What this document is
Hedonic Hunger: A New Dimension of Appetite? is a 2007 paper by Michael R. Lowe and Meghan L. Butryn published in the journal Physiology & Behavior. The authors argue that a growing share of human eating is driven by the pleasure food provides rather than by the body's caloric needs, and propose distinguishing this kind of eating, which they term hedonic hunger, from the more familiar homeostatic hunger that reflects an actual energy deficit.
The paper reviews evidence that people who are obese tend to eat more high-palatability food even when they are not calorically deprived, and it discusses the Power of Food Scale, a measurement tool developed to capture individual differences in how strongly people respond to the presence and anticipation of appealing food. The concept was offered as a way to explain overeating that conventional hunger-and-satiety models, built around energy balance alone, do not fully account for.
The paper has been cited well over a thousand times in later obesity and eating-behavior research and remains available through its publisher, in its original 2007 volume of Physiology & Behavior.
Where to find it
Available from Physiology & Behavior (Elsevier).