connection between poor nutrition and hunger/cravings?

jjpptt2

I'm not sure if this will be an actual debate or not, but I didn't want the typical forum response/conversation, so I'm posting it here for a *hopefully* more thoughtful/complete dialogue.

Is there any connection between poor nutrition and hunger/cravings? Specifically, if the body is deficient in something (say a vitamin/mineral/nutrient, but NOT calories overall), does it respond by increasing hunger cues? Are there other physiological responses?

Derpes

There are many factors that contribute to cravings.

One factor is dopamine:


"Certain foods, particularly those rich in sugars and fat, are potent rewards [23] that promote eating (even in the absence of an energetic requirement) and trigger learned associations between the stimulus and the reward (conditioning)"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3124340/

kommodevaran

Need for nutrition sets off hunger. Habits/attitude/external triggers set off cravings.

janejellyroll

Are you talking about specific food cravings, like those charts you see on Pinterest/Facebook telling you to eat more kale if you're craving potato chips?

Other than a link between some forms of pica (eating non-nutritive stuff like soil) and anemia/mineral deficiency, I'm not aware of any evidence showing that our cravings are a good guide to what we may deficient in.

As far as nutrient deficiency triggering general hunger (not particular cravings), it seems like the sort of thing that may be true and you frequently hear it being proclaimed as if it is true. But I don't know if there is anything backing it up.

jjpptt2

janejellyroll wrote: »

Are you talking about specific food cravings, like those charts you see on Pinterest/Facebook telling you to eat more kale if you're craving potato chips?

Other than a link between some forms of pica (eating non-nutritive stuff like soil) and anemia/mineral deficiency, I'm not aware of any evidence showing that our cravings are a good guide to what we may deficient in.

As far as nutrient deficiency triggering general hunger (not particular cravings), it seems like the sort of thing that may be true and you frequently hear it being proclaimed as if it is true. But I don't know if there is anything backing it up.

This is more what I was asking about. I'm a firm believer that the body wants/tries to maintain itself in a healthy balance. This is most easily seen in body fat percentages. But does it also try to maintain healthy/optimal nutrition by triggering hunger (or other responses) when nutrition is deficient?

NorthCascades

I crave saltier food when I'm sweating a lot through exercise. I don't give much thought to how much table salt I use, but one day during the cold part of spring I realized I hadn't used any in weeks. Can't get enough during the summer.

Crafty_camper123

I think there is something to it, but all of the evidence is anecdotal. There are no studies that I am aware of to back it up. I get those general cravings for things that are sweet, salty and/or fatty. Those probably have more to do with the dopamine release from eating those foods. But I also get strong cravings for very specific things such as fish, peppers, vinegar, greens, salt, etc. I have always been under the impression that is my body telling me it needs something from those foods.

NorthCascades

It looks like what I said above is true but may not generalize beyond salt.

One study demonstrated that fact very neatly. Researchers offered people different soups and recorded which they ate more of when they’d been sweating on an exercise bike. People consistently showed an unconscious preference for saltier soup after they’d been sweating, which the researchers took to back up the idea that our bodies are very good at correcting salt deficiencies through dietary intake when needed.

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/6-signs-you-might-be-a-salty-sweater/

jjpptt2

NorthCascades wrote: »

It looks like what I said above is true but may not generalize beyond salt.

One study demonstrated that fact very neatly. Researchers offered people different soups and recorded which they ate more of when they’d been sweating on an exercise bike. People consistently showed an unconscious preference for saltier soup after they’d been sweating, which the researchers took to back up the idea that our bodies are very good at correcting salt deficiencies through dietary intake when needed.

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/6-signs-you-might-be-a-salty-sweater/

Interesting, thanks. While it may not be shown beyond the context of salt, it lays groundwork for the possibility of other minerals.

singingflutelady

Iron deficiency does for sure. When I'm anemic I can't stop eating ice.

pinuplove

singingflutelady wrote: »

Iron deficiency does for sure. When I'm anemic I can't stop eating ice.

