The Bliss Point Trap: The Secret Formula for Addictive Food

Ever wonder why you can’t stop after just one chip? Suddenly, you’ve finished the bag.

It’s not a lack of willpower—it’s science.

This article uncovers how manufacturers engineer foods to hit your bliss points—tricking your brain into overconsumption.

Discover how to identify these traps and regain control over your cravings, one bite at a time.

Contents

The Science of Craving: What’s the Bliss Point in Food?
Howard Moskowitz and the Discovery of the Bliss Point
The Salt Sweet Spot: Our Sodium Bliss Point
Sugar’s Goldilocks Zone: Not Too Sweet, Just Right
Cracking the Code: Fat’s Bliss Point Revealed
Protein’s Role in Satiety
The Carb Addiction Formula
Micronutrient Cravings: Your Body’s Hidden Hunger
DRIs vs. Bliss Points: Why the Minimum Isn’t Enough
Outsmarting Overeating: Break Free from Food Addiction
Take Control: Simple Strategies to Eat Smarter
Key Takeaways

The Science of Craving: What’s the Bliss Point in Food?

The bliss point is the perfect amount of any nutrient that maximises a food’s palatability. It’s the Goldilocks concentration where the food tastes just right, triggering pleasure centres in the brain, driving us to eat more.

A deeper understanding of our nutrient bliss pints empowers us to understand why certain foods are so hard to resist. We can reverse engineer these insights to know which foods to avoid and which to prioritise to achieve greater satiety and prevent obesity and related diseases.

Howard Moskowitz and the Discovery of the Bliss Point

As Michael Moss detailed in his best-selling book, Howard Moskowitz revolutionised the food industry in the 1970s by identifying the perfect bliss points for sugar, salt, and fat.

Moskowitz found that by optimising the ingredients using multivariate regression analysis, he could maximise a product’s appeal to consumers, thus empowering his clients to win on the highly competitive supermarket shelves. This unique skill made Cambell’s Prego Pasta Sauce, Pepsi & Diet Pepsi, Dr Pepper, V8 Vegetable Juice and Ragu Pasta Sauce dominant brands with killer recipes.

This discovery marked the birth of the ultra-process food industry. Once the secret was out, every processed food company had to follow the same formula to be competitive. Companies began engineering foods to hit these bliss points, increasing their profitability by making products more addictive.

Watch this video on YouTube

Recognising this strategy on food labels before you bring them home is the first step in choosing foods that work for you, not against you.

Food companies keep their secret formulas under wraps, but our data analysis enables us to decode them. Excitingly, we can also reverse engineer these insights to regain control of our appetite.

The Salt Sweet Spot: Our Sodium Bliss Point

Let’s explore sodium’s bliss point. Our analysis of six hundred thousand days of food logs shows how sodium intake affects energy consumption.

In the middle of the chart, we have a bliss point for sodium at 2.9 g/2000 calories, which aligns with the maximum energy intake. However, notice how we eat less if our sodium concentration is above or below the bliss point.

When our food contains less sodium, it tastes bland, and we crave saltier foods.
But once we exceed this amount, our food tastes ‘too salty,’ so we eat less.

Sugar’s Goldilocks Zone: Not Too Sweet, Just Right

The following chart highlights the bliss point for sugar at 23.5% of total calories. The bliss point is the Goldilocks point between these extremes.

We enjoy sweet things, so we eat more of them.
But if we add too much sugar, our food tastes ‘sickly sweet,’ and we eat less.

Cracking the Code: Fat’s Bliss Point Revealed

Similarly, we see a distinct bliss point for fat at around 24% of calories; we eat less when our fat is above or below this point.

But when we double-click on fat, we see that the problem is not fat per se but when all the different fats are combined in a way that is rare in nature but common in processed food.

Of the three, our proportion of energy from monounsaturated fat (the dominant fat in vegetable oil, which has become a dominant ingredient in processed food) has the most significant impact, but saturated fat is not far behind.

