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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
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To Your Health: We all crave 'bad' foods. Why? |
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| To Your Health: We all crave 'bad' foods. Why? | ||
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. . . there are many reasons . . . by Que Areste, N.D. - SGN Contributing Writer There are many reasons why people crave foods that are not healthy to eat. Although we may enjoy a good salad, love the taste of a fresh picked tomato, we seldom crave these foods. We tend to crave foods like chocolate, which is a category all by itself, potato chips, french fries, cheese cake, pickles, ice cream, and on and on and on& The more we try to avoid them, the louder they call to us. Yeah, they will make us fat, we know that. But they taste so good right now. There are physical, chemical and emotional causes for food craving. When we long for that tamale pie Aunt Mildred used to make, we are remembering more than the tamale pie. We are remembering being at Aunt Mildreds house, being loved, being in a pleasant moment and eating food we loved and only got at Aunt Mildreds place. We will never eat tamale pie like that again because that whole experience cannot be duplicated. That kind of craving is mostly a craving for an emotion. We need to be loved and cared for and substitute Aunt Mildreds tamale pie for the feeling of being cared for that we really want. Sometimes a craving for a certain kind of flavor may indicate an imbalance. For example, craving sour food may be due to depleted adrenal glands. Craving for fatty foods may occur when we are on a fat restricted diet because we do need a certain amount and quality of fat in our diet. Craving sugar may indicate low blood sugar or a condition called insulin resistance, where we dont have enough insulin receptors on our cells so although there is insulin bound to sugar in our bloodstream, the sugar isnt getting into the cells where we need it. If you look at Chinese medicine, there are 5 elements which correspond to the 12 organ channels. Each element has an associated flavor. Eating a food that has a flavor associated with an organ can strengthen that organ but eating too much of that food can deplete the organ. An example is the element Earth. It relates to the stomach and spleen. The flavor associated with the Earth element is sweet, so, eating a food that is mildly sweet can strengthen the stomach and spleen. Eating too much sweet food can deplete them. It is thought that the Chinese spleen corresponds to the pancreas in some ways, and eating too much sweet can definitely affect the pancreas. The tastes associated with the five elements are: Earth sweet: stomach and spleen; Water salty: bladder and kidney; Metal pungent: large intestine and lungs; Wood - sour: gall bladder and liver; Fire bitter: small intestine, heart, triple warmer and pericardium. Sometimes when a person has an allergy to certain foods like wheat, eating that food they produce endorphins to blunt the allergic reaction. They can become addicted to those endorphins and crave the food that produces the endorphins. That is one reason people with food allergies can crave foods they are allergic to, even when they have uncomfortable reactions to those foods. They often eat a small amount of that food every day. When they do this, they are eating a maintenance dose of the food. They may never feel at their best, but dont have a noticeable reaction either. When they eat a lot of the food, they will have a more severe reaction. If they dont eat the food they are allergic to for a few weeks, when they do, they can have a bad reaction, even though they only ate the amount they were able to tolerate before. It is common for people with food allergies to either love or hate the foods they react to. When I treat food allergies I ask about food cravings and foods the person hates. When you are under stress what do you want to eat? A lovely crisp apple or a bag of you favorite potato chips? Fried chicken? Ice cream? Cake? All those fattening carbohydrates and fat! Sugar, sugar, sugar!!! And FAT! Carbs and fat together! Oh my, heavenly, heavenly fats with carbs. There are a lot of theories, some backed up with research on just why we crave those carbohydrates combined with fat. Fats with carbs can cause a short term release of serotonin. Yes, that neurotransmitter. This only lasts a short time however, then we crash. Other researchers believe foods high in fats and carbohydrates trigger opiate receptors in the brain, possibly because of the pleasurable taste and texture of fatty sweet foods. When our opiate receptors are blocked, blocking pleasure we get from eating fats and sweets, we dont crave those foods. Some researchers have recently found that stress will activate the hormone cortisol. This leads us to eat high energy foods like fats and sugars. These will cause an increase in abdominal fat which blunts our feelings of stress. Apparently, chemicals in our fat deposits act to stop us from feeling stressed out. Unfortunately this abdominal fat also increases our risk of diabetes and heart attack as well. There are ways to deal with chronic stress that will reduce our cortisol production and defuse the stress at the same time. Chocolate is a special category all to itself. It has at least 300 chemicals which affect us in many ways. If you crave chocolate before your period, you may need more magnesium at that time to relax the muscles in your uterus and relieve cramps. Chocolate also has the amino acid phenylethaylamine which we produce when we are in love. It contains the neurotransmitter anandamide, called the feel good neurotransmitter. In addition, it has factors that keep anandamide in the system longer. Chocolate has tryptophan which we use to make serotonin and can trigger release of endorphins in our brain. Endorphins are neurotransmitters that blunt pain. Chocolate actually may have some health benefits in its dark form. It is high in substances like polyphenols, which are good for us. One study of Harvard graduates found that those who ate chocolate regularly lived longer than those who ate no chocolate. Studies of milk chocolate compared with dark chocolate found only dark chocolate had real health benefits, however. We only need 2-3 ounces of dark chocolate a day to benefit, not a large expanded bar. People are perverse. When we are told we cannot have something it often becomes what we most desire. It has been found that if we are able to only eat a small amount of chocolate or fatty food or even junk food, it is better to allow ourselves to do this and eat well most of the time. When we dont allow ourselves to eat a little bad food, we will binge on it eventually and eat much more than we would have eaten if we ate a small amount regularly. Areste is a naturopathic doctor with a private practice on Capitol Hill in Seattle. |
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