How Eating Got Complicated

and addiction. I felt totally at home on the show and really enjoyed my conversation with the host Yuna and Eddie, and so I thought you would too. If afterwards you want to hear more smart thoughts on eating, then you should listen to other episodes of Food we Need to Talk wherever you get your podcasts.

right because they were just eating food to survive. And so I feel like it's completely you started to mean this different thing.

we were hungry, we wanted to eat. And I think if you look at the foods that people were eating back then, you know, like roots and tubers and whatever, you know, in the back in the evolutionary day, very little of it was this sort of highly palatable food. And so I think sometimes we think, oh, today food's so utilitarian. You know, maybe we need to get back to pleasure. But in some ways, I think we need to get back to what food really was. It's just

like a way to fulfill our needs. It wasn't necessarily supposed to be this super pleasurable thing that you know, we got a lot out of. And so I think when you take that big historical approach, you realize, wow, we're thinking about food in a really different way, and it's one of the needs that we've gotten so obsessed about. You know, you talked about regulating your weight or kind of wanting to get fit and things like that. And I think these days we really are super utilitarian when

it comes to food. And when you start to realize that it's just an urge, this starts to feel kind of weird, you know when you think about like, you know, if I have urged to go to the bathroom, right, I have to urinate, I'm not like making a schedule or having an app or like there's not like influencers who are telling me I wanted to go to eth, Like if I'm feeling cold, there's very little infrastructure for like how to get warmer or tips on getting what like.

You just kind of obey that need. And somehow we've gotten off track with food.

wasn't really this sort of pleasure thing. It wasn't like we were, you know, going on our hunter gatherer yelp to try to pick their best restaurant, you know, with the best cocktails and food.

us have with food. Now, if we could get back to thinking about food just as fuel, like gasoline that we're putting into our big human meat tanks, and we might end up developing a healthier relationship with eating.

But when I watch people who have what I would think of as a healthy relationship with food, they just eat when they're hungry, and they eat something that seems like it will make their bodies feel decent, and then

they don't really think about food very much. So I think kind of just the act of worrying about this healthy relationship with food and making hashtags about it that go on Instagram already, that's signaling like something is a miss, right, Like, no one's hashtagging like I have this great relationship with my like you know, urination or like my body feel warm? Right, Like it's just another urge that we have, is just

another need that our bodies have. And so already, as we start asking this question, I think it means we got off track. But I think you know, when we think about a healthy relationship with food, it's one that's not taking up a lot of mental bandwidth. I think when you start having a take up mental bandwidth already,

this is problematic. You know, even maybe if it's pleasurable, right, even if you're obsessed with, oh, what I'm going to eat tonight, I'm really excited about this restaurant and things. I think that already is signaling, but you might be kind of getting off track a little bit. So that's I think point number one is you shouldn't be obsessed with it. You shouldn't have to talk about it. But the second thing is I think that it's kind of not an emotion that seems to be like very high arousal,

Like you're not feeling anxious or sad or stressed. It's kind of much more one of these neutral emotions. Even when it kind of verges on the positive relationship, like you're savoring your food and you're enjoying it, it's not this like extreme thing. It's kind of just like joy. It's like walking around and seeing the nice flowers. It's like that level of emotion and not one that's taking up a lot of energy and mental bandwidth.

more pleasurable relationship with food? And I think that brings us into the healthier versions of cultures that we can have with food, right, because food is really it's super important part of our social connection. Right again, done well?

and sort of life changes. These things can be really essential, but they're often less about the food and more about kind of how we're thinking about the food and what it represents in our lives. Like, my guess is it's it's not necessarily you know, if I think back to like, you know, I don't know my grandmother is cooking. My

grandmother used to make these cupcakes and things. It's less about what's in the particular cupcake and more the narrative and the stories that I have going with it, the fact that it's been part of this tradition and so on, and so that healthy relationship with food is less about the particular food itself. I don't think anybody cares about the macros that are in the cupcake. It's really about the narrative and the stories and the sort of cultural background that comes with food.

aware of. But even my grandmother, you know, I was born in the it was a child of the eighties, and already she was, you know, making food out of boxes and doing these things right. Already, the cultural traditions that I think she had grown up with were kind of fading in my you know, American upbringing, and so I think, you know, we've lost a lot of that and we need to start building that back in. And I think that's important both for our happiness but also for our health.

to eat kind of no matter what was in it. Right, you take traditional cultures that are much more meat based or much more plant based, and they have, you know, some nuance there, but pretty much all the traditional die it's are better than what I was growing up on out of the box in the nineteen eighties.

the house all the time. And it's like, if I don't consciously think to myself like I probably shouldn't be having this all the time, I just would because they

just taste good, do you know what I mean? So, how do you like balance the idea of like these things are everywhere all the time, and even all my social gatherings, I've been noticing like I've just been going out every other day guys and getting food that I know isn't good for you, because I've just been meeting my friends because this summer, and in the back of my mind, I'm like kind of like, oh, like I feel like it's just like happening a lot right now.

