The 2024 book Foods That Lie explains how intermittent reinforcement within the modern food supply promotes overeating. This article introduces these ideas and summarizes the concept of intermittent reinforcement of flavor.
Intermittent reinforcement of flavor occurs when the relationship between a food’s flavor and its nutritional outcome becomes unpredictable and variable. This concept builds upon B.F. Skinner’s research on intermittent reinforcement, where he found that animals exhibit specific behavioral patterns when rewards are delivered inconsistently.
In the context of flavor, intermittent reinforcement happens when the relationships between flavor and nutrition are unpredictable.
For example, strawberry flavor historically was only associated with the nutrition found within actual strawberries. Today, however, strawberry flavor appears in countless products – some with real strawberries, some with minimal strawberry content, and some with none at all. This creates an unpredictable relationship between strawberry flavor and the nutrition received.
Intermittent reinforcement of flavor leads to three predictable responses:
Increased Engagement
When flavor-nutrition relationships become intermittent, the natural response is to eat these foods more frequently. This increased engagement occurs for several reasons:
- If a flavor sometimes delivers nutrition and sometimes doesn’t, more frequent engagement is needed to obtain the same nutritional outcome
- The act of seeking and consuming food itself uses energy, creating an increased need for nutrition
- Because the delivery of nutrition is unpredictable, people must build up a buffer of nutrients to survive periods when nutrition isn’t received
Resistance to Stopping the Behavior
Once someone is exposed to intermittent reinforcement of flavor, the tendency to keep seeking that flavor, even if no nutrition is forthcoming. This is because:
- Intermittent reinforcement by definition includes unpredictable gaps between rewards, thus periods absent of a reward are expected. This makes it much harder to ascertain when a nutritional reward has disappeared for good
- Seeking these flavors is the only known method the body has for obtaining certain nutrients
- Even if the odds of receiving nutrition become infinitely small, these odds remain better than zero
Heightened Obsession
Intermittent reinforcement creates an increase in attention and focus toward the relevant stimuli. This obsession serves a crucial survival function – it is the brain’s attempt to identify patterns and solve the unpredictability. The uncertainty about when and where nutrition will appear demands increased attention to try to decipher the rules governing the situation.
Foods That Lie provides a simple mathematical illustration of how this process might unfolds.
Intermittent reinforcement of flavor creates a severe nutritional emergency, whereby:
- More engagement is required to meet nutritional needs
- The average reward per engagement continues to fall
- Even more engagement becomes necessary
What makes intermittent reinforcement particularly insidious is that it’s often imperceptible. The changes happen gradually and the connection between cause and effect isn’t obvious. People typically blame themselves for lacking willpower rather than recognizing they’re caught in a predictable pattern of behavior caused by deceptive sensory signals.
Understanding intermittent reinforcement of flavor makes it clear that overeating isn’t a personal failing or lack of control – it is the normal, expected response of any lifeform to intermittent reinforcement. Just as Skinner’s pigeons pecked levers thousands of times when rewards became unpredictable, humans naturally increase their engagement when nutrition is delivered via intermittent flavor-nutrition relationships.
The solution isn’t moderation or willpower, but to prioritize flavor-honest foods – those whose taste reliably predicts their nutritional content – so that the body can rebuild accurate associations between flavor and nutrition. This naturally leads to normalized appetite and eating patterns without requiring ongoing struggle or restriction.
Understanding intermittent reinforcement of flavor is crucial because it explains why many common approaches to weight loss fail. Dieting often makes the situation worse by increasing nutritional needs while maintaining exposure to unreliable flavor signals. Addressing the underlying pattern of intermittent reinforcement allows you to rapidly escape this cycle and return to normal eating patterns.
Truly understanding this concept makes it clear that overeating is not a disorder or malfunction but the logical consequence of the body being misled. By recognizing and avoiding deceptive foods, appetite abates, and you can get on with living the rest of your life.