I was wondering if there is any relation betw. what you crave and what you nutritionally need at the moment. When I was a little kid, I was told there was IIRC. I know when you’re dehydrated, you become thirsty.
I seem to crave whatever I haven’t had for a while. When I was a kid, for example, we had few sweets in the house, though alot of other stuff of course. One time when I was still a kid, or perhaps in high school, I craved something sweet. But there was nothing in the house, except white sugar of course, and flour. So I baked myself some peanut butter cookies! That is a rather extreme example. Still, it shows how strong the cravings can be.
On the other hand, sometimes we crave what is bad for us. For example, we had a Siamese cat that would eat nothing but liverwurst if she had the chance. But if we gave her too much, she’d get sick naturally.
Then again there’s pregnancy. Again, when I was a child, people used to say women sometimes got strange cravings because their nutritional needs and that of the baby clashed somehow. There’s a scene from I Love Lucy where the “enceinte” Lucy pours chocolate sauce over sardines. Not scientific, I know. But it does show how widespread the belief is.
Carbs are a lot like caffeine. They give you a high and then you crash. So in some way, you (feel like you) need sugar when your blood sugar drops as a result of the sugar surge being over just like you (feel like you) need caffeine when you’re used to drinking a lot of coffee and haven’t in a while.
For stricter definition of “need”, you don’t need sugar or, more generally, carbs no matter how much you crave it. You could get by on fat, protein and the minerals and vitamins your body can’t make.
I’ve been reducing my intake of sugar these past few months and I get carb cravings once in a while, especially the day after I indulge in carb-rich foods. I’ve found that taking cough drops (3.5 grams of sugar) helps reduce the craving in the same way that nicotine patches help stop smoking.
I hate to say it again (since I said it in an earlier post about weight loss), but yes - in my experience. When I used to lose a lot of weight for wrestling, I would experience intense cravings for dairy (which is something I normally hate, but the calcium and other minerals are there), sugar (the brain works on sugar and water alone), and meat (protein).
Everyone on the team had their own specific set of cravings according to (presumably) their own deficiencies. Some guys would pack cookies, some sandwiches, some god-awful other stuff. Grocery day (the night before a match) was kind of a big deal. It was like rats with cash.
Well, since your body can make glucose from protein, carbohydrates are not an essential nutrient, but most people would be more comfortable keeping their carbs at greater than 50 grams a day. I keep mine at 30 or below, but I’m doing a specific diet for weight loss and because it greatly diminishes my narcolepsy symptoms. Most of your tissues can run on ketones instead of glucose, so the needs are pretty minimal once the adjustment to a different fuel source occurs.
I was sitting at my desk, at work, innocently as you please, and suddenly out of a clear blue sky I was overwhelmed by an intense craving for those lemon-creme (not “cream,” mind you) sandwich cookies.
I have not thought of those things in 30 years, and I was never a huge fan of them anyway. But suddenly my body was shouting, “you have a severe lemon-creme sandwich cookie deficiency! Get some NOW!”
I managed–like Ninotchka–to “suppress it.” But sometimes I wonder *what *the hell my stupid body is thinking.
Anecdotally (and not very scientifically) I would back up the theory that your body craves what it needs.
Example…when I finish a long run, one of the most satisfying snacks I have is a big glass of milk and a couple pieces of peanut butter toast with banana slices. If you think about what I’m getting out of that, I think it correlates pretty closely with what a body would be deficient in after a long period of exertion, or what I would need to recover.
My first meal after said run, I usually have a strong preference for meat. Foods that are empty calories have no appeal, and actually are unappetizing.
I think that there’s a few different types of craving. Some are psychological (eg’comfort foods’ when miserable, or the ‘see it, want it’ principle), some are just random (eg, Eve’s creme puffs), and some are your body saying ‘I need this, gimme gimme gimme’ (eg, the time at uni where I didn’t eat any veg for a week and ended up fantasising about Swiss chard).
I think your body craves what it needs, but for most of us those cravings can be short circuited into unhealthy places.
Just like if people are thirsty, the will crave water. But if you usually quench your thirst with sweet drinks, you’ll probably find yourself craving soda instead. I imagine most of our cravings are for foods that we need, but in today’s world of readily available high-quality (as in high fat, high sugar, high protein) food they get distorted.
I know that if I go to store thirsty, I will end up buying only fruit. More than once I’ve walked in to a store intending to get dinner, and walked out with a pineapple and a bag of oranges. They sound SOOOOO good when I’m at the store, but of course when I get home and have a glass of water I wonder what the hell I was thinking.