I don't really like it. I don't really feel like I feel as good. But then I also don't want to be becoming very stressed about it like I used to, and I haven't been. I haven't not been going those social gatherings because there's food there the way I used to.

Both of those have a particular psychological set of features, which is like it's making us obsessed with stuff, right like we kind of whether it's a sort of diet mentality or a sort of fitness mentality, neither of them are pretty good when they go along with this sort of anxiousness. And so you know, the kind of anxiousness you're describing about these sort of social events isn't ideal.

But then that of course raises the question like, okay, but how do I do that in the environment where there's this hyper palatable food that I know, even if I don't care about, like, even if I'm not in diet head, I still don't want my body to feel super gross right afterwards, right, And so I think part of that is really trying to come to terms with actually paying attention to how these foods make us feel.

There's lots of evidence growing that these hyper palatable foods really kind of hijack a certain part of our system, and we often talk about it hijacking our sort of pleasure system what we really like. But I think that's sort of incorrect, because when you get down to it, these foods don't necessarily feel that great if you're paying

attention to them. You know, a lot of people who engage in mindful eating exercises sometimes have the realization that whatever food they've been obsessing over, say like Hershey's kisses, they finally eat them and they're like, oh, they're kind of waxy, Like I didn't like in my brain, I had this is this very delicious thing. But when I mindfully really pay attention on what the taste is, I'm

kind of not digging it that much. And that plays into this very dumb feature of the way our brains work. It's like the one feature like if I could change the way that this part of the human brain work, I would, which is that there seems to be this weird disconnect in our brains between wanting and liking, and so liking is like I eat the Hershey kiss and how it actually tastes, like what's my actual pleasure response to is it is or whatever? But wanting is different.

Wanting is how much I start obsessing about it, how much I want to go after it, how much when I see it add for it, I'm like, oh, that seems really good. You would assume that our brains would be smart, that our brains would put those two circuits together, that we would want only things that we actually liked, But it turns out if you look that is not how brains are organized. There seems to be this interesting disconnect between liking and wanting, and so you can see

that most clearly with drugs of addiction. You know, so take somebody who has a heroin addiction. That person has a really strong wanting for heroin. Right, they're going to you know, rob their family, get into all kinds of bad behaviors to go after heroin. But because their bodies are habituated to it, when they actually experience the drug,

they don't really even like it anymore. Right, They're not getting the same blast that they got maybe the first time they got it, and so that already shows us that there's this disconnect. But I think this is the same kind of thing that's happening with hyperpalatable food. Right, Like you know, your roommate makes the bake goods and you see them on the table, and your wanting system is like go go go like take that, you know, like, but maybe when you eat it, I guess you know,

I'm like no, no, Like shade to your room. She really delicious, but it might not be as good as your right. And what's frustrating about the wanting liking system is I think it runs in reverse too. I think there's lots of stuff that we like that the wanting system just hasn't latched onto. Take exercise. Right, we were just talking before we started about you know, all your dead lifts and going up right, Like, I have never had my wanting system like tell me to go to

the gym or tell me to do dead lifts. But I'm pretty sure most of the time I engage in like a hard plates class or a hard workout, my liking system fires to that. In the end, when I'm leaving the gym, I'm having like I'm in a sort of euphoria of like that felt really good, but it doesn't translate into this sort of wanting to go after things.

And I think that's true for healthier foods too. Right there, you know, we're in the middle of summer when we're having this conversation, and right now, like the peaches are just like so good. I had a nectary in the other day that was like on the verge of orgasmic, but like, oh, I do not still do not have the wanting for those nectaries and the same way I would for the bake goods. And so I think understanding

the way this system works can help us a little bit. First, it just gives us some knowledge about when I'm experiencing this wanting. It might not be an honest signal I'm probably not gonna like this as much as my brain is telling me, my mind's kind of lying to me. But in another way, it can cause us to really start to pay attention more to the things we really

