The Science of Bliss Points in Food: Unlocking the Secret to Addiction

Imagine biting into a perfectly seasoned potato chip, feeling an irresistible urge to grab another.

This isn’t by chance—it’s science. In the 1970s, a food scientist named Howard (Howie) Moskowitz discovered the secret formula that makes us crave more: the bliss points for sugar, salt, and fat. These precise combinations revolutionized the processed food industry, creating products that are nearly impossible to resist.

But what if I told you that these bliss points extend beyond just sugar, salt, and fat? What if our cravings are also driven by the perfect levels of every essential nutrient?

Welcome to the world of nutrient bliss points, where the right amounts of macronutrients and micronutrients can significantly influence our eating habits.

In this article, we’ll explore:

The concept of bliss points and their impact on food addiction.
How processed food manufacturers use these points to maximize consumption.
The science behind bliss points for sodium, macronutrients, and micronutrients.
Practical strategies to reduce your intake of hyperpalatable foods and regain control over your diet.

Join us as we uncover the hidden mechanisms that drive our cravings and learn how to navigate a world engineered for maximum consumption.

Contents

The Science Behind Your Cravings
What is the Bliss Point?
Bliss Point for Sodium
Bliss Point for Macronutrients
Our Learned Appetite for Micronutrients
Minerals Bliss Points
Vitamin Bliss Points
Protein and Amino Acid Bliss Points
Are the DRIs and AIs enough?
How to Avoid Food Addiction and Overeating
Fortification: A Double-Edged Sword?
How Can I Reduce My Consumption of Bliss Point Foods?
Appendix: Bliss Point Charts and High Nutrient Foods
More about Micronutrients

The Science Behind Your Cravings

Have you ever wondered why certain foods are nearly impossible to resist?

The concept of the bliss point helps explain this phenomenon. In food science, the bliss point is the perfect combination of sugar, salt, and fat, maximising sensory pleasure and creating a strong food reward.

The food industry has perfected the art of engineering highly palatable foods that hit the bliss point, making them incredibly satisfying and difficult to stop eating. This manipulation of taste and texture plays a significant role in processed food consumption, which is a major factor in the current obesity epidemic.

In his book “Salt Sugar Fat“, renowned author Michael Moss delves into how these foods are designed to hijack our dopamine response, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. This manipulation can significantly influence our eating habits, increasing cravings and overeating.

The term hyperpalatable foods has been coined to describe items that are engineered to be extremely appealing. These foods often override the body’s natural satiety mechanisms, making it easy to consume more than necessary. This concept is crucial in understanding why processed food consumption is linked to various health issues, including obesity and metabolic disorders.

Understanding the science behind the bliss point and the creation of highly palatable foods can help us make more informed dietary choices. Understanding how food reward and sensory pleasure manipulate our cravings can reduce our intake of hyperpalatable foods and improve our overall health.

What is the Bliss Point?

The bliss point in food is the perfect concentration of a nutrient in a food that maximises its palatability.

These bliss points intakes for the essential nutrients represent the minimum your body craves that aligns with maximum food intake.

In the 1970s, Howard (Howie) Moskowitz revolutionised the processed food industry by identifying the perfect bliss points for sugar, salt and fat. By quantifying these bliss points with mathematical precision, he weaponised the arms race to create the most hyperpalatable, profitable and addictive foods. Fifty years later, all food manufacturers understand how to simultaneously hit all these bliss points.

Watch this video on YouTube

Bliss Point for Sodium

The chart below illustrates how the bliss point works. It shows the amount we eat using varying concentrations of sodium. In the middle of the chart, we have a bliss point for sodium at 3.1 g/2000 calories, which aligns with the maximum food intake.

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.

Bliss Point for Macronutrients

The chart below shows the bliss points for each macronutrient together.

Notice the peak of each curve indicating that we eat more when our food contains the perfect combination of macronutrients that our bodies crave, i.e.:

12.5% protein,
38% fat and,
48% carbohydrates.

Creating foods to profit from and how much we will eat of them is not just about sugar, fat, and salt. Our analysis has shown that all the micronutrients, to differing degrees, influence our cravings and, hence, how much we will eat of a particular food.

