Many people who struggle with weight management may experience an uncontrollable, near-obsessive preoccupation with food. The concept has long existed but only recently earned the name “food noise,” the quieting of which has been reported as a benefit of GLP-1 agonists and other obesity medications.
Currax Pharmaceuticals, the maker of one such medication, is working to raise awareness of the concept of food noise as a psychological barrier to weight loss. A new campaign from the company offers educational resources about food noise while also nudging viewers toward Currax’s Contrave, a combination of naltrexone and bupropion that specifically claims to curb cravings and hunger.
Currax unveiled the “Quiet the Food Noise” campaign this week, citing in its announcement a recent survey from Weight Watchers and the STOP Obesity Alliance showing that nearly 60% of people who are overweight or obese said they experience food noise, but only 12% of those surveyed were familiar with the term.
The campaign’s website describes and defines food noise, detailing its various symptoms and information about its triggers, effects and management. It also features a pair of 15-second video ads that Currax said will run on YouTube and connected TV channels.
Each ad shows an individual being pestered by an anthropomorphic food item: a woman getting annoyed by a too-chatty ice cream container, and a man attempting to ignore the call of a bag of potato chips. In both clips, the food item gets the last word—“You know how this ends”—before a voice-over directs viewers to the campaign site as a resource to “help control your cravings and support weight loss goals.”
Elsewhere, Currax said it has developed 30-second spots that will go out via radio broadcast and podcasts.
Though the campaign is an unbranded one, with no outright mention of Contrave in the ads or on the main website, the site features multiple links to “get help to control food cravings” and “learn more,” all of which lead straight to Contrave’s own site.
Currax has marketed Contrave since 2019. Before it was bought by the specialty pharma, Contrave was originally owned by Orexigen Therapeutics, under which it earned FDA approval in 2014, in a marketing partnership with Takeda. By 2016, with Contrave struggling to get off the ground, Takeda pulled out of the team-up, and Orexigen filed for bankruptcy two years later, ultimately agreeing to be purchased by Nalpropion Pharmaceuticals, which in turn was acquired by Currax in 2019.
In another component of the Quiet the Food Noise campaign, Currax has partnered with My Weight – What to Know, an organization dedicated to providing educational resources about the many options available beyond simply diet and exercise to aid in weight management. The partners plan to send out a questionnaire to members of the organization’s community to learn more about how they experience food noise.
“We’ve heard from so many people living with obesity that dealing with constant ‘food noise’ is a significant challenge for them in everyday life,” Ansley Dalbo, the organization’s founder, said in this week’s announcement. “These persistent thoughts about food can impact mental health and can also make weight management more difficult. Recognizing this is a critical first step in combatting weight bias (both internal and external) and de-stigmatizing the choice to seek medical help for obesity.”