The bliss point: how food is designed to make you eat more

Some foods are built to be hard to stop eating. Food scientists call the target the bliss point: the exact level of sugar, fat and salt at which a food tastes as good as it possibly can. Go below it and the food tastes flat; go above it and it becomes sickly. Hit it, and you find yourself reaching into the bag again long after you stopped being hungry.

The idea grew out of work by the American market researcher Howard Moskowitz, who spent decades testing versions of products such as soft drinks and pasta sauces to find the one people liked best. The journalist Michael Moss made the term widely known in his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, which showed how food companies used this kind of testing to design their best sellers. Your favourite crisps, biscuits and fizzy drinks taste the way they do because many versions were tested before one went on sale, and the winner was the one that kept people buying.

What happens in your brain

When you eat, your brain's reward system releases dopamine, a chemical messenger that makes the experience feel good and makes you want to repeat it. The system exists for good reasons: it pushed our ancestors to seek out energy-dense food when it was scarce. Food engineered to hit the bliss point gives that system a stronger signal than an apple or a bowl of lentils, and it does so reliably, every time.

Researchers have found overlaps between the way the brain responds to these foods and the way it responds to addictive drugs, though whether food can be addictive in the same sense is still debated. The effect on behaviour is clearer. In a 2019 study at the US National Institutes of Health, 20 adults lived in a research centre for a month, spending two weeks on an ultra-processed diet and two weeks on an unprocessed one. The meals offered were matched for calories, sugar, fat, salt and fibre, and people could eat as much as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet they ate about 500 calories more a day and gained about 0.9kg; on the unprocessed diet they lost about the same.

Diets high in these foods have been linked with higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure around the world. One bag of crisps won't do any of that; eating this way day after day, without noticing, is what adds up.

Where the bliss point hides

Obvious snacks are only part of the story. Ketchup, soups, flavoured yoghurts, smoothies, breakfast cereals, pastries and a lot of supermarket bread are designed with the same goal in mind. The industry talks about "hyperpalatability" and "mouthfeel", and products go through taste panels, lab analysis and consumer testing until they hit the mark. The packaging then sells convenience and flavour, and nutrition rarely gets a look in.

Ultra-processed ingredients help get there. Flavourings, emulsifiers, sweeteners, stabilisers and preservatives improve taste, texture and shelf life, and they let manufacturers fine-tune the balance of sugar, fat and salt in ways a home cook couldn't. The result is often food that's high in energy and low in the things that keep you full, such as protein and fibre.

That combination also affects your glucose, the sugar in your blood that your body runs on. It rises after you eat carbohydrates and falls again as your body uses or stores it. Many bliss point foods pair refined carbohydrates with fat, so they're easy to eat a lot of quickly, and the carbohydrate is absorbed fast. If you've ever eaten a pastry mid-morning and been starving again before lunch, you'll know how that feels.

Eating around the bliss point

The surest way to avoid engineered food is to eat food you've cooked yourself from simple ingredients. Nobody manages that every day, so a few habits help when you're buying something ready-made.

Start with what's on the plate. A meal that's rich in nutrients, includes a good portion of protein and goes easy on refined carbohydrates will keep you fuller for longer, which makes the biscuit tin less tempting at 3pm. Eggs, fish, meat, beans, Greek yoghurt, vegetables and whole grains all fit the bill.

Then read the label. Sugar appears under many names, including glucose syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin and fruit juice concentrate, and a product can contain several of them. Count the ingredients too. As a rule of thumb, if a food has more than five, there's a good chance it's been engineered, especially if some of those ingredients are things you'd never keep in your own kitchen.

Finally, notice how a food makes you feel while you're eating it. Bliss point foods are easy to eat quickly and hard to stop; real food slows you down and tells you when you've had enough. Paying attention to that difference is one of the simplest ways to eat on your own terms, whatever the product designer had in mind.

Their irresistible taste is no accident.

The food industry has spent decades learning exactly what makes you want more. Next time a craving arrives, it's worth asking how much of it was designed in a lab.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash