The Primal Feast by Allport Susan;

Author:Allport, Susan; [Susan Allport]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Published: 2016-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

CRAVINGS

Sensory-specific satiety is one of an omnivore’s most important tools, but as Barbara Rolls would be the first to admit, it is just one of its tools, just one of the things that are going on during a meal. It is largely a short-term phenomenon (after a period of hours, Rolls’s subjects report a renewed interest in the same foods that had fallen into their disfavor), and omnivores must adjust their food intake to their nutritional needs over the course of long lives.

To do this, animals need a certain amount of nutritional wisdom or good food sense. You might not know it from standing in that same lunch line at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, but humans, like other animals, come into the world with a certain innate knowledge of what and how much to eat. Take the fact that most of us, quite naturally, keep our protein intake low and eat enough carbohydrates (and fats) to spare that protein for body building and the other things that proteins do best. Or take our energy needs, the amount of calories that we need in order to supply our bodies with the energy to mow lawns, run marathons, write books, and teach mathematics. A person easily consumes one ton of food and fluid during the course of a year, and a daily excess intake of only one hundred calories (the amount of calories in a single pat of butter) has the potential to increase fatty tissue by twelve pounds after just one year, by 120 pounds after ten. Though it is apparent that the incidence of obesity in this country is rising, it should also be apparent that most people have a remarkable ability to adjust their energy intake to meet their energy needs.

“These smells are pleasant when we are hungry, but when we are sated and not requiring to eat, they are not pleasant,” Aristotle noted many hundreds of years ago. The pleasure we derive from food is not a fixed property of food. It changes over the course of a meal, as Rolls has found, and it changes with bodily needs, whether those be for calories or for specific nutrients. One of the most fundamental jobs of the brain is sensing the internal environment of the body and assessing the levels of blood sugar, insulin, salt, and any of a number of other compounds. If the brain detects a deficiency, the body’s sensitivity to its environment gets transformed into motivated behavior, into the desire for foods containing those substances.

“A given stimulus can induce a pleasant or an unpleasant sensation depending on the subject’s internal state,” the psychologist Michel Cabanac restated Aristotle in 1971. Cabanac dubbed this phenomenon alliesthesia and suggested that it could explain the specific appetites or cravings experienced by people with certain diseases or nutritional deficiencies, cravings for sugar in diabetics and for salt in people with hypertension.

Most poignant are the children who develop these cravings. In Clara Davis’s famous studies on food selection in newly weaned infants, there

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