As detailed in Seasonal Oscillation of Sugar, Starch, Saturated Fat, Polyunsaturated Fat & Monounsaturated Fat, one of the most fascinating insights from our data analysis is the way our energy sources oscillate with the seasons, even in our modern food environment.

In summer, we get more energy from sugar and starch (i.e., grains and fruit).
In winter, we get more energy from fat (i.e., meat and dairy).
Only around the traditional harvest festivals when the seasons change (now celebrated as Easter and Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas) do these energy sources come together, driving us to eat more.
These feasting seasons ensured we fattened up a little to survive the coming lean times.

Whether by design or luck, the processed food industry has cracked the code to reverse engineer our instinctual cravings to maximise profit at our expense.

The secret to designing a smash-hit, ultra-profitable food product does not revolve around one ingredient. Instead, it’s about hitting all the nutrient bliss points simultaneously. Conversely, we can leverage these insights to empower us to make more informed food choices that satisfy us without excess energy.

Protein’s Role in Satiety

Beyond salt, sugar and fat, our analysis shows bliss points for protein and carbohydrates.

The following chart shows that the bliss point for protein is 14%. While we have a modest craving for the umami taste in meaty foods, we experience a robust sensory-specific satiety response when our diet has a higher protein %. On average, people whose diet contains 40% protein eat half as much as those whose diet hits the 14% protein bliss point.

The Carb Addiction Formula

Carbs hit their bliss point at 50% of total calories. Low-carb or low-fat diets reduce overall intake, but when half of your energy comes from carbs, paired with fat and a little protein, it becomes much harder not to overeat.

If we remove fibre and look at net carbs, the bliss point decreases to 46%.

Interestingly, while moving from 46% to 11% net carbs aligns with a 27% reduction in energy consumption, pushing your carbs even lower doesn’t help. This may be because a very low-carb diet tends to eliminate low energy density, high fibre, non-starchy vegetables, which are super hard to overeat.

Micronutrient Cravings: Your Body’s Hidden Hunger

Beyond macronutrients, our bodies have a learned appetite for micronutrients—vitamins and minerals essential for health. While we may not consciously crave specific minerals, deficiencies can drive us to eat more to obtain these nutrients. This is sometimes known as our bodies’ nutritional wisdom or hidden hunger.

Your appetite is like a nutrient-seeking missile that searches for foods containing your priority nutrients, whether you realise it consciously or not.

While we don’t have a robust conscious taste for minerals the way we do protein, fat, salt and sugar, it appears subconsciously to understand the nutritional value of our food. Through repeated exposure, our bodies know how much food they need to get the required nutrients, and we get a reinforcing dopamine hit after consuming these foods.

Minerals

We’ve included all charts in the appendix to this article to illustrate the bliss point for minerals and vitamins, but the table below shows the bliss points for each mineral, with the DRIs for comparison.

mineral	Bliss Point	DRI	units
calcium	650	1,000	mg/2000 cal
copper	0.9	0.9	mg/2000 cal
iron	11	18.0	mg/2000 cal
magnesium	200	420	mg/2000 cal
manganese	2.7	2.3	mg/2000 cal
phosphorus	1000	700	mg/2000 cal
potassium	1800	3,400	mg/2000 cal
selenium	95	55	mcg/2000 cal
sodium	3100	1,500	mg/2000 cal
zinc	8	11	mg/2000 cal

For more detail, see The Role of Minerals in Cravings, Hunger, Satiety and Health.

