Study Suggest 'Food Monitors' Trigger Cravings

Day to Day, March 18, 2005 · NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on new scientific findings that suggest food cravings are the result of internal biological food monitors. Recent research in animals shows that this system sets off an alarm when certain key nutrients are missing from a meal.

Click the link and then the "listen" button to hear the story (4 mins) from NPR's website.

Basically, there's behavioral evidence that all kinds of animals can detect and respond to the presence (or absence, I guess) of certain amino acids in their diet, and now a mechanism for this detection has been located in yeast. It's speculated that the same (or a similar) mechanism is at work in animals.

This ties in to my post a few weeks ago about that vitamin deficiency website. According to the research, you don't develop cravings for vitamins/minerals that might be missing from your diet because there's no mechanism (hence scurvy, pellagra, etc.). That's why the vitamin deficiency website would be a helpful thing if it were accurate and easily navigable. On the other hand, according to this model you wouldn't need any such website or tool for amino acid deficiencies because you develop a craving for or gravitation toward foods that contain the amino acid you might be short on.

I was kind of surprised that this research was so new; to me it's an old idea, but I guess it was just a matter of working out the mechanism

Of course, you have to be able to differentiate these from cravings that are just about sugar/starch, fat, and boredom.

I guess what would be helpful now is to identify sources of amino acids that might be "rarer" than others (esp. in a vegetarian diet) so that e.g. if I develop a craving for something awful like a donut (which probably doesn't net you much in the way of amino acids anyway), I can look it up and say "Oh, donuts are a good source of the amino acid lardokine, so that must be what I need. I see here that boogers are also high in lardokine but I know they're not as deathly caloric as donuts, so I'll just have a booger instead."

It's possible that the new food pyramid website has something like that. It's actually pretty helpful if you have the time to look around a bit.
- posted by k @ 12:10 PM