I figured that this must have been answered before but I can’t find a thread on it. I believe there should be a factual answer to this question. Mods feel free to move this to IMHO if it’s all speculation.
So here’s the question: Is there any evidence that food cravings (or just desires) are somehow related to what our bodies actually need? For example, if unbeknownest to you I somehow removed all the salt from your diet would you start to crave salty foods? How about if I removed all of the fat or protein from your diet? Or does my craving ice cream daily have nothing to do with what my body might need?
I’ve had a hypothesis for several years, completely unsupported by any personal research, that this is precisely the purpose of flavor. Without consciously realizing it, your body associates certain flavors with certain nutrients. Low on potassium? You don’t think, “I need some potassium”; your body screams, “Bananas! I want bananas!”
Ok, but what about when my body is craving pork rinds and beer? I most certainly don’t need those, or jalapeno cheese White Castle burgers or any of the other mostly useless foodstuffs I crave sometimes.
I would expect that the sense of taste had evolved to serve our needs, which would certainly include preferring safe food to spoiled or toxic food, and probably the blend of nutrients we particularly need at the moment.
I’d also think our enginuity at selling things to each other would have taken this over with sophisticated artificial chemistry and the like that we can’t evolve fast enough to make sense of.
So, I think, yes, except for modern snack foods whose flavoring has been highly manipulated.
But it’s an obvious enough question and I don’t remember ever seeing it answered.
I don’t think that your body & brain work together to the point where you crave foods that supply certain nutrients.
If this was the case, then women would tend to crave stuff like spinach or red meat that have high levels of iron. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that this is the case.
I think your taste buds are there to identify safe to eat foods, and also ones with good nutritional value, which are things that they’ve evolved to identify. I think that it’s likely that any cravings for certain foods are more of a psychological thing than a physiological one.
I mean, when was the last time that I’d have been low on salt? Yet I crave salty stuff on a fairly regular basis.
Some people think that some forms of pica are driven by nutritional deficiencies. But I don’t understand how the subconscious mind knows that dirt has iron in it.
If we crave what we need, why doesn’t the craving stop after the need is satisfied? There are many times when I feel a craving for, say, something salty or something sweet, yet I’m fairly confident that I’ve never had a salt or sugar deficiency.
Not that there could even be a sugar deficiency. Why do we crave sweets at all? And why do we find them so satisfying?
To take a sideways step, I’ve read about parrots in the wild flocking to a particular cliff and eating dirt containing essential minerals (and elephants going into caves to find minerals) so I can well believe we can do the same.
Anecdotal, but I certainly agree with this idea. My diet primarily consists of meat, fish, dairy, and pasta. I almost NEVER eat veggies, and though I like juice, fruit is often pricey so I don’t get it a lot. I occasionally get a strong craving for a salad though and it usually will nag me until I’ve gotten a good one with a wide variety of greens in it. After that it disappears for a month or two until I guess I “need” veggies again.
I have no science to support this, but I’ve always suspected that this phenomenom might explain why pregnant women get “weird” food cravings - their pregnancy is requiring additional nutrients, and their body is signaling a desire for the tastes associated with the requisite foods.
I saw a show on TV about those parrots some years back. It seems that their primary (perhaps only) food source is a particular berry that contains a deadly poison. Meanwhile, those chalky (or whatever) cliffs contain the antidote to that poison. They instinctively eat the minerals from those cliffs immediately after eating the berries. I think it was something along the lines of one being alkaline and the other acidic, and canceling each other out.
What Astorian said. Our senses of smell and taste, and our sense of appetite and craving/satisfaction, evolved in a way that serve us well. They lead us towards things that are good/healthy to eat, and away from potential harm, and help us to regulate intake so that it’s appropriate to our requirements for growth, strength, health, repair and so on.
Unfortunately, for most of us, these natural and very helpful instincts have been corrupted and ‘re-wired’ by modern food technology and commercialisation, which is one reason why so many people develop poor diets and related problems. For many of those who make the journey from poor diet/weight problems to a healthier and fitter lifestyle, part of the work involves a sort of re-tuning of these natural instincts so that they once more work for you instead of against you.
Or on the other hand, our lifestyles have changed in such a way that our primordial instincts became counter productive.
We loooooove fatty food, for Og the caveman that had to run 8 miles behind a woolly elk to get his dinner, kill it, make it into smaller pieces and drag it all the way back to his lodging, all that fat he craved for was dutily burnt to fuel his errands and keep him warm in his cave at night.
Nowadays we (in a general sense) live a very sedentary life and can barely get arsed to pick up a phone and order a pizza. We still have the craving for high energy foods, the instinct it´s still living in the paleolythic; what was good for a semi naked hunter-gatterer is not good for a slack assed modern man.
Aaaand, I do get cravings too, I associate my salty food cravings with low blood pressure… we really need a physiologist in here.
So it looks like the answer is at least a partial “yes” based on the answers here. Your cravings can certainly be caused by something physiologial, but it isn’t always wise to listen to them.
I’d still bet that more often than not our cravings are caused by something psychological, though. There’s just too many times that I crave something I definitely do not need for me to get behind the idea that my body is smart enough to make me want foods that contain the nutrients I need.
When I was a young child (until I was about ten-ish) I used to get very high fevers whenever I caught a bug. It happened regularly several times a year, and I’d get delerious every time. This would go on for two or three days and then at the end of it, I’d be absolutely wiped out. My mother would ask me what I wanted to eat, and I would without fail say “I want to eat blood”. It was ALL I could think about. She would go out and buy steak (we never had steak!) and cook it very rare. After eating very very bloody steak a couple of times, the craving went away and I’d begin to feel better. She says that it was very creepy seeing her little toddler whispering “I want to eat BLOOOOOD”!
>these natural and very helpful instincts have been corrupted and ‘re-wired’ by modern food technology
I think this twists it somewhat. It would be truer to say that our food supply has been corrupted to take shortsighted advantage of our instincts by creating better matches to our flavor desires than nature did, often without delivering the nutrients that in nature typically accompany those flavors. Our instincts are still functioning the way they were designed to, and those of us raised on modern fare would automatically choose pretty wisely if we were suddenly confronted with a primitive hunter-gatherer menu (see for example the thread about the largest nuclear explosion ever filmed).
