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You are a helpful AI assistant.
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You probably feel the same way about some food too. A craving that surpasses all other cravings. Foods whose sensory portrait you can paint in your head over and over again while you're standing in the subway car on the way home.



Read: The pleasures we can't say "no" to

Not all cravings are so familiar. Have you ever craved something you had completely forgotten about, like the taste of a donut you no longer get or a salad dressing you tried at a party a long time ago?

Pregnant women are said to crave extremely unlikely food combinations, from ice cream and pickles to strawberries and tuna. They feel like important messages that the body sends.

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Instant noodles are a typical student food.

But they are not. Eva Kemps, professor of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, explains that although there is a long popular tradition of treating... she continues with the text.<end_of_turn>
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Linking cravings to nutrient deficiencies is not the case.

A common justification for chocolate cravings, for example, is that the body is low in magnesium, a mineral that chocolate can provide.

But many, many foods, including spinach, contain more magnesium than chocolate, which is the most commonly craved food in Western societies.

"Interestingly, people don't crave spinach," she observes.

Hormonal factor

There are many such rationalizations. But cravings are more closely linked to emotions and external cues that evoke memories.

Being sad, anxious, stressed, bored, or lonely is often the trigger for a craving, says Kemp.

Food as comfort doesn't exactly explain the precision of cravings, except for the fact that we often crave foods that we've had previous experiences with.

We also tend to desire things that we have only seen in a photo or that appear in our vicinity. Like when muffins appear at the office in the middle of the afternoon, it doesn't matter if you just had lunch.

It's not that biology isn't involved.

According to experts, sometimes it is better to succumb to cravings.

The fact that women tend to feel significantly more cravings in the days just before their periods, and during pregnancy, suggests there may be a hormonal component.

But Kemps can't say whether that's something that plays a nutritional role or just noise in the neurons.

And obviously, cravings are more universal than pregnancy or menstruation.

Regardless of their origins, cravings can be extraordinarily intrusive.

Experiments have shown that they make it more difficult to perform cognitive tasks, suggesting that they are hogging up a certain limited amount of mental bandwidth.

Visual cues

To understand the longing process and see how it could be interrupted, Kemps and his colleague Marika Tiggemann have studied exactly what is...<end_of_turn><eos>