do like. And while it is true that the wanting and liking systems are a little bit disconnected, they can sort of update a little bit, like when you actually start to pay attention to your liking. And we know this from work by folks like Hetty Kobert, who's a colleague of mine at Yale who studies drugs of addiction, where she gets, for example, cigarette smokers to really pay attention when they're smoking, to like do you like the way this feels? To like the way this smells? You know,

do you like the way this feels? And people often when they start to pay attention like, actually, this feels kind of gross. I don't like the smell of that. I don't like you know, I don't like what this is doing to my body when I think about that. And what she finds is that that can gradually start to update the wanting system, not perfectly, but when you really start to pay attention to like, hang on, this

was not rewarding, I like really didn't like this. Then it can kind of do the update, and the same with really mindfully paying attention to the healthy food. If you really focus on the nectarine and think about it again,

you're not probably going to crave it. In the same way your dopamine system goes to these highly palatable foods that are literally engineered by engineers in a laboratory to kind of you know, be like the heroine, but you can kind of get your wanting system a little bit more on board with going for it.

you know, if your dietician or nutrition looked at your what you were eating, they might be like, oh, that's great, like you look so healthy, But in practice, you feel really dysregulated. You feel like you're on this kind of like verge of a binge all the time. It's taking up all your airtime for you. It doesn't feel good. And so I think that's the problem, is that living in this environment of food being so hyper palatable, it's so hard to pay attention without dipping into the orthorexia.

embedding them in our cultures and in our rituals. Even if that's sort of starting new cultures and rituals, What does that look like?

to different wines. Right, you're tasting wines, right, and you're doing that, for example, like in an fMRI scanner, so we can see what's happening in your brain as you're tasting these things. And what you find is that the simple label that you're showing people of the price of this wine affects whether or not they taste it. You know, literally the reward centers in their brain firing more as they taste it. And so you can give someone exactly the same wine and their brains will fire more for

that same wine. If it's labeled as more expensive, right, And so that tells us something interesting, right, It tells us it's not what we're tasting, it's kind of what we're thinking about as we're tasting it. There's a similar paper about tasting coke and pepsi, and so a lot of people say that they like coke better. I also

like say that I like coke better. But if you put people in the scanner and you don't tell them which is which, people's reward centers fire more for pepsi, I think, just because pepsi actually has more sugar in it than the whole and coke. But if you tell people it's pepsi as they're drinking it, then it will fire less. So if they don't know what it is, they like it more than coke. But if you tell them it's pepsi, they're like.

You know, so if your roommate's bringing out the cookies that she bakes and she just says, oh, they're cookies that might not taste as delicious as if you say, these are my grandmother's secret rest if you deck get it, chocolate cookies, Like just labeling something differently actually does make it more delicious to us, right, And so there's there's kind of funny hacks that we can engage in to make things more delicious.

its only purpose, you know what I mean. So I don't know if like part of it is that, Like I think one time I saw a nutritionis she's kind of like kind of nutritionis kind of psychologist, and she was like, you have a lot of fear associated with food, and you're a migdala is really that miguala is the part of the brain, guys, that's like the fear kind of anxiety center of the brain, and it's the kind

of the oldest part of the brain. It's like very very deep in your brain anyways, and she was saying, like you just have all these connections between food and you're amygdala, and like we need to like rewire to have food and like pleasure associated together, not just food and fear.

of it? Right, Like, it means that you're not no longer thinking of food as this like fuel that's neutral, or like a friend that you could savor, that you might like, but is this negative, scary, like potentially harmful,

threatening thing. And so I think the process of trying to engage a little bit more with food mindfully, you know, might be might be pretty helpful, you know, because we do know that both again, the stories we tell ourselves about food matter, and so if you have a negative story, that's only going to make it worse. But if you have a positive story, that might be better. But also the rituals that we have around food matter to right.

You know, a wine drunk and a really nice wine glass at a beautiful restaurant's gonna taste different than you know, out of a bag, like you know, I don't know, in a dorm room somewhere like some ivy league dorm room, right, you know, And so I think we can try to develop different rituals to come up with food and a lot of you know, therapeutic interventions for eating disorders as people are eating more. You know, that's one of the things. Right, It's like, let's let's try to kind of make this

thing not scary. Let's put it in a pretty dish, you know, set thee have a nice ritual about it. You really take a deep breath before you eat it, really try to pay attention to what does this taste like? You know, how would I describe this?

But what I'm learning from you, Laurie, is that what sold the wine to me was again the setting and the story that is it the venter is that they were actually standing there pouring their their creation and setting me up for this experience. And it was sort of like, of course I was going to I mean, first off, it really is objectively better. Put me in an FMR.