I went through that when I was pregnant and anemic. It's a form of pica (although nothing like hair or dirt ) Sonic Drive-Ins have the best ice!

singingflutelady

One of my friends had dirt cravings from anemia. I'm glad that I never have had those.

midlomel1971

I don't know if there any scientific reason for it, but I find that the healthier I eat, the less I crave things like junk food, chips and cookies. It might all be in my head, though. The hunger never goes away, though. If I'm hungry I eat, but I try to choose something filling and nutritious.

divcara

When I don't have a lot of fat in my nutrition, I start craving peanut butter!

garystrickland357

In my personal experience when I eat home cooked nutritious meals I seldom get the munchies/cravings. When I was obese (feels good to say WAS) and ate foods that were less nutritious I would have days that craved different things. Are munchies the same as cravings? Maybe not in this discussion, but I thought I’d put this out there.

shaumom

This article lists a few known studies on the concept, for a few different deficiencies, in a few different situations.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/nutrient-deficiencies-cravings#section5

I've had doctors tell me hunger can be triggered by nutritional deficiencies, but they never showed me studies. But just for the fun of it, to talk it out as a possibility...

One problem seems to be centered around what the body might use to identify that a food has a particular nutrient, you know?

Like, it could be something associated the smell/taste of the food plus an increase in a certain nutrient at some point after ingestion for example. Maybe the body can connect those two somehow. Deer studies have shown that baby deer will pick out plants to eat based on the flavor of the plant in their mother's milk, even if they have never had contact with their mothers and so have no other sight or scent based clues to go on. So the idea that flavors of foods can influence whether or not we want to eat something, in a way that is unrelated to how much we like the taste, is not completely unreasonable to consider.

Or, say, maybe something unknown in the stomach can sense certain nutrient levels of the stomach's contents, and we are unaware of it. We know there is a 'sensor,' for lack of a better word, in the stomach that basically detects levels of certain 'bad' substances and triggers the body's vomit reflex, which is why we tend to vomit with certain types of food poisoning. This sensor is ramped up like crazy in pregnant women, and is theorized to potentially influence morning sickness (we have no actually proven reasons why morning sickness exists, actually, so all we've got are theories). So...we know there is at least one 'sensor' in the stomach that has more than one, well, 'setting' for lack of a better word.

For there to be another sort of sensor, or set of them, that we don't know about yet? Who knows, maybe there could be. The idea of missing something basic like this is less far fetched than you'd think. Heck, scientists just discovered this year that there is an entire organ in the body we didn't know about. (the Interstitium, if you are interested).

That's not to say there IS some kind of 'stomach nutrient sensor,' just throwing ideas out there for fun, you know? :-)

Or there could be something else, or might not exist at all. But we don't know that information. Heck, we still don't know what triggers cravings even in the cases where we DO know that something is triggering a craving, like for salt.

But for the sake of argument, say something DOES exist. From what i've seen, we've only touched the surface on studying the idea, and, well, the studies are either looking only at one angle (which is good, it just means that more need to be done), or they are studies that are lacking. The latter mostly because they suffer from a common problem: ivory tower ignorance.

Basically, researchers assuming that they have compensated for enough variables because they THINK they know how the world works, when they don't. Great example of this: for years researchers thought that gluten was in wheat, rye, barley, and oats, and that wheat and oats had some very similar proteins in them. They eventually found out that, in the real world, oats and wheat are so commonly grown together that all their 'pure' samples of oats they were testing were actually 'oats and wheat.' All the oat 'gluten' was just wheat contamination. But for years, they assumed they 'knew' that oats are just oats, so they didn't need to worry about it.

I see this same issue for if, say, a craving was triggered by the taste or smell of a food followed by an increase in a nutrient...that would mean it is completely hamstrung by the modern diet, so you CANNOT test for that with people who are eating modern, normal foods, and yet that's usually what you see in tests.

