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Okay so we’re a month behind in meme time, but we know goats crave that mineral but why
do we crave anything?
Cravings are a strange phenomena and it’s not just pregnant women who get them.
folk wisdom says that craving a mineral means you have some mineral deficiency.
But let’s be real here, if that worked then we would all crave healthy foods rather than
mac and cheese and chocolate.
Recently, researchers from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
looked at sugar cravings in mice to see what was going on in the brain.
They looked at the relationship between the the ventral tegmental area which is the brain’s
natural reward processing center and the lateral hypothalamus which is responsible for feeding.
They used a technique called optogenetics.
This process uses light to trigger light sensitive proteins that can activate or silence a set
of neurons that connect these two parts of the brain.
When activated, the mice stuffed their faces with sweetness and overate even when they
weren’t hungry.
When silenced, the mice still ate regular food when they were hungry, but they no longer
compulsively ate the sugar.
This indicated that the neural circuit for sugar cravings is a different circuit than
the one that regulates healthy eating.
Mice aside, for us most cravings start with a cue.
Think of Pavlov’s dogs.
Something happens that just gets our mouth watering.
Like dreaming of your mom’s roast beef as soon as you land back in your hometown or
craving ice cream on a hot summer day.
Another cue for most people is stress, which can trigger cravings for comfort food.
We crave chocolate during hormonal fluctuations, not for any biological reason.
We’ve just come to associate the chocolate with comfort during a pretty uncomfortable
time of the month.
Cravings feel so strong because they are so vivid in the mind.
The very act of craving a food, not just being hungry and wanting to eat, but craving something
specific like ice cream or chocolate, conjures up images in the brain, which uses up cognitive
resources.
One study showed that those who craved chocolate did worse on memory and math problems.
We can literally distract ourselves with our cravings.
We typically crave high-caloric foods, stuffed with fat and sugar, because they were a rarity
in our evolutionary past.
We evolved a reward system associated with these foods.
When we eat sweets our brain kicks off a cascade of chemistry, feel good hormones like dopamine
and serotonin flood our system, giving us a bit of a sugar high.
So when we’re stressed and need a bit of a pick me up, we turn to these foods.
While we all crave something at some point in our lives, unusual cravings might be a
sign of an underlying medical condition.
Craving salt?
You might have addison’s disease.
Addison’s disease degrades the endocrine system leading to electrolyte imbalances.
The adrenal glands don’t make enough cortisol and AL DOSS TER OWN aldosterone.
Aldosterone helps the body hold on to the salt it needs.
When you don’t make enough of it, you can get an unusually strong desire to eat salty
things.
Craving chalk?
or paint chips?
You might have Pica, named from the Latin for Magpie, because of the belief magpies’lll
eat anything.
Pica is the bizarre behavior of eating things like clay, chalk, soap, dirt, or rocks.
Scientists think a lack of nutrients might cause this craving maybe because of an iron
deficiency, celiacs disease or hookworm.
Mental health related illness like OCD or schizophrenia might also lead someone to chow
down on chalk.
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Want to learn more about cravings?
Click here and let Laci tell you more about how they can be caused by high stress.
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