Many forum users ask me what they can do about food cravings, especially when they are trying to lose weight.
Some complain that they cannot stick to their diets because they are constantly plagued by food cravings that sabotage their resolve to stick to a weight-reduction regimen. Others report that food cravings, particularly for sweet or fatty foods, are causing them to gain weight exponentially.
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In view of these problems, I decided to investigate the latest research findings on food cravings.
Two approaches
It is evident that there are two major schools of thought relating to what causes, triggers, and supports food cravings.
Behavioural scientists believe that food cravings are the product of psychological processes and factors and that learnt behaviour plays an important role in the phenomenon of food cravings.
Biochemists, on the other hand, believe that some food cravings are caused by an imbalance in hormonal and chemical substances in the brain and nervous system, with particular emphasis on serotonin.
The psychology of food cravings
In this article, we look at the research that has been done on the psychology of food cravings.
I found a variety of studies that had investigated the psychological factors that may play a role in making humans crave sweet and fatty foods.
In the following sections, we take a look at some of the results published in scientific journals:
a) Chocolate cravings
Two studies concentrated on why people crave chocolate. One of the studies compared chocolate cravings in Spanish and American women with special emphasis on cravings experienced before the menstrual cycle. Craving chocolate is often strongest just before menstruation.
Interestingly, Zellner and co-workers (2004) discovered that the urge to eat chocolate before menstruation was stronger in American women than in Spanish women. These authors concluded that chocolate cravings have a cultural, rather than a psychological or physiological origin.
The second study by Gibson and Desmond (1999) found that hunger and a learnt response to satisfying this hunger by eating chocolate, played the most important role in chocolate cravings.
In other words, individuals who often satisfy their hunger by eating chocolate, condition themselves to crave chocolate when they are hungry. So, every time they feel hungry, the craving for chocolate emerges.
b) Mental images
Harvey and co-workers (2005) studied food cravings before and after their experimental subjects were asked to either imagine a food or a holiday scenario.
Their results confirm that mental images of the desired food increase the tendency to overeat this food.
If you constantly fantasise about that delicious, smooth and creamy cake or chocolate, you will be fuelling your cravings for these foods.
c) Binge eating
Another study conducted by Engelberg and co-workers (2005) asked 39 women suffering from bulimia eating disorders to monitor their eating episodes, periods of dietary restraint and binge cravings.
The results suggested that the periods of denying themselves food, made the cravings worse. In other words, strict dieting was usually followed by binging on 'forbidden' foods. This is proof that unrealistic dietary restrictions can make dieters crave all the foods they are trying to avoid and therefore undermine their success.
It is far better and more sensible to use a balanced, moderately energy-restricted diet combined with exercise to lose weight, than to starve yourself, because periods of semi-starvation will just make the cravings worse.
d) Food deprivation
Polivy and his co-workers (2005) at the University of Toronto investigated how 103 chocolate-deprived, vanilla-deprived or non-deprived female volunteers would react.
The chocolate-deprived group reacted by eating more chocolate than any other group. In addition, both groups who had to curb their intakes of 'forbidden' foods experienced more cravings than the non-deprived group.
The authors concluded that being deprived of certain foods, like chocolate, leads to cravings and overeating.
However, some studies found the opposite. A study performed at the University of Vermont by Harvey et al. (1993) with 93 obese type 2 diabetics who either used a balanced low-calorie diet of approx. 1200cal/day, or a very-low-calorie diet (400cal/day) for 12 weeks, found that the latter group on the 'semi-starvation' diet experienced fewer food cravings than the former group.
A second American study (Martin et al, 2006), using very-low-calorie, supplement-based diets confirmed that this diet caused less food cravings than standard low-calorie diets.
So, here we have two opposite views. Some researchers believe that deprivation of certain foods will make individuals crave these foods, while other researchers report that extreme dieting will reduce cravings.
When researchers present us with such different findings, we can unfortunately not get a clear-cut view of what is actually going on.
Additional studies may well pinpoint why there are differences. For example, it is possible that the use of very-low-energy diets (400cal/day), which border on starvation and cannot be recommended to the general population because they can only be used under strict supervision by a medical and dietetic team, do eliminate cravings.
However, the use of such extreme diets is restricted to individuals who require drastic measures to reduce their weight because of direct health threats.
For those people who do not have to lose vast amounts of weight, a balanced moderately-energy-reduced diet is still the better option, and as mentioned in the first study in this section, such diets may well lead to cravings.
e) Carbohydrate vs. protein deprivation
Most people are aware that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to slimming: the Atkins-type high-protein, zero-carbohydrate diets, and low-fat diets that permit users to eat plenty of carbohydrates and some protein.
A study conducted in Toronto (Coelho et al., 2006) demonstrated that experimental subjects who were carbohydrate-deprived (like dieters who use a high-protein, zero-carbohydrate diet), tended to develop cravings for carbohydrate-rich foods. On the other hand, the subjects who were protein-deprived did not develop cravings for protein foods.
These results indicate that human beings need carbohydrates if we are to function without cravings. This is understandable when we keep in mind that carbohydrates are our best source of rapidly available energy. Cutting out carbohydrates is, therefore, a recipe for creating carb-cravings and is not advisable.
The latest research studies on the psychology of food cravings indicate that learnt responses and deprivation of certain foods, particularly carbohydrates, can fuel cravings and sabotage attempts at losing weight.
Apparently, very-low-energy diets such as those used to treat massively obese patients under strict supervision, lessen cravings, but are not for general use.
Compared to high-protein Atkins-type diets, which exclude most carbohydrates, a high- carbohydrate diet with a moderate protein content will cause fewer cravings and make it easier to stick to dieting. – (Dr Ingrid van Heerden, DietDoc, September 2006)
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