The Urge to Snack Is Built Into Our Brains

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TTrying to watch what you eat while watching anything on TV is like navigating a minefield. Every fast food commercial — with the tantalizing images of sizzling beef patties, crispy fried chicken and gravy dripping in slow motion — threatens to weaken your resolve. Now, new research published in the journal Appetite shows how such food cues can prompt us to snack, even when we are full.

“Obesity has become a major global health crisis,” study author Thomas Sambrook of the University of East Anglia said in a statement. “But the rise in obesity is not simply a matter of willpower: it is a sign that our food-rich environments and learned responses to tempting cues are dominating the body’s natural appetite controls.”

To study the effect of food cues on our brains, Sambrook and his team of psychologists connected 76 volunteers to an EEG machine and monitored their brain waves while they played a reward-based game. When participants got a correct answer, they were shown a picture of a snack; when they were wrong, they saw the image of an empty plate. Halfway through, they were given a meal consisting of one of the snacks, which they ate until they were completely full.

Read more: “Junk food is also bad for plants”

Unfortunately, their brains didn’t get the message. Even though the participants were satiated and reported significantly less desire to eat the food, which their behavior confirmed, the regions of their brain associated with delicious rewards continued to light up when they were shown images of themselves.

“Even when people know they don’t want food, even when their behavior shows they have stopped valuing food, their brains continue to trigger ‘rewards!’ signals when food appears,” Sambrook said. “It’s a recipe for overeating.”

According to the researchers, this suggests that our response to food cues is habitual and independent of our conscious mind. They also found no link between participants’ ability to make goal-directed decisions and their brains lighting up when presented with images of food while they were full. In other words, even people with strong self-control are still betrayed by their brains. “It’s really no wonder that resisting a donut can seem impossible,” Sambrook said.

Still, it’s comforting to know that everyone is in this together. Maybe not as much comfort as a late-night snack.

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Main image: baibaz / Shutterstock

• Jake Currie

  Published on March 3, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.