Atrue story: A friend of mine in Seattle recently got ahankering for pizza. Seattle has plenty of pizza, but it doesn'thave Pizzeria Uno, the legendary joint that hooked my friend onChicago deep-dish pies many years ago.
Usually, my buddy can make do with any old oregano-flavoredbread dough, but on this particular day he was like some 1,200-poundmoose in mating season. He had to have Pizzeria Uno.
Lucky for him, America is a country where you not only can growup to be president, but you can satisfy eccentric food cravings, too.Only $169 later, my friend had his Chicago pizza - via air courier.
Few men go to such lengths to indulge food cravings. Mostprobably won't even admit they're slave to certain snacks. Real menmight eat quiche, but they're not supposed to crave it.
The truth is, though, men do hunger after certain foods. Justask Harvey Weingarten, a McMaster University psychologist whorecently conducted a survey of the eating habits of college students.Over two-thirds of the 385 men in his study confessed to foodcravings. "Some craved a food almost daily. The mean was about fiveto nine cravings a month," says Weingarten.
Psychologists have proposed the controversial theory thatcravings are biological drives to correct nutritional deficiencies, akind of wisdom of the body: We want what we need. But more widelyaccepted theories stress the links between foods and the feelingsthey evoke. Like Pavlov's dog, we may be conditioned to seek outcertain foods because of their positive associations - and avoidothers because of the unpleasant memories they stir up.
"Bacon means breakfast; cake means birthdays; popcorn meansmovies, and macaroni and cheese can mean that you've run out ofmoney," wrote Canadian psychologist Bernard Lyman, in his book, APsychology of Food.
Even certain emotional states may provoke food cravings,according to Lyman. College students chose full meals over junk foodwhen they were happy, ate hearty steak-and-potato meals when theywere self-confident. When they felt sad and lonely, they chosesoups, suggestive of hearth and home. In romantic, affectionatemoods, they went for alcohol.
But let's get down to cases. Here are the foods men say theycrave the most - and why they crave them. Meat: Hamburgers, cheeseburgers and chicken wings were hits onWeingarten's survey. Similarly, studies of food preferences of theU.S. military over the past 25 years show men like nothing betterthan to sink their teeth into a thick slab of grilled steak. Variousresearchers peg the craving for meat on its sensory qualities - itstaste, smell and texture. Few aromas pique the appetite quicker thanthe smell of a sizzling steak.
Herbert L. Meiselman, a leading U.S. Army food researcher,thinks the appeal of meat is simple:
"It's flavorful."
That's it?
"Well," he says, "men like to chew on things."
Adam Drewnowski, director of the human nutrition program at theUniversity of Michigan, sug gests another, albeit not entirely surprising, explanation.Meat-eating is manly, he reminds us, linked to hunting and ourcaveman roots. To some degree, then, men crave meat to live up tome-hunter, you-Jane sex roles. Pasta, carbohydrates: "What is it about having meat and notpotatoes?" asks Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a psychiatrist at the NationalInstitute of Mental Health. "When you see tuna, why does your braintell you to have bread? I don't think the flavor or texture ofstarchy foods really explains it. I think something more is goingon."
That "something more" may be simple habit, but some scientistssuspect cravings for carbohydrates are a signal to eat food that willbring about desirable mood changes.
Nutrients can alter the manufacture of neurotransmitters, thebrain's chemical messengers. One of these, serotonin, has atension-relieving effect on the body. Studies by Judith Wurtman, aresearcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, show thatcarbohydrates trigger a series of chemical events that stimulate thebrain to produce serotonin. Wurtman theorizes that we go after breadand pasta for their calming, attention-focusing effects.
Rosenthal has studied people with seasonal affective disorder,also known as winter depression, and found they crave sweet, starchyfoods during the short days of fall and winter. Carbohydrate-richsnacks gave them more energy, his studies show. Thus, saysRosenthal, author of Seasons of the Mind (Bantam Books), pasta andother starchy foods have some anti-depressant value. Ice cream, cake, candy: Drewnowski points out that many popularsnacks contain large amounts of fat. In fact, calorie for calorie,many sweets contain more fat than carbohydrate. Drawing on studiesshowing sugar-fat combinations like ice cream are particularlyirresistible, Drewnowski speculates: "So-called carbohydrate-craversreally are craving sugar and fat."
Some animal research suggests high-fat and high-sugar foodsstimulate production of endorphins, the natural opiate-like compoundsin the brain. Drewnowski has found something similar with humans:Injecting subjects with a drug that blocked endorphins decreasedtheir cravings for high-sugar, high-fat snacks such as M & M's.Thus, it's possible that high-fat, high-sugar foods influence thesame pleasure centers that heroin and other addictive drugs affect.The implication: Our sweet-fat tooth gets us high.
More traditional explanations for the drive across town at 11p.m. to get ice cream emphasize the cool, creamy texture of aspoonful of Haagen-Dazs. A recent survey for Parade magazine foundmen are more likely than women to beat the blues with ice cream.While we can't directly taste fat, it has a highly desirable mouthfeel.
Of course, we may have first learned that desire in our highchairs if Mom and Dad used desserts as a reward for finishing meals.Our sugar habit also has a respectable evolutionary history linked tothe need for energy and calories. The survival of our earlyancestors depended on ripe fruit to provide nutrients, which probablycreated a built-in drive for sweets. Next time you reach for alittle mocha chip, console yourself with the fact that you're reallyfueling up to dodge saber-toothed tigers. Chocolate: "It packs a multiple whammy. Chocolate has lots ofpharmacologic effects," says Duke University psychologist SusanSchiffman. That Hershey bar has tiny amounts of caffeine andanother mildly addictive stimulant, theobromine, plus a smidgen ofphenylethylamine, a possible chemical link to enhanced romanticfeelings. Coffee: Java junkies are made, not born. Bitter and harsh, thetaste of coffee is universally disliked by children, but we come tolike coffee usually as a result of pairing it with milk and sugar.Of course, it helps that we get a pharmacologic kick from thecaffeine. Major coffee drinkers display the classic features ofaddiction. When deprived, they get mild withdrawal symptoms:headache, lethargy, irritability. Crunchy, salty snacks: Back when we were all running around inanimal skins, salt, an essential nutrient, was hard to come by.Thus, as with sweets, we seem to this day to be genetically driven toseek the stuff.
Snacks such as chips, pretzels and popcorn may also satisfy ourneed to crunch, Duke University's Schiffman speculates. "They satisfyan urge to bite down on something during emotions like frustrationand boredom." Indeed, college students in Canadian studies byBernard Lyman reported they preferred crunchy foods when they wereangry, bored or frustrated. Soda: "Primarily, it's the carbonation," Schiffman says of thecraving for soda. "There is caffeine in colas, but the carbonation iswhat really turns on the nervous system. I've put catheters intopeople's arms and seen the increase in adrenaline in the bloodstreamafter carbonated beverages." Pizza: Topping the list for the men in Weingarten's survey waspizza. Why the recent national mania for pizza, which has surpassedhamburgersas the nation's favorite fast food?
"Multiple textures," says Schiffman. "It's crispy, crunchy andyet has a certain `elasticity' - it pulls back when you pull on it.Pizza is really like the banana split of entrees: You can enjoy somany different things in one product."
Texture aside, pizza is a one-stop shop of the things we crave.It's salty, packs a high fat content in the cheese and usuallycarries meat toppings. It's got carbohydrates and the spices and, asWeingarten puts it, "the real lure, that fantastic aroma. . . . "
You don't need to tell my Seattle friend that. He could smellit coming all the way from Chicago.
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