That creamy Reese’s peanut butter cup dissolving on your tongue. The next crunchy Dorito you’re reaching for before you’ve swallowed the last one. The first sip of an ice-cold Coke, with a mix of syrup and carbonation; it hits like relief.

Your brain’s reward center is supposed to keep you alive, but a major new study from the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Duke says the food industry learned how to use it against you — engineering products with the same science as cigarettes.

The playbook is this: optimize the craving, accelerate the reward, and make it nearly impossible to stop.

Ultraprocessed foods now make up roughly 60% of what Americans eat. San Francisco has sued 10 major food manufacturers over the harm.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said these foods are poisoning Americans, but he has stopped short of regulating them.

In Detroit, 69% of households face food insecurity and researchers describe the city as a food swamp, where drive-throughs, party stores and gas-station snack aisles vastly outnumber places to buy fresh produce.

Detroit’s numbers make the question sharper: What happens when engineered food is all that’s there?

Ashley Gearhardt, clinical psychologist, addiction scientist at the University of Michigan, creator of the Yale Food Addiction Scale and lead author of the study, joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss this and more.

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In the 2010s, the effort to uplift people with bigger bodies shifted online. The Body Positivity Movement expanded its reach with the advent of social media and trendy hashtags. However, that momentum appears to be slowing with the growing popularity of weight loss medications. 

GLP-1 agonists are FDA approved weight loss medications that were approved in 2014 to treat patients who suffer from obesity. Nowadays, the drug is in high demand. The percentage of U.S. adults who use it doubled from 2024 to 2025. At the same time, obesity rates in the U.S have been declining since 2022.  Could this be the end of the body positivity movement of this era? What does embracing weight loss drugs say about the shifting standards of beauty in the U.S?

Randy Seeley is the director of the Michigan Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Michigan. He is also a paid consultant to pharmaceutical companies Lilly and Novo which manufacture drugs like Zepbound, Mounjaro and Ozempic. He joined the program to explain how GLP-1s are being used for both health and vanity.

Then Kendrin Sonneville, an associate professor and Chair of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Michigan joined to talk about how GLP-1 medications are changing the way we view bigger bodies. 

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro