More than half of the calories consumed in the United States are ultra-processed. At the same time, food-related ailments, including heart disease and diabetes, are on the rise. Yet we struggle to resist foods that are the worst for us.⁠Alex DiFeliceantonio⁠, an assistant professor and interim co-director of the Center for Health Behaviors Research at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, and leader of the DONNUT Lab, investigates our food choices, how what we eat can change our brains, and whether our relationship with food can actually be an addiction. In the inaugural episode of Pocket Science, she explores those questions, and whether we can behave our way out of unhealthy eating when major food manufacturers have so effectively stacked the deck against us.

The DONNUT Lab seeks to understand the basic mechanisms of food choice, by both isolating the properties of foods in our modern food environment to evaluate their effect on physiology, brain function, and brain-physiology interaction, and trying to understand how individual differences in response to these food properties can confer risk or benefit for disease outcomes.