Because we have huge swaths of foods that have very similar flavor make ups but completely different nutrients, because we LIKE certain tastes, so we kind of add them to everything. Makes it tricky to figure out what you might need, if one sweet, citrus thing gives you a few carbs and tons of vitamin C, yet another similar tasting item merely gives you empty sugar carbs, you know? So the body might give out a craving for sweet citrus things if it wanted vitamin C, but someone may be eating lemon candies by the tonne as a result, and never get that nutrient, and on a study it would come across as cravings not matching what nutrients they are getting, if that makes sense?

Soooo, the reason I say all this, is because my own experience, just my own anecdotally, does seem to support the idea that not only do we get cravings due to deficiencies, but that our modern diets may screw with it. I never really had cravings much past 'I like that taste.' Then my diet got medically restricted like mad, so I have just a couple handfuls of food, all 1 ingredient foods that I had to make myself. So suddenly, the flavors I ate ONLY matched specific nutrients, and nothing else. And After a few weeks, maybe a few months, sometimes I would have insane cravings for an ingredient.

After a blood test, found out that some of these were for foods I tested low in nutrients for. When I had to do meal planning that included tracking nutrients, it turns out that, barring the craving for a sweet taste, the foods I craved were typically one of my few sources for certain vitamins or nutrients, ones that I would often be low in. That has continued for as long as I'm on that diet.


So personally, just based on my own experiences, i honestly do believe that not just hunger, but even cravings, CAN be triggered by nutrient deficiencies. But I also think that the way we eat now would make it likely quite difficult for our bodies to accurately connect a nutrient TO a particular type of food unless we are eating pretty simply diets, you know?

RadishEater

I've been cravings nut butters pretty strongly for the past couple weeks and I'm usually low in fat and over in meeting protein and fiber macros because that what keeps me full.

Went out to eat and had fajitas where the chicken and veggies were definitely cooked in butter and the past three days I haven't had a strong craving for nut butter.

It is just nut butters too, not fried food. I think overall healthy eating has mostly squashed cravings for anything fried.

Johnd2000

NorthCascades wrote: »

I crave saltier food when I'm sweating a lot through exercise. I don't give much thought to how much table salt I use, but one day during the cold part of spring I realized I hadn't used any in weeks. Can't get enough during the summer.

I was about to say the same thing. So thanks for saving me the time.

I would add, that I most crave sugar when I’m physically exhausted, but I think that’s just a learned response.

cynthialperkins

I heard of a study involving toddlers given free access to a huge range of foods, that found they ate what they needed nutritionally. UNTIL sugary foods were added to the selection. I don't know if it's true -- never found the study.

kshama2001

After upping iron and starting magnesium, I no longer get chocolate cravings.

Good_Morning_Glory

shaumom wrote: »

This article lists a few known studies on the concept, for a few different deficiencies, in a few different situations.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/nutrient-deficiencies-cravings#section5

I've had doctors tell me hunger can be triggered by nutritional deficiencies, but they never showed me studies. But just for the fun of it, to talk it out as a possibility...

One problem seems to be centered around what the body might use to identify that a food has a particular nutrient, you know?

Like, it could be something associated the smell/taste of the food plus an increase in a certain nutrient at some point after ingestion for example. Maybe the body can connect those two somehow. Deer studies have shown that baby deer will pick out plants to eat based on the flavor of the plant in their mother's milk, even if they have never had contact with their mothers and so have no other sight or scent based clues to go on. So the idea that flavors of foods can influence whether or not we want to eat something, in a way that is unrelated to how much we like the taste, is not completely unreasonable to consider.

Or, say, maybe something unknown in the stomach can sense certain nutrient levels of the stomach's contents, and we are unaware of it. We know there is a 'sensor,' for lack of a better word, in the stomach that basically detects levels of certain 'bad' substances and triggers the body's vomit reflex, which is why we tend to vomit with certain types of food poisoning. This sensor is ramped up like crazy in pregnant women, and is theorized to potentially influence morning sickness (we have no actually proven reasons why morning sickness exists, actually, so all we've got are theories). So...we know there is at least one 'sensor' in the stomach that has more than one, well, 'setting' for lack of a better word.

