Food Craving

What it is

Andrew Hill's review in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society describes food cravings as intense, specific hedonic responses. Specific means that a craving is aimed at a particular food and not at eating in general. The review reports that cravings are common among young adults and are closely linked to liking.

Hill sets out three families of explanation: cognitive, conditioning and emotional processes. Among the conditioning accounts is conditioned cue reactivity, in which a cue that has accompanied a food in the past comes to provoke a response. The review also notes a change in the field. Cravings were once read as a signal that the body needs a particular thing, and that reading is giving way to a more complex account.

Adrian Meule's review in Current Nutrition Reports discusses craving itself as possibly a conditioned response.

Andrew Hill's 2007 review characterises cravings by two features, their intensity and their specificity, and reports that they are common among young adults. It separates craving from consumption: cravings are closely tied to liking but are not synonymous with eating more. The review also suggests that some cravings work as self-attributions, a way people explain to themselves why they want a particular food.

In effect

Karolien van den Akker and colleagues applied the principles of Pavlovian conditioning to eating in a review in Current Addiction Reports, and described how food cues can readily become linked to eating responses through conditioning.

In two preregistered studies, Katrijn Houben and colleagues had participants learn to link one neutral stimulus with a chocolate sweet while a second stimulus was never paired with food. Stimuli that resembled the original cue, whether in appearance or in meaning, produced responses too, though weaker than the original. The authors suggest that this generalisation may widen the range of environmental cues that trigger an appetitive response.

Wendy Wood, in Good Habits, Bad Habits, described a habit as an association between a context cue and a response, formed as an action is repeated in that context for a reward. Read beside the craving reviews, it adds the idea that a familiar setting can prompt a response without a fresh decision. The Why We article Why do we crave sugar sets these accounts side by side.

What it does not say

The reviews discuss food craving as a whole. They do not single out sugar or any other food, so what they offer for a sweet food is the general account applied to it. The page describes how researchers explain craving. It makes no health, dietary or medical claims and gives no advice about eating.

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