Vitamins

The table below shows the bliss point for each vitamin that aligns with the maximum energy intake along with the DRIs.

vitamin	Bliss Point	DRI	units
thiamine (B1)	1.6	1.2	mg/2000 cal
riboflavin (B2)	1.4	1.3	mg/2000 cal
niacin (B3)	20	16.0	mg/2000 cal
vitamin B5	3.3	5.0	mg/2000 cal
vitamin B6	1.2	1.3	mg/2000 cal
vitamin B12	2.4	2.4	mcg/2000 cal
choline	450	550	mg/2000 cal
folate	400	400	mcg/2000 cal
vitamin A	400	900	mcg/2000 cal
vitamin C	90	90	mg/2000 cal
vitamin E	6.2	15	mg/2000 cal
vitamin K1	58	120	mcg/2000 cal

For more detail, see The Role of Vitamins in Satiety and Weight Management.

DRIs vs. Bliss Points: Why the Minimum Isn’t Enough

Intriguingly, the bliss point is eerily similar to the DRI for many essential nutrients.

This makes sense when we understand that the DRIs generally represent the minimum of each nutrient required to function and maximise growth and fat storage. But if we treat the DRIs as a target, we set ourselves up for endless cravings and hunger.

The solution to beating hunger is to move beyond the bliss points and DRIs by packing in more nutrients per calorie, thus satisfying our cravings with less energy.

Outsmarting Overeating: Break Free from Food Addiction

This understanding of the nutrient bliss points is critical to the design of our food addiction satiety index.

While many approaches use a single factor in an attempt to increase satiety (e.g. low carb, low fat, high protein %, low energy density, low sugar, etc.), combining multiple factors empowers us to predict more accurately how much we’ll eat based on what we eat and thus make more informed food choices.

For more details, see:

Take Control: Simple Strategies to Eat Smarter

Just like Moskowitz’s analysis to maximise addiction and provide the processed food industry superpowers, quantifying the addiction-satiety spectrum can help us escape the seduction of ultra-processed food. But, even without the numbers, there were a few simple things we can do.

1. Avoid Processed Foods

Avoiding packaged foods containing a blend of sugar, refined starch, and seed oils is a great place to start. Also, any packaged food listing artificial flavours, colours, and fortification is a dead giveaway that it was engineered to hit your bliss points and make you eat more. By being mindful of these signs, you can take control of your food choices.

2. Avoid Fat and Carb Combo Foods

Natural foods provide energy primarily from fat OR carbohydrates, not both simultaneously. If you’re trying to eat less to lose weight, try to minimise adding fat to carbs to create delicious recipes (e.g. fried rice, pasta carbonara or baked goods that contain butter and flour).

3. Prioritise Protein

Protein dominates the satiety equation, so prioritise protein-rich foods at every meal. This will leave you more satiated and less prone to snacking on less optimal foods between meals. In our Macros Masterclass, we guide our Optimisers to dial their protein % by prioritising protein and incrementally dialling back fat.

4. Increase Nutrient Density

Once you’ve laid the foundation with adequate protein, you can focus on getting more of each of the micronutrients per calorie.

In our Micros Masterclass, we guide Optimisers to work towards our Optimal Nutrient Intake for each mineral and vitamin to augment their satiety further and give their body everything it needs more efficiently.

Ready to take back control? Join our Optimising Nutrition Community today and start mastering your cravings with our guided programs.

Key Takeaways

The bliss point is the concentration of any nutrient that aligns with maximum energy intake.
Food manufacturers optimise their foods to hit our nutrient bliss points to make foods more palatable and profitable, often at the cost of our health.
Prioritizing whole foods and nutrient-dense meals that exceed the nutrient bliss points empowers us to avoid the seductive allure of addictive processed foods.

Conclusion

Understanding the bliss point in food is crucial in today’s environment, where hyper-palatable foods are readily available and heavily marketed. By recognising how the bliss point leads to overconsumption and food addiction, you can make informed choices to prioritise your health.

Appendix: Bliss Point Charts and High Nutrient Foods

If you’re currently getting less than the bliss point intake for a particular nutrient, you must prioritise foods containing more. For those eager to learn more, we’ve also included the bliss point charts and infographic showing foods that contain more of each nutrient. You can find more details for each nutrient and printable food lists in the resources section of our Optimising Nutrition Community.