"The Hungry Brain" by Stephan Guyenet

I've recently hit a good streak with books packed with wisdom and science. I sincerely hope I don't jinx it. Even though it feels like the list of my "best books of 2025" will be lengthy, I'm happy to add "The Hungry Brain" to it, because it outlines the most recent scientific consensus on how addiction works and how people lose and gain fat. Yes, it was written over 8 years ago, yet it was so forward-looking that I'm sad I haven't read it before.

Stephan backs all of the points with research, and here's the list of the main ones:

• Our brains' evolutionary preference is for calorie-rich food that's easy to get; in modern times, it is processed grocery store food and junk food.
• Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical but a learning mechanism; the brain likes a thing, wants us to do it again, spikes dopamine; the rest of the body systems crave dopamine and seek out behaviours that spike it.
• Highly palatable, fat-rich, calorie-rich foods spike dopamine, but this isn't just about taste; even bypassing the taste buds by injecting calories straight to the intestines spikes dopamine. This indicates that our dopamine system is so much more complex.
• Food corporations engineer foods to cause maximum dopamine spikes through sugar, fat, and flavours (both artificial and natural).
• Artificial and natural flavours on the label can contain up to 25 different chemicals, some of them not having any taste but simply spiking dopamine.
• Obesity genes don't make us fat; they make us susceptible to a fattening environment.
• The body has no "lose fat" or "gain fat" calorie threshold. Instead, it works like a thermostat set at a specific weight (this setting can be changed through various techniques) and gains or loses weight to maintain a stable weight.
• Poor sleep causes poor food choices.
• Chronic stress causes fat gain through increasing cortisol, which affects leptin sensitivity, appetite and metabolism.
• Modern food corporations design foods to spike dopamine, yet not trigger the satiety circuits in the brain. This means we eat a lot of junk food that doesn't make us feel satiated!
• Public health regulators must combat the obesity epidemic through taxes, subsidies, and other tools.
• Multiple factors cause overeating: food corporations, availability, and lack of food scarcity. Overeating causes fat gain, but other mechanisms regulate how effective overeating is at gaining fat.

If you still struggle with extra weight, I recommend reading "The Hungry Brain."