You know, if you walk into you know, one of these like bougie New York kind of vegan places where the stuff has plated really well, and you know you're paying a lot of money, the kale that's there is different than the kale that I you know, grab the supermarket, like just to me to taste differently, right, So I think that matters. I think who we are eating with seems to matter too. You know there's lots of top account what's that.

kind of thing earlier. But you know, as I've made a foray into trying to eat more healthfully again, not for a weight loss or just like to you know, make my body feel good. Sometimes that means eating on the go. Sometimes that means grabbing you know, a few carrot sticks that are in my bag, and that's not often eating and the prettiest way possible with the best narrative possible. It's just kind of like getting the fuel

in to go, right. And so it does feel like we're sometimes because we're so busy and because we're so easily distracted, missing out on these opportunities to really enjoy food. Well, you know, one of the main complaints of people who try to engage in more mindful eating is just like it's boring, yes, Like you're like like I have to just eat and not watch you know, like not look at my TikTok videos or not watch root Pul's drag race or whatever. It's like what, you know, Like how

am I expected to just eat? Right? Like? It just seems so boring, right, And I think that tells us something, Right, even if we're eating a hyper palatable food, it sometimes seems boring, right, And that really tells us it wasn't about the food, It wasn't about our enjoyment. It was really about the wanting of the food, right. The getting of it and enjoying didn't really matter as much as.

the brand of Starbucks. Like I just love the idea of I'm going to get my Starbucks, if that makes sense. Just it's something I grew up with and it's so comforting to.

Why do they kind of trigger this wanting system so much? And I think part of it is that, like the not so hyperpalatable foods, they don't tend to have the marketers or the brand now, like my nectarine from the Farmer's Market doesn't come with, like, you know, a logo that I associate with that nectarine that's bright that you know,

triggers my memories about eating previous nectarines. It's just a nectarine, right, And so I think that's that's one of the things that we're pushing against as we try to engage in eating more healthily, is that most of the healthy stuff just doesn't have any of that kind of branding narrative. Nuance that gets our wanting systems and.

marketing budget or whatever. Also, all the packaging in the supermarket, if you look at the packaging, you would think the healthiest food is in the middle of the supermarket, right, and then all the vegetables have zero packaging. So it's like, I don't know, it is all very deceptive.

Because I was having no other treats, I was like, Halo Top is the best thing on the planet. And remember I'd wait all week for my and I was like, I can have a whole pint because it's only three hundred whatever calories. And then I would get it and I'd be like, this is like not good. Why did I wait all week? But I would eat the whole things. I was like, I waited all week for this. I have to eat, you know what I mean?

drugs of addiction. Like you're walking down the street and you're a smoker and you see a non smoking sign, right, Ostensibly, the sign is telling you not to smoke, but we don't really have any representation in our brain for not smoke. What our brain sees is smoking, and it tries to shut that down. So it turns out that if you look at the cravings that smokers experience, they experience more craving in the presence of no smoking signs Oh my god.

And the reason is, like you just they're just like walking down the street, maybe not thinking about smoking, and they look and they're like smoking. Oh wait, don't do that. But what's in their brain is like smoking, smoke, right. I think that insight tells us why restricting often comes

with binges. Why In the words of someone who's been on my podcast a lot, Andrea Walker, who studies mindful eating, she calls it the diet riot roller coaster, the diets often go with the riots and part because just the act of telling yourself don't have it usually comes with you thinking about having it. Right, So take your halo top right, You're like, I'm not gonna have it till the end of the week. I'm not gonna have it

till the end of a week. But your brain is just like halo top, halo top, and like there's pressure is to like kind of squish it down. But really what it's thinking about is that food. And so a better way to kind of get out of that restriction mindset is actually to find the healthier food that you like. You know, so instead of like, oh I can't I just got to wait on the halotop, no halotop, no halotop.

If you thought like, ooh, today you're like really good blueberries that just came from the supermarket, or like I got these almonds that are like so fresh and I'm excited about them. Right, thinking about the thing that you actually want to do rather than the thing that you're not supposed to do can be quite helpful. But yeah, I mean, you know, pretty much every available study of binge eating suggests it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes

from having a mindset of restriction. Right, That's what's kind of leading people to. People don't necessarily binge unless they also have a even in their head, if they're not acting on it, this urge that they're not supposed to do or these are the things they're not supposed to eat.

adiction is actually a real thing. Maybe they're related, maybe they're two separate things, but it did relate food addiction or like not being able to regulate food intake. I guess to substances of abuse because a lot of people, when you ask them about it, it's like a behavior they really want to stop and they're unable to stop, and they kind of tell themselves to not do it, not do it, not do it, and they end up

doing it and they feel really bad. So it kind of had a lot of similarities to the addiction cycle. So I was wondering what you think about that relationship between addiction food.

