Why Do You Crave Certain Foods?

There are a number of factors that help us to naturally regulate our body weight. Two hormones that help to do just that are ghrelin and leptin.When you eat a sweet treat, your body increases the production of the hormone leptin, which regulates your appetite and fat storage. The leptin release should stop you from eating too much. If you eat too fast, you can overeat before the leptin signals that you have eaten enough. This is a reason why it is better to eat slowly.

Ghrelin is known as the "hunger hormone". Subjects that were given ghrelin in a study, became so hungry, they ate much more than their usual food intake.

Ghrelin appears to act on your brain's "pleasure centers", signaling you to eat another piece of chocolate cake because you remember just how good the first one tasted and how it made you feel while you were eating it, but not necessarily how you felt later on.

Between of our interaction with ghrelin and leptin, we should eat more when we should and less when we don't need to.

Unfortunately, there are many factors that can throw a monkey wrench into this seamless operation.

When insulin isn't doing its job of efficiently, which is transporting glucose over the cell membrane, this is called insulin resistance. When this happens, the ghrelin levels can remain elevated after you have had enough to eat, which can lead to cravings, overeating and weight gain.

Another mechanism that drives us to eat is that when we are hungry, neurons in the hypothalamus will trigger unpleasant feelings in our bodies. This, in turn, drives us to seek out food in order to relieve these negative feelings. When food is scarce, this innate drive could be life-saving. Once upon a time, seeking out your next meal might have put you in physical danger and you wouldn't take the physical risk, unless you were very hungry. But today food is readily available and usually attainable with a minimal physical risk.

Food manufacturers have figured out how to override your body's innate hunger regulators by designing processed foods that are engineered to be "hyper-rewarding".

According to the "food reward hypothesis of obesity", processed foods stimulate such a strong reward response in our brains that it becomes very easy to overeat.

One of the guiding principles for the processed food industry is to artificially stimulate hunger. The greatest "successes" for junk-food manufacturers is their "craveability" formulas that stimulate taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain's inclination to say "enough".

The three key junk food ingredients are sugar salt and unhealthy types of fat. Unfortunately, healthy fats are rarely, if ever used.

Foods like celery and many vegetables lack these hyper-rewarding qualities. The abnormally high stimulation of the receptors for sugar, salt and fat, generates excessive reward signals in your brain. This has the potential to override innate self-control mechanisms, which leads to food addictions and weight gain.

One of the best strategies to break this vicious cycle, is to eat real food that is made from scratch at home, while eliminating junk foods, processed foods and fast foods. This is easier said then done.

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