For there to be another sort of sensor, or set of them, that we don't know about yet? Who knows, maybe there could be. The idea of missing something basic like this is less far fetched than you'd think. Heck, scientists just discovered this year that there is an entire organ in the body we didn't know about. (the Interstitium, if you are interested).

That's not to say there IS some kind of 'stomach nutrient sensor,' just throwing ideas out there for fun, you know? :-)

Or there could be something else, or might not exist at all. But we don't know that information. Heck, we still don't know what triggers cravings even in the cases where we DO know that something is triggering a craving, like for salt.

But for the sake of argument, say something DOES exist. From what i've seen, we've only touched the surface on studying the idea, and, well, the studies are either looking only at one angle (which is good, it just means that more need to be done), or they are studies that are lacking. The latter mostly because they suffer from a common problem: ivory tower ignorance.

Basically, researchers assuming that they have compensated for enough variables because they THINK they know how the world works, when they don't. Great example of this: for years researchers thought that gluten was in wheat, rye, barley, and oats, and that wheat and oats had some very similar proteins in them. They eventually found out that, in the real world, oats and wheat are so commonly grown together that all their 'pure' samples of oats they were testing were actually 'oats and wheat.' All the oat 'gluten' was just wheat contamination. But for years, they assumed they 'knew' that oats are just oats, so they didn't need to worry about it.

I see this same issue for if, say, a craving was triggered by the taste or smell of a food followed by an increase in a nutrient...that would mean it is completely hamstrung by the modern diet, so you CANNOT test for that with people who are eating modern, normal foods, and yet that's usually what you see in tests.

Because we have huge swaths of foods that have very similar flavor make ups but completely different nutrients, because we LIKE certain tastes, so we kind of add them to everything. Makes it tricky to figure out what you might need, if one sweet, citrus thing gives you a few carbs and tons of vitamin C, yet another similar tasting item merely gives you empty sugar carbs, you know? So the body might give out a craving for sweet citrus things if it wanted vitamin C, but someone may be eating lemon candies by the tonne as a result, and never get that nutrient, and on a study it would come across as cravings not matching what nutrients they are getting, if that makes sense?

Soooo, the reason I say all this, is because my own experience, just my own anecdotally, does seem to support the idea that not only do we get cravings due to deficiencies, but that our modern diets may screw with it. I never really had cravings much past 'I like that taste.' Then my diet got medically restricted like mad, so I have just a couple handfuls of food, all 1 ingredient foods that I had to make myself. So suddenly, the flavors I ate ONLY matched specific nutrients, and nothing else. And After a few weeks, maybe a few months, sometimes I would have insane cravings for an ingredient.

After a blood test, found out that some of these were for foods I tested low in nutrients for. When I had to do meal planning that included tracking nutrients, it turns out that, barring the craving for a sweet taste, the foods I craved were typically one of my few sources for certain vitamins or nutrients, ones that I would often be low in. That has continued for as long as I'm on that diet.


So personally, just based on my own experiences, i honestly do believe that not just hunger, but even cravings, CAN be triggered by nutrient deficiencies. But I also think that the way we eat now would make it likely quite difficult for our bodies to accurately connect a nutrient TO a particular type of food unless we are eating pretty simply diets, you know?

Fascinating.

Evelyn_Gorfram

In my humble and anecdotal experience, yes.

When I feel hungry, I usually do one of two things:
- I eat whatever's available and seems like a good idea until I'm not hungry any more. (This is not a successful weight loss strategy.)
- I look at my food diary for the day, see which macro(s) I'm short on, and eat that. I've never yet been hungry and not been short on at least one macro, and I've never yet still been hungry after getting to my target intake on my macros. (This has been a very successful weight loss strategy for me.)