Introduction
Why do some foods feel difficult to stop eating, while others can be highly enjoyable without prompting the same tendency to overconsume? Answering this requires a clearer understanding of food reward, including the distinction between liking a food, wanting it, and perceiving it as easy to overeat.
In this episode, we examine how nutritional composition, sensory characteristics, learned beliefs and the eating context may shape hedonic overeating. It also considers the limits of using broad food categories to explain complex eating behaviour.
Discussing all this is Professor Graham Finlayson, professor of Psychobiology at the University of Leeds, whose research focuses on human appetite, food reward and the psychological processes involved in eating behaviour and weight control.
- [04:02] Prof. Finlayson’s research
- [06:06] Food reward
- [07:13] Liking versus wanting
- [12:43] Measuring wanting in research
- [15:27] Does wanting predict overeating?
- [16:36] Study on hedonic overeating
- [23:19] Perception and context effects
- [26:24] Does ultra processing classification add anything?
- [36:09] Key takeaways and future work
- [40:35] Premium key ideas
Episode Resources
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- Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course
- Study: Finlayson et al., 2025 – Food-level predictors of self-reported liking and hedonic overeating: Putting ultra-processed foods in context
- Related episodes:
- #499: How Sensory Cues Impact Food Choice & Behavior – Prof. Ciarán Forde
- #299: Compensatory Eating, Exercise-induced Weight Loss & Energy Balance Homeostasis – Mark Hopkins, PhD
- #404: Psychology and Development of Food Preference & Eating Behaviour – Prof. Marion Hetherington
Guest Information
Professor Graham Finlayson is Chair in Psychobiology at the University of Leeds, where he leads the Appetite Control and Energy Balance Research Group.
His research examines human appetite, food choice and food reward, with particular interest in how eating behaviour and physical activity interact in the context of energy balance, weight management and obesity.
He also developed the Leeds Food Preference Questionnaire, a widely used method for measuring distinct components of food reward, including liking and wanting.
Study Notes
Overview
This episode examines why enjoying a food is not equivalent to being likely to overeat it. Food reward includes related but separable processes, particularly liking and wanting. Their relationship is shaped by the food, the individual, the person’s current state, prior learning, beliefs, and the wider eating context.
The central study, Food-level predictors of self-reported liking and hedonic overeating: Putting ultra-processed foods in context, used three online surveys to model how objective nutritional composition and perceived food attributes related to two outcomes: food liking and self-reported hedonic overeating. Nutritional composition explained considerably more variation in hedonic overeating than in liking. Participants’ beliefs about foods added substantial explanatory value, whereas carbohydrate-to-fat ratio added none and ultra-processed-food status added little once basic nutritional characteristics were considered.
The study is informative about how foods are perceived at the group level. It did not measure actual ad libitum intake, establish that any food characteristic caused overeating, or show that the models predict an individual’s behaviour in a real eating situation.
Core Terminology and Distinctions
- Food reward: The value assigned to a food that makes it attractive and capable of producing pleasure. It is a broad construct made up of partly separable processes rather than a single property contained within a food.
- Liking: The subjective pleasure or hedonic impact experienced when a food is tasted or anticipated. It can usually be reported directly on a rating scale.
- Wanting: The motivational pull or incentive value of a food: how strongly it captures attention, promotes choice, and draws someone towards consumption. Wanting can include explicit, consciously reportable motivation and implicit components that are less accessible to introspection.
- Hedonic overeating: In the study, the degree to which a person associates a food with eating too much because it is desirable or pleasurable. The construct includes reward-driven overconsumption, but the survey measured a belief or expectation about a food rather than observed energy intake.
- Sensory-specific satiety: The decline in pleasantness of a food as it is eaten, relative to foods that have not been consumed. Liking for the eaten food may fall even when some motivation to continue eating remains.
- Food-level analysis: An analysis in which foods, represented by aggregated ratings across participants, are the units being compared. It answers which characteristics distinguish foods that groups rate higher or lower; it does not directly estimate which people will overeat.
- Explanatory variance (R2): The proportion of variation in an outcome statistically accounted for by a model in the analysed dataset. A higher R2 does not establish causality, mechanism, or out-of-sample predictive performance.
- Incremental variance (ΔR2): The additional variation explained when a new predictor or block of predictors is added to an existing model.
Food Reward Is Multicomponent and Context-Sensitive
Liking and wanting usually track together, but not perfectly
- People usually want foods they like and like foods they want. This strong correlation explains why the two constructs are often treated as interchangeable.
- Discordance becomes informative when one process changes more than the other.
- After a large meal, liking for the food just consumed may decline through sensory-specific satiety.
- Residual wanting may remain, creating motivation to continue choosing or eating despite reduced pleasure.
- In people with binge-eating traits, wanting for high-fat, sweet foods may relate more strongly to