about this stuff. Not all the facts are in, last time I checked.

It it weren't for being open to new ideas, I'd still be trapped in Conventional Wisdom.

I disagree. That's a bit like saying Class-A drugs are addictive because they give less "buzz".

I see that people are still conflating tastiness with reward.