Seems a more accurate headline would be "Several scientists discuss different plausible mechanisms for causing food cravings"
This article reeks of scientific illiteracy. The "Myth of Food Cravings" is in no way invalidated because "if you eat popcorn every time you watch TV, you might crave popcorn when you watch TV"
As travisjungroth points out, the most obvious mechanism is feed-back where they eat something, it works, and the body is designed to do more of the same.
But if there is a feed-forward mechanism, i.e. where genetic information tells you "eat this thing now, even if you normally hate it*; then the most plausible thing would a pretty low level mechanism that matches chemicals detected by smell.
Good points:
> “If you always eat popcorn when you watch your favourite TV show, your cravings will for popcorn will increase when you watch it,” he says.
I'm pretty sure this is true. Habit will go a long way.
> Even in languages that do contain a word for craving, there is still is a lack of consensus around what a craving actually is. This, Konova argues, is a barrier to understanding how to overcome cravings, since we may be labelling several different processes as cravings.
I'm pretty sure this ["we may be labelling several different processes as cravings"] is true too.
They give more attention to "chocolate cravings" than I think that phenomenon really warrants, but here are a couple of points I thought were well made:
> Chocolate is one of the most common food cravings in the West – which supports the argument that cravings don’t stem from nutritional deficiencies, since chocolate doesn’t really contain high levels of anything we could be deficient in.
> [Female "craving" for chocolate], [uncredited researchers] say, is because Western culture has a “thin ideal” of female beauty that creates the perception that craving chocolate must be justified with a good excuse.
I would tend to lean toward the theory that people are expressing a "craving" for chocolate mostly because it contains a lot of sugar, and those people would find unsweetened chocolate unsatisfying. And I find it plausible that a lot of people feel they need a special excuse, like an especially strong word, to indulge themselves.
On the other hand, I am certain that food cravings based on nutritional issues do exist. You can read the story of the guy they consulted for Life of Pi who was lost at sea, and how he started to crave raw fish eyes. When you're starving, the eyes taste fantastic, and you daydream about them -- and not coincidentally, they are a rich source of certain nutrients that aren't so easy to get by eating the rest of the fish.
I am a very picky eater, and when I first went to China I had a hard time getting food. When I visited home, several months later, my dad met me at the airport and the first thing he said was "you look like a skeleton -- where do you want to eat?"
And I had an answer ready immediately, because I'd spent a lot of time those past months thinking about pizza.
But modern life generally satisfies everyone's basic nutritional needs, so again it seems plausible that the majority of food cravings that actually occur (however we end up defining cravings) are based on something else.
It reads like they took the 'myth' that "Some cravings are based on nutritional need" spun it into the strawman "All craving are based 100% on nutritional need" and then spend the rest of the article smugly congratulating themselves for tearing down their strawman. Because nobody actually advocates for the strawman, the meandering content of the article comes across as bizarre.
It's not really a strawman if people really believe this (and justify all/most of their cravings as nutritional needs).
For those people, it makes sense to tear this idea down.
Chocolate also contains caffeine.
That being said the article basically says stop eating stuff you crave altogether and fugetaboutit... as an effective way to stop craving it. The more you eat something the more you want of it -- and thinking about my food addictions like soda that seems to be true. The cite a study that confirms this theory.
In general, the opposite is the case. For most foods, people will get tired of them after a certain amount of exposure. Bread and milk (for the lactose-tolerant) are exceptions.