About the Ro Allison Indiana Dhurandhar Food Noise (RAID-FN) Inventory
Food noise—the phenomenon of persistent and intrusive thoughts about food that are perceived as unwanted and unpleasant—is something that many patients experience and report affecting their daily lives, behavior, and even the ability to achieve their health goals. Until now, there has not been a clear, standardized way to define or measure food noise, making it difficult to effectively identify, address, and manage.
The RAID-FN scale is a brief, easy-to-use questionnaire that determines whether respondents experience food noise as well as how often those thoughts occur and how disruptive or upsetting they are. The scale translates a personal, often hard-to-describe experience into a simple, clinically validated score for use by patients, providers, and researchers.
The RAID-FN scale is designed to be a three factor, comprehensive measure that distinguishes:
Preoccupation with food;
Persistence of thoughts;
Dysphoria (i.e., the extent to which it is harmful to someone’s perception of themself)
The RAID-FN scale is the result of a years-long collaboration, organized by Ro, which brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts spanning nutrition to psychology and obesity medicine to psychometrics. The scale was robustly tested in a multi-phase validation study, which showed the measure’s strong statistical alignment with known constructs like anxiety, food cue reactivity, and food cravings, as well as patients’ real world experiences.
Whether you're a provider supporting patients, a researcher studying the impact of food noise on diet, quality of life, or health, or an innovator developing pharmacological interventions or digital health tools—this scale is designed to give you actionable insights.
Ro developed RAID-FN to help usher in advances in the scientific and clinical understanding of food noise, how it affects patients, and how to best manage it. Click the button below to start using the RAID-FN scale in your work.
How it can be used
Care delivery
Clinicians can use the RAID-FN scale to better understand the daily burden of food noise that patients experience, enabling the delivery of more personalized, empathetic, and effective care.
Clinical research
Researchers can use this validated, scalable tool to quantify and track food noise, to study its prevalence, psychological and behavioral impacts, and association with clinical outcomes across populations.
Clinical trials
Industry innovators can use RAID-FN to explore how novel treatments, devices, or interventions affect food noise and those who experience it, supporting the discovery of potential new therapies.
RAID-FN FAQs
Is RAID-FN available for use?
Yes. You can request to access the tool by filling out a form here.
Who developed RAID-FN?
Ro worked with leading obesity experts, including David B. Allison, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics and Endowed Chair and Director of USDA-ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Emily Dhurandar, Director of Research Special Projects at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and Chief Scientific Officer of Obthera. For the full list of authors, click to see the manuscripts below:
Nutrition & Diabetes, “Food noise: definition, measurement, and future research directions”
Appetite, “Development and Rigorous Multi-Step Validation of a Psychometric Tool to Measure Food Noise”
What research has been published in support of RAID-FN?
The work is detailed in an article in Nutrition & Diabetes, which lays out the scientific basis for the definition as well as the scale. Additionally, the RAID-FN scale was robustly tested in a multi-phase validation study published in Appetite, which showed the measure’s strong statistical alignment with patients’ real world experiences – making it a valuable tool suitable for both clinical and research uses.