Like filling a hybrid car with gas and electricity simultaneously, foods containing the perfect blend of carbs and fat enable us to fill the glucose and fat fuel tanks in our body more rapidly, giving us a bigger dopamine hit.

This is great in a world of scarcity where survival relies on building enough fat to survive the impending winter, but not so good in our modern world, where food is cheap and abundant.

You can think of this as nature’s optimal fat gain setting, which leads us to eat and store the most to survive an impending winter. But today, these foods are available 24/7/365 and designed to be impossible to resist.

Our Learned Appetite for Micronutrients

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 strong conscious taste for minerals the way we do protein, fat, salt and sugar, it appears we may have a learned appetite for the nutritional value of our food.

Through repeated exposure, our bodies learn how much food they need to get the required nutrients, and we get a reinforcing dopamine hit after consuming these foods.

Minerals Bliss Points

The table below shows the bliss points for each mineral (per 2000 calories).

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

Vitamin Bliss Points

The table below shows the bliss point for each vitamin that aligns with the maximum energy intake (per 2000 calories).

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

Protein and Amino Acid Bliss Points

The table below shows the bliss points for protein and amino acids (per 2000 calories) that align with maximum energy intake.

amino	Bliss Point	DRI	units
protein	12.5%	10%	%
cystine	0.9	0.9	g
histidine	1.9	1.4	g
isoleucine	3.1		g
leucine	4.7		g
lysine	4.6		g
phenylalanine	2.6	1.6	g
methionine	1.4		g
threonine	2.6		g
tryptophan	0.75		g
tyrosine	2.1	1.6	g
valine	3.2	2.3	g

Are the DRIs and AIs enough?

Intriguingly, the bliss point is eerily similar to the DRI or AI for many of these nutrients. The DRIs and AIs represent the minimum nutrient intake required to function and maximise growth and fat storage. If we treat the DRIs and AIs as a target, we set ourselves up to minimise satiety and maximise how much we’ll need to eat.

Although our cravings for vitamins may be more subtle than our cravings for protein, targeting the DRIs may leave us craving more food to get the vitamins our bodies crave.

How to Avoid Food Addiction and Overeating

This understanding of the nutrient bliss points is critical to the design of our satiety score.

We are often warned to avoid empty calories, but we don’t tend to overeat nutrient-poor foods (e.g. rice, flour, sugar or oil) by themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, nutrient-dense foods (e.g. spinach, liver, sardines, etc) have a strong taste. They quickly trigger sensory-specific satiety because they contain a high concentration of nutrients well beyond the bliss point.

Meanwhile, the foods with the lowest satiety scores we overeat strike a balance between these extremes. They seduce our appetite but never really satisfy it.

To find foods that promote greater satiety and those to avoid to prevent addiction and overeating, see Ditch the Fads: This Interactive Tool Reveals the Perfect Foods for YOU.

Fortification: A Double-Edged Sword?

To account for the lack of naturally occurring nutrients, ultra-processed foods are often fortified with synthetic vitamins. In addition to artificial flavours and colourings, these synthetic supplements may make these foods taste much more appealing than the meat and seafood that naturally contain these nutrients.

How Can I Reduce My Consumption of Bliss Point Foods?

1. Avoid Processed Foods

Avoiding packaged foods with 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 that food was engineered to hit your bliss points and make you eat more.

2. Avoid Fat and Carb Combo Foods

Natural foods provide energy primarily from fat or carbohydrates, not both simultaneously. So, 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 is the dominant player in the satiety equation, so ensure you get protein 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.

If you’re currently consuming an average of 15% protein, you could work up to 20% protein. Most people don’t need to make it to our Optimal Nutrient Intake of 40% protein to see sustainable weight loss results.

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 (numbers exceeding the DRI/AI) for each mineral and vitamin to augment their satiety further and give their body everything it needs more efficiently.

Appendix: Bliss Point Charts and High Nutrient Foods

If you’re currently getting less than the bliss point intake for a particular nutrient, you need to prioritise foods that contain more of that nutrient. 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.