A while back, when I wrote about why we crave sugar, I primarily focused on the physiological processes that, over the centuries, have tunes our bodies to look for foods with higher energy density. But as with almost anything you can think of, there is a mental aspect to this topic as well and the Boston Globe article “Cravings” attempts to dissect this point of view of the story.
This much, apparently is true: calories have a lot to do with cravings and in particular the amount of carbohydrates and fat in a food seems to affect how much we crave for it. But there is a biological aspect to this as well:
Cravings […] activate the caudate nucleus, one of the parts of the brain involved in habit formation; it’s also activated during drug cravings. A cocaine user who has physiologically kicked the habit might find himself craving cocaine in a situation he associates with the drug. Cravings work pretty much the same way for a doughnut user. “If you go by a doughnut store on the way home, it can trigger a habitual response […] If you’ve gone in before, just seeing it may cause you to cross the street and go in again. But it can also make you think of doughnuts, and another part of the brain involved in food cravings is the circuit that’s involved in obsessing.”
Then there are associations: those invisible links we create between foods and the emotions and the emotion they invoke in us. If a certain type of food is almost universally associated with happy memories (birthday=cake! football=wings! celebration=pizza!), then guess what - people gravitate toward those foods when they are hit with cravings.
In that regard, chocolate seems almost universally liked:
“Chocolate is perfect […] It’s got fat, it’s got sugar, it’s got stimulants. And it has these wonderful sensory qualities.” In other words, it’s simply an extremely palatable high-calorie food, one many people have positive associations with.
What foods do you crave most? Have you ever analyzed the mental rather than physical reasons for these cravings? Read more about Cravings and share your thoughts.
