Wanting vs. Liking vs. Needing Certain Foods
Lets be clear, taste is the driver for what we eat. Our choices are based on the pleasure of eating. And, why not? Eating should be pleasurable. In America only our impoverished old, (who eat cat and dog food), our homeless (dumpster diving in alleyways) and our children (who eat what they are told) eat what they would rather not, because they have no financial choice or we make them. It s time to distinguish “liking” from “wanting” verses “needing” certain foods.
“Liking” a certain food means you get pleasure from eating it. “Wanting” a specific food involves fulfilling desires derived from a totally different pleasure point based in the unconscious. The next time you really want a food, ask yourself why? Go deeper, beneath the superficial desire for the pleasure of its taste. If you are honest it may reveal something about yourself that you didn’t know: that you need the food because you have some wild, dizzying infatuation with it. Or, that you may even be addicted.
Caffeine is addictive. Sugar and white flower too. But, how many of you know that fat is addictive? And dairy? Let’s say that you are addicted to sugar. Sugar addiction is so pathological that it overrides normal satiety control centers in the brain, even when food seems to be consumed in normal amounts.
Our addiction to certain foods is no different from our addiction to drugs. Think Coke and cocaine. Cocaine is not known for its gourmet taste, (I have never heard an addict say he likes the taste of coke) yet coke becomes very high on the “want” column and very quickly the “need” column because it has the unmitigated power to send a tsunami of dopamine through our synaptic brains. Coca Cola’s primary ingredient caffeine, forces our adrenal glands to produce toxic levels of adrenalin while boosting our dopamine and acetylcholine production in the brain.
There is no question that drugs and food share other common reward pathways like muscles, eyes, nose, taste buds; stomach, gut . . . stop taking and or eating them and you will experience shakiness, nausea, fever, headache, tears, self-hatred, depression . . . most of which disappear when the substance is reintroduced, allowing you to feel normal again--for a while.
There is no question that drugs and food share other common reward pathways like muscles, eyes, nose, taste buds; stomach, gut . . . stop taking and or eating them and you will experience shakiness, nausea, fever, headache, tears, self-hatred, depression . . . most of which disappear when the substance is reintroduced, allowing you to feel normal again--for a while.
The litmus test for food addiction is physical craving. Clinical ecologists, Doctors who specialize in allergies, believe that one third of the industrial world is obese because of the need to stop withdrawal symptoms brought on by food allergy addictions. They are convinced that allergenic foods trigger opioid enkephalin in the limbic brain (The component of our brain that controls: emotions, memory, blood pressure, sleep, hunger and thirst). They just may be right, what with all of the sugar, flower and bad fat buried in our processed foods, is it any wonder that we—and our children—can’t help but continually crave and seek to satisfy the “habit” that releases these addictive brain opioids? If you think you might be a member of this group, do not just try to abruptly quit, contact a licensed practioner in the field of food allergies.
There are also many external reasons for wanting, needing, making some food choices. They include décor, music, friends, and the time of day. For one person, an afternoon at the fun filled country fair will inspire memories and desires of fried macaroni on a stick whereas for another the sound of race horses breaking from the gate might send him running for a beer at the bar. Talk about Pavlov’s dog. When it comes to wanting / needing, hunger and satiety, context is reality. There are so many physiological variables to isolate ‘liking’ and ‘needing’ versus ravenous unstoppable ‘addiction’ to some foods, that I could write a whole other book on the subject.
It has been said that “An empty stomach hears nobody. But, boy can we hear it.” One of the “old school” theories about why some people can’t stop eating certain foods is that their stomachs are always empty. We know now that this is not totally true. Dangle something tasty in front of a test subject whose stomach has been inflated with balloons and they will not necessarily experience satiety.
Sans satiety most people feel compelled to keep eating. And eating. And eat . . . Researchers have even tried removing their subjects stomachs. Guess what? Many still wanted / needed to eat. Other research aimed at obsessive hunger tried nourishing subjects intravenously with glucose. Guess what? They still wanted / needed to eat. Other research targeting the guts of the ravenous with billions of fatty acid receptors did little to induce sincere satiety.
The seasons of the year seem tell us more about satiety than how full our stomachs are where hunger fluctuates with the temperature. During the winter, as our body temperature drops, we seem to get hungrier and eat more. This is believed to be a throwback to the days when we needed extra layers of body fat to survive. This is okay because we burn more staying warm. For more information on this please refer to the chart in the back of the book that lists the fattest states. They are all in the warm south.
For many, the need, hunger, addiction and or compulsive consumption of carbs is a symptom of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, winter depression, brought on by, among other things, diminished exposure to sunlight. In the summer SAD is brought on by too much heat. For these folks, eating lots of carbohydrates is a way of self prescribing with nature’s antidepressant because carbs transport the amino l-tryptophan across the brain barrier where it is then converted into serotonin, our primary feel good neurotransmitter. I will explore this in greater length later in the book.
Of course some excessively hungry people are just bored. But, did you know that boredom can also usher in satiety? Try eating the same food day in and day out. I’ll get into that later in the book. The problem with humans is that we are too physically and emotionally complicated for our own good and we have too many different types of hungers to satiate.
To be sure, most of our hungers aren’t even for food. We eat when we are sad, angry, bored, happy . . . Feeling a little empty inside? Fill it with food. Having a bad day? Head for the refrigerator. Hungry for love? Eat! Need a little attention or protection, eat; go ahead, put a layer of impenetrable fat around yourself. Our emotional hungers are so inexorably involved with our physical hunger that the “wanting” verses “liking” versus “needing” origins of most foods are lost in a psycho stew, and until overeaters realize that they can feed their bodies, minds and souls with something other than food, they won’t be able to stop ingesting more calories than they need to feel satiated, because satiety is about how our body and mind come together.
Most people regard satiety is the state of being full or gratified to the point of physical satisfaction. I’d like to take that definition a step further by defining it as a state of gratification taken to a point of both physical and emotional satisfaction. For me, satiety is little voice in my head that says, “It’s all good, you’re fine, it’s time to put down the fork to go do something else—like take a siesta, maybe wash the car, go to the gym, build a cabinet, write, anything but finger, fork or spoon something else into your mouth. For me, satiety is the opposite of hunger, it is hunger’s solution.
