The Foods That Remember You: How Ultra-Processed Cravings Are Written Into the Brain

Now, I’m not a stranger to junk food. I eat candy like it’s going out of style, and my purse is full of snacks at all times. I’m more of a sucker for ultra-processed foods than anyone, which was why the other day I was wondering about my strange compulsion to eat it.

I walk past the bakery and my mouth waters, but not because I’m hungry. I definitely don’t need fuel, so it’s more because something in my brain lights up like a childhood birthday candle.

Smell, color, crunch, and ooo that delicious sugar.

Suddenly, I’m five years old again, holding a cupcake with pink frosting and sprinkles like edible confetti!! Or maybe I’m twenty-three, drunk at 2AM with fries in my lap and grease on my hands (after that club hop I swore wouldn’t happen again!). Maybe it’s after school, or maybe it’s after a heartbreak.

But the food, now the food remembers, and it’s not nostalgia or my lack of willpower. It’s actually neuroscience.

Ultra-processed food like chips, soda, packaged cookies and drive-thru nuggets, isn’t just designed to taste good. It’s actually engineered to write itself into your hippocampus. Those french fries literally encodes memory into your brain to trigger craving, even when you’re full. Those bastards.

Let’s Get Honest About What We’re Eating

Ultra-processed food isn’t just “bad for you.” It’s not just “junk” or “occasional treats,” as of today, it’s actually the dominant form of caloric intake in the U.S. and much of the world. AKA, w’ere eating more crap than good stuff on a daily basis now, and what used to be treats are now day-to-day food.

If it has a long shelf life, comes in bright plastic, and contains ingredients you can’t pronounce, chances are, it’s ultra-processed.

I’m not talking about bread or granola (although those have their own issues too), I’m talking about foods that are the end-product of industrial formulations: high-fructose corn syrup, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, seed oils, and those lovely additives made in laboratories.

These foods are built, I feel like I can’t even call it cooked at this point in time.

They are assembled, like terrible little puzzles, to hit all the sensory notes your brain loves: sweetness (sugar, real or fake), salt (to amplify flavor), fat (for mouthfeel), crunch or softness (for textural satisfaction), and even color (engineered to signal freshness or indulgence, check out how RFK is trying to change this!).

And they don’t just taste good (they do, obviously), they teach your brain to remember them.

The Hippocampus

Your hippocampus is the part of your brain responsible for memory and learning, but it's also deeply involved in appetite regulation. It plays a starring role in how we remember food: what it looked like, how it smelled, how it made us feel, all the warm and fuzzy feelings the smell of chicken soup reminds us of.

Which is totally fine…if the food is real.

But ultra-processed food completely hijacks that system. It tells your hippocampus: “This food is not only tasty, but emotionally important,” and the hippocampus, bless its ancient design, actually listens.

So, in a nut-shell (which is a good snack now that I’m thinking about nuts), first you eat a bag of cheesy snacks after a stressful day. Then your brain records the combination of high salt, high fat, and satisfying crunch. Check, it hits all those boxes. You feel a temporary surge of relief or pleasure as your dopamine surges (your brain is like “oh, good job, well hunted”). The hippocampus links that food to that feeling of relief and pleasure and just happiness. Later, even when you're not hungry, your brain will cue you to seek that same snack the next time you're stressed.

It’s a horrible loop that might as well be it’s own circle of hell.

And the more processed the food is, the stronger and faster the loop forms. This right here is why cravings often feel emotional. Because they actually are. They're stored in the same damn place where your brain files breakups, music, and your grandmother’s perfume.

The processed food industry figured out how to install itself there for good.

The Study That Proved It

In a 2023 study, scientists used brain imaging to show that when participants were exposed to images of ultra-processed foods, their hippocampus lit up like a slot machine right before it spit out a bunch of quarters.

The signal wasn’t hunger based at all, it was just memory and recognition.
Suddenly, reward pathways igniting like firecrackers as your dopamine goes haywire.

Even people who had just eaten felt a craving. Their brains weren’t responding to need, they were just responding to familiarity. The body wasn’t hungry at all, the brain was just reminded.

Ever notice that spinach doesn’t haunt you the way french fries do? (Sorry I keep bringing up fries, but they’re my current craving as I write this post).

You don’t crave steamed broccoli in the middle of the night at 3am after you went to the bar with your coworkers even though you work again the next day.
And you don’t remember the kale salad from last Tuesday with a feverish emotional tug that makes you absolutely need more of it.

That’s not because healthy food is boring (although, if the shoe fits…am I right?), no, it’s because it doesn’t hack your hippocampus.

Real food nourishes you and makes you feel a sense of contentment afterwards.
Ultra-processed food brands itself onto you like a marketing campaign inside your neurons.

What Sugar Does to Your Immune System

It gets even worse, because of course it does. If you’ve read my post on sugar and your immune system, you already know this:

Excess sugar isn’t just linked to metabolic issues, it actually shuts down immune function for hours. One sugary binge and your white blood cells go sluggish, which is super helpful in the middle of flu season and when you work in restaurants with the public.

Now imagine craving that food constantly, not because you’re hungry, but because your brain stored it like a good memory.

Your immune system suffers, and we call it “lack of willpower.” But it’s not that, it’s architecture and the whole damn world conspiring against us.

It’s also part of why doctors recommend limiting sugar the first 1,000 days of life!

What Do You Do?

First: forgive yourself. You’re an angel in a world of demons. (Too far?)

You didn’t build this system of schite, you were born into it and grew up with it before you were even able to understand any of this post. You’ve walked past vending machines and fluorescent-lit food courts designed to prime your hippocampus for lifelong customer loyalty.

Okay, then start with awareness of what’s actually going on in your body and mind. Begin noticing what foods linger in your mind long after eating them. Ask yourself: do I crave this when I’m full? Do I associate this food with a specific emotion? Do I feel relief just by thinking about it?

That’s your brain tipping its hand, and that’s the hippocampus spitting the old tune.

A Book That Changed Everything

If you’re a reader (and you probably are if you’ve made it this far into my rant disguised as a blog post), The End of Craving by Mark Schatzker changed how I view ultra-processed food entirely.

It explores how we’ve over-engineered food to be more addictive, and why craving isn’t about indulgence, it’s about memory, chemistry, and evolution crashing into marketing.

It’s smart and readable, and maybe it’ll even change your grocery cart in the future.

Healing the Hippocampus

The good news is that your brain is plastic. Your hippocampus can be rewired, so don’t think this is the end for you and it’s all too late. Every time you choose a good whole food, every time you pause before indulging, every time you notice without judgment, you’re writing a new neural script in your brain.

You’re teaching your brain: “this is what nourishment feels like,” “this is what calm feels like.”
“This is what being full actually means.”

It won’t erase the old loops, those are stuck there for a while, I’m sorry to tell you.
But it will soften them, and one day, you’ll walk past the bakery, and your brain won’t scream at you that you need that chocolate croissant. And you’ll keep walking, not even tempted to check the time and see if you’ve got five minutes to run in there.

You Deserve Better Than Memory-Engineered Cravings

Food shouldn’t be a trap and shouldn’t leave you haunted. Life has enough ghosts in it for that.
It shouldn’t turn your brain into an emotional marionette, and I’m annoyed it’s gotten this far that I even need to say that to someone.

You deserve food that nourishes, comforts without controlling, and that supports your immune system, not sabotages it.

You deserve memory that’s yours, not implanted by ad agencies and flavor chemists in a boardroom. So here’s to chasing those feeling and ignoring those fries a little longer.