into opiate systems that exist in our brain. So it's like you're abusing the very chemical that is very very close to the signal in the brain. There's a more open question about addictions that seem to have all the same features where people binge on these things, they overthink

about them, they want to stop, but they can't write. Like, behaviorally and psychologically these look the same, But the substance that you're feeling addicted to isn't like an opiate, right, It isn't a chemical signaler in a brain, you know, So things like a shopping addiction, or an internet addiction, or a TikTok addiction, or you know, maybe in a

more nebulous case, a sugar addiction or a food addiction. Right, Obviously, foods are you know, they're not direct opiates, but they're chemicals that are playing a part in this process.

And I think bending behaviors, food behaviors for a lot of people feel addictive, you know, whether that's kind of a drug of choice and that you're kind of eating more food than you want to or comfortable with, whether that's you know, something like orthorexia where the thought patterns that you engage in are really you know, you don't want to keep thinking about healthy food, but you're kind of obsessing with it, like almost like in an OCD way.

And so I think, even though again there's some debate about whether it kind of fits as a kind of capital a addiction that would be in like the psychology journals, it definitely for the people that are experiencing these things is like deeply problematic, you know, beyond just being an eating disorder or something like that.

can't think about other things. And so yeah, I think we're using these foods in functional ways. I think sometimes when we think about disorders of eating, we say, like what's going on? But you know, minds are smart, despite what I was saying about all these problems with the way brains are organized, Like, our minds are smart, right, And sometimes the best go to for pleasure for when you need to stop thinking about something is something related to your eating.

I wonder what caused that urge? And sometimes when you start to engage in that process, you notice it wasn't really about hunger. It was about some emotion like you were bored, or maybe you were in a good mood, or you were excited, or you just saw it, right, Like, that's the first step I think to noticing whether you're using food in the way that at least evolutionarily our bodies intended, which is as fuel. Right, And you can eat for other reasons, but like that's the main reason.

And then I think the second exercise is to really pay attention to how a food really truly feels, the real liking that you're getting from it when you experience it, because again, sometimes these hyper palatable foods that are like in our brain of like, oh, I'm so obsessed with that, when you finally sit down and notice you're kind of it sort of takes some of the magic away. You're like, that actually wasn't like as super delicious as I thought.

And this is a practice that we use generally beyond just the domain of food in the class, just a practice of mindfulness trying to notice what things feel like. And I think often that practice shows us this dissociation between wanting and liking, where we're like, huh, I really wanted that thing, you know whatever, it was shopping, buying something, watching the TikTok videos, eating, but I didn't actually like

it as much as I thought. And sometimes, I think in a more important way, it can tell us the opposite, right Like I didn't really want to go to the gym, but I enjoyed it more than I thought, Right Like, I thought this salad was just gonna be the boring thing I was going to eat because I was you know,

trying to eat healthier. But when I paid attention, it was crunchy, it was delicious, It had these flavors that I didn't expect, right, And so I think that that mindful process can kind of allow us to get our wanting and liking back in sync. And it can also be you know, an important part of the presence that just makes life better, and that we can savor it and notice it more.

don't have to go back that far. I think even if we rewind, honestly, like seventy five one hundred years, we're already getting to cultural relationships with food that were a lot healthier.

So those things were going away at the same time as I think, you know, the food industrial complex was telling us like, oh, these things are so healthy or these things are so delicious. And there were advertisements on TV, you know, I mean take an extreme example, take something like breast milk versus formula. Right. You know, I was from the generation my mom where they were like, oh, breast milk so totally not good, like we want the

you know, food science energized formula like healthy. Yeah, some ways it still is, you know. And I think that you know, that basic thing was telling you, oh, you're you know, the wisdom you thought you had about food

that was wrong. Let's follow what the nutrition science says, you know, like doctor Kellogg who with his you know, crackers of like we'll control those urges and make you healthy eat these crackers, right, And so I think that that really really was a moment in time that was happening as again, culturally, we were kind of abandoning what we used to do, and so in some ways it was like a double edged sword of these more of these hyper palatable foods around in a way there never

had been in human history. Plus the kind of loss of our sort of ancestral wisdom about just how to eat.

blah bah blah. And now the narratives completely changed where it's like people always say don't have low fat things because they've been manipulated to take out the fat and blah blahlahlah blah. And